I use a simple 2.5" external usb drive connecter to my router as a shared drive on my home network. I also use it to run my router’s torrent download tool and get new content.
The external drive is not new and I worry that with the constant load it might fail one day. It’s also slow sometimes when watching content directly from it with kodi.
What would you suggest I replace it with? Would a 3.5" external usb drive be safer?
Any drive has the possibility of failure. If you value the contents, have a way to recover, either by restoring from backup or by re-downloding your media.
Correction:
Every drive has the certainty of inevitable failure.
It’s only a question of when. Backup everything and backup your backups if you care about the contents.
Thank you!
All drives will ultimately fail, could be 10years, could be 10mins. If you don’t want to lose your data, back it up. Have a storage drive and a backup drive. Don’t both connected them to the router. Use an alternative method to connect , like to a computer and have run a backup protocol on a regular basis. As for 2.5 over 3.5, the 3.5 are usually faster but it probably doesn’t matter reliability wise.
Thank you!
2.5" vs 3.5" HDD doesn’t make much difference in speed, you could get an SSD instead maybe.
All drives will fail sometime, I wouldn’t worry about constant load being an issue, that’s generally better for HDDs.
I see thank you!
Unless you’re getting a fancy NAS grade drive I can’t imagine a 3.5" drive would be any more reliable than a 2.5" drive.
If you’re worried about the health see if your router gives a smart reading from the drive, or if it doesn’t just plug it into your PC and get a reading from time to time.
I did just that now, and my old drive has a “caution” rating already. Will change it soon I guess! Thanks!
A single drive is always going to be a potential point of failure. Definitely make periodic backups to a different device if you don’t want to potentially lose everything on it without warning.
There are more complicated solutions available, such as a RAID array, but it sounds like you want to keep things relatively simple. In that case, I don’t think there will be a whole lot of difference between 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives – except that there are 3.5 inch drives designed for data center applications which may net you some extra reliability. You’d likely need to get such a drive and put it into your own external enclosure, though.
That said, there’s only so much you should expect to get out of a single drive connected via USB (relatively slower transfers, reliance on the bespoke external bay, potentially not getting warned if SMART status changes).
You’re right, if I really want to improve things, I should go for a Raid solution, but that invoke a NAS or a desktop pc I suppose, so… Maybe next year! Thank you!
Old saying. If you do not have 3 copies of you data, consider it lost already. Get another drive, in your setup type does not mater what size. And if there any important data on that drive, create a couple of backups in different places.
You’re right! I do have another drive for backup
