Is it worth having a clone disk?

[Radio Fixer]

Had my W10 backup HDD drive, with USB 3.0 IF, fail yesterday but had another HDD drive to create a new one.

It got me thinking: is it worth creating a clone drive as well?  SSD drives are cheap and the desktop PC, with SSD, is working well so would a clone just swap in to get it running, as is, if disaster strikes ?  Could the clone SSD just be taken out of the USB shell and put in the PC for instant up and running?

Another expense of course that the better clone software has to be purchased on a 1 year contract.

thanks for thoughts or experiences if you have gone this way

Gary

[Radio Fixer]

On further investigation the original backup disk was in fact an SSD !

Thought they went on forever ... seems not.

Gary

[ppppenguin]

SSDs don't go on for ever but you're unlikely to exceed the write cycle limits with an ordinary personal workload for many years. With a drive used only for backup I find it hard to think that you'd get anywhere near the write cycle limits in the practical lifetime of either yourself or the SSD.

I think you may have had a random SSD failure rather than wear out. I would stick to Samsung or Crucial for SSDs. I'm sure that some other makes are good, but these are the leading brands with a good reputation for reliability.

[radioman]

This makes interesting reading.... https://harddrivetalk.com/how-long-can-a...out-power/
So I suppose it depends on how often you power up the SSD and run the backup software.
Personally, I'd just use an actual HDD for backups.

Andy

[Mike Watterson]

SSD is Flash, so can fade in a drawer. Writing is the most wear. Reading has little affect. I use a pair of USB Flash sticks for slide show with music to HDMI and then a DVB-T* HD H.264 modulator box with HDMI in. The Flash controllers may silently re-write or relocate blocks. There is usually no SMART data or advance warning of failure. SATA SSD is much slower than PCie NVMe. Assume you don't have latest SSD or Flash and it needs powered annually.

An HDD has mechanical parts and if dry might sit an a drawer for 40 years. They are not usually hermetically sealed, just dust proof. I've also recently read content off some 30 year old floppies I found in the attic. I've some 1970s audio cassettes and 1960s reel to reel. Magnetic media in a box can be durable. Newer HDDs have smart controllers and might 'silently' relocate content. The SMART utility on a SATA HDD tells you lots. Most USB adaptors don't expose SMART data. An unused HDD may not wear out at all. There are cheap adaptors for PATA IDE that work on SATA hosts. SCSI cards are getting scarce and might need a PCI rather than PCI-e slot. I have a PCMCIA dual height USB interface for HDDs or Flash cards (a CF adaptor works in it). It doesn't support any other kind of PCMCIA device. Older MFM drives will need an MFM controller and likely an ISA slot. All sizes of floppy, but not all formats, will work with a Mobo 34 way floppy port, but a USB floppy drive only works FAT12 DOS.
So the issue is interface.

Power on/off is the most wear on a an HDD, spinning is 2nd most wear (bearings, not surface as the head flies), track access seeks is the 3rd most wear (bearings etc, not actual head or surface).

My main workstation and laptop are both hybrid. That's PCIe NVMe SSD for boot/OS and much cheaper per G Byte HDD for user data (on Linux it has /home and /var). The HDD SATA have SMART which can give advance warning of failure. I have separate backups of OS and user data (which includes entire Win XP (x2), 7 & 10 VMs on Linux) and use rsync for backups / sync between workstation, server in attic and main laptop. The workstation used for the old SCSI scanner and old Digital 8 camera Firewire rarely has any installs other than updates and any user scans/firewire transfers, image edits or video edits are copied to the main workstation. It has an actually cloned SATA HDD (by occasionally connecting to internal SATA port and using a Linux disk manager). Actual OS backups are done with Linux TimeShift. The physical Win98, XP, Win7 desktops and Win10 laptop are essentially 'disposable' and all the install applications installers and user data is on the server (which gets backed up and has content from ancestor servers back to about 1994, a 386 with NT 3.5).

[* Irish SD & HD both use DVB-T H.264, not DVB-T2, but I think all DVB-T2 sets do DVB-T HD H.264. The cheap €15 approx DVB-T USB sticks often used for SDR do work on HD here as the USB data is normally the MPEG-2 Transport stream, not the demuxed & decoded data]

[Mike Watterson]

Personally, I'd just use an actual HDD for backups.

I find the dedicated USB models are much slower than buying a USB box with a SATA interface. I have one box that takes mini-IDE and also a mini to standard IDE to read HDD from a dead laptop in a workstation. That also works with SATA to PATA-IDE adaptor!

[Refugee]

I am careful where I buy any media from.
Some of the in town big box places have been supplying blank media that is very poor for many years.
It started in the 1970s with blank compact cassettes with areas on the tape that were clear and useless and after take overs it was blank CDs that only held data for a couple of months.
I get my blank media from CCLonline and they do replace stuff that fails within there 3 year warranty in my case two times once with an item that was within a couple of months of the three year warranty running out and another that failed out of the box.

[Radio Fixer]

A lot of info there !  thanks to all.

The backup SSD drive that has failed was a Crucial Jeffrey.  It was basically on when the computer was powered up but only read and written to during the scheduled backup or when I directly copied files to or from it: easier to me than using the Backup App.

For now I will keep using the available HDD drive in its place and if that packs in buy another SSD.  The USB interface is simple and fast enough for me.  Surprised Mike doesnt have a Clone drive as he has so much other stuff   .  Maybe main (in the box) drive failure is rare and so having a Clone standing by is just another thing that can niggle away at you that you dont get to use.

Lets face it I have never had main drive failure in decades or ever.  How easy is it to restore the W10 OS from the backup App anyway?  Anyone actually done it.

thanks Gary

[ppppenguin]

I note you're leaving your backup drive connected to your PC at all times. Not a good idea. If something goes horribly wrong (for example some types of malware) your backup files could easily be lost. You can also accidentally overwrite something on it that you didn't intend.

All you really care about is your own files. Windows and other software can be re-installed from scratch if something goes wrong. I've done it a few times over the years.

My main PC has two separate SSDs. One for the OS (Linux Mint as it happens, if would be the C drive on a Windows PC) and the other for my files, which might be the D drive on Windows). I back up my files regularly on to a number of ordinary HDDs. I could do this with a USB drive. In practice I have a caddy in a front panel slot and slip in a drive when I'm using it. Not possible with a laptop I keep copies of many installation files for my software on my data drive to save having to hunt for installation media when I have a problem. Though it's often easier to just download them from the net.

Having another usable PC is a huge help when you've had a failure. When I killed my previous main PC (don't ask!) it was long overdue for replacement. I used my laptop to download Linux Mint and make a bootable USB. Then I built my new PC from scratch.

[Mike Watterson]

I note you're leaving your backup drive connected to your PC at all times. Not a good idea. If something goes horribly wrong (for example some types of malware) your backup files could easily be lost. You can also accidentally overwrite something on it that you didn't intend.

He's totally correct. It's just an extra drive it if always connected, not a backup. I used to have to explain that RAID didn't mean no backups were needed. Even without malware an online drive can be damaged by HW failure or deleted by OS bug or user error.

I've seen tops blow off chips on an HDD controller when a PSU failed. In that case I was able to recover the user's data by swapping a controller off a same model drive. That's not likely to work with newer drives.

There is also time delayed ransomeware-malware, so for critical information you need separate archived backups. Also Internet (Cloud) is better for publishing and sharing than backups.