hard drive enclosures and external drives

Avoriaz

I’m going to tread very carefully here so I don’t get caught in the crossfire of geek wars.

Aqueoushumour01 asked two questions.

Firstly he wants to know what drive and enclosure to buy and secondly he wants to know if he can clone his existing drive so that he can replace it with the new drive.

In general there are two physical sizes of disk drives. 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch.

2.5 inch drives normally have much lower data storage capacities. 160gb is the biggest that I have seen. This compares to 500gb or more on 3.5 inch drives. Spin speeds can also vary, the higher spin speed normally equates to higher data throughput.

Laptops normally use 2.5 inch drives and desktop and tower PCs normally use 3.5 inch drives.

There is really no such thing as an external or an internal drive. They are the same drives used in different ways.

You can mount a 2.5 inch drive internally in a laptop or mount the exact same drive externally in a caddy or enclosure and connect it to the laptop with USB2 or Firewire etc. Ditto with 3.5 inch drives and desktop PCs.

All that Aqueoushumour01 needs to do is to make sure that the new disk that he buys is compatible with his laptop. It must be the same physical size and have the same interface. Almost certainly that is 2.5 inch and IDE. I doubt that the spin speed matters very much.

He can buy a suitable drive and separately buy a caddy or enclosure to mount it in or he can buy a purpose built external enclosure containing a drive. The latter is usually a bit more expensive. Shop around for the best deal.

There is software available that will allow him to clone his existing disk so that he can then swap them over. Maybe someone can advise on the best software to do this.

Edit;

I should add that you can attach virtually any disk externally to a laptop.

I use 3.5 inch drives in external caddies for backups for my laptop. I attach them via a USB cable. Obviously I can’t fit the 3.5 inch disk inside the laptop but they work just fine externally.

darich

Buying an internal drive and an enclosure would give you the option later on of removing it from the caddy and installing it inside your machine if it was a desktop (what I've done in the past). However with a laptop it would have to be the 2.5" drive. I'm not sure if caddies for that size are as easily available but I've not looked.

Given you're working on the laptop i'd imagine that either the internal with caddy or the normal external drive would be equally good. Check out the costs though. I saw on www.dabs.com this morning that you can buy a Western Digital 500Gb for £59. I've got one and it works a treat.

Not too sure on cloning or ghosting drives though.

Idiophreak

Just to add my own two cents (don't worry, I've got my flame retard-ant gloves on) to this...just never really seen the point in cloning unless you really have to. Find it better to take the chance to do a clean install and just drag any data over from the old disk...

Avoriaz

darich wrote: »

However with a laptop it would have to be the 2.5" drive. I'm not sure if caddies for that size are as easily available but I've not looked..

2.5 inch caddies are widely and cheaply available.

I bought one on Ebay for about £3.

http://shop.ebay.co.uk/items/Hard-Disk-Drive-Cases__W0QQQ5fcatrefZ1QQ_flnZ1QQ_sacatZ86759

Avoriaz

Idiophreak wrote: »

Just to add my own two cents (don't worry, I've got my flame retard-ant gloves on) to this...just never really seen the point in cloning unless you really have to. Find it better to take the chance to do a clean install and just drag any data over from the old disk...

You are probably correct for most occasions but I have a situation where cloning would be ideal.

My laptop (80gb 2.5 inch drive) is over four years old and I’d never bothered reinstalling Windows etc so everything was getting slow and clunky.

I bought a new 80 gb and reinstalled everything from scratch. After quite a few hours work I now have a very new and clean install that works much sweeter and faster. I will keep the 4 year old disk as a spare.

I would like to clone that fresh install onto the old disk so that, if my new disk ever fails, I have a spare disk with a clean install on it, rather than having to revert to an old clunky install or going through all the hassle of doing another clean install on it.

Cloning is also presumably useful of you are a business supplying identical configurations to your workforce etc.

It saves all the hassle of doing multiple repetitive and time consuming work.

lumpy_bum

lmfao@ this thread


this is the funniest thing ive read in ages

Idiophreak

Avoriaz wrote: »

I would like to clone that fresh install onto the old disk so that, if my new disk ever fails, I have a spare disk with a clean install on it, rather than having to revert to an old clunky install or going through all the hassle of doing another clean install on it.

Surely for this kinda thing it would be better to just create an image, ghost or something, rather than tie up a whole disk "just in case" ?

Lokolo

Btw just beware about the HDD you put in a caddy. My HDD blew up inside the caddy, also blowing up the power converter thus making everything useless and a waste of £30

rdwarr

I still have lots of 360K floppies so will be backing my laptop up on to those. I have roughly 180GB of data. Assuming I do one disk every two minutes it will take just under two years if I do nothing else.

Actually - these big hard drives look quite good

Avoriaz

Idiophreak wrote: »

Surely for this kinda thing it would be better to just create an image, ghost or something, rather than tie up a whole disk "just in case" ?

I don't really understand the difference between image, ghost etc.

What I really want to do is to have two identical disks so that if one fails I can quickly swap over to the other disk.

What I used to do before was take regular backups of all my data onto two external USB2 connected 3.5 inch disks. That left me well protected as, if my laptop disk ever failed I had two separate copies of all my data.

But, if my laptop disk did fail, I would have needed to get another 2.5 inch disk, install Windows, all my applications and all my data. That would have taken me a day or so to go out and buy a disk and do all the work.

Now that I have two 2.5 inch disks, I would like to keep the spare 2.5 inch disk as an exact copy so that in the event of a failure, I can be up and running again in minutes by just swapping the disks over.

So I would like to clone what I have on the new disk onto the old spare disk and then keep it in synch by regularly copying new data and any changes to it on a regular basis. I will still keep a copy of all my data on one of the 3.5 inch disks, so that I still have 2 backups. That will free up the other 3.5 inch disk to go into my Sky+ box.

I don’t know whether clone, ghost, image etc is the right expression but hopefully you can understand what I am trying to achieve.

Any advice or suggestions would be welcome. I am fairly knowledgeable and competent on PCs but by no means an up to date expert.