Question DRAM-less SSDs for Local Scheduled Backups?

[Boris_yo]

Hello.

I see many SSD SATA and NVME drives with 1TB capacity at very affordable prices. I already have Samsung EVO 870 Plus 250GB as OS drive that does a great job. I also have Western Digital 2TB 5400RPM mechanical drive purely for storage of data.

In addition to storing data I want to start making scheduled full backups of OS drive on a weekly basis. I don't know whether I should set daily backups too as incremental or differential. I was wondering whether I should get SSD if I happen to see one worthy on sale and which should I get.

I noticed that very affordable ones are those with 3D-NAND though I don't know if it matters. What matters is TLC and QLC and I wonder which one should I get. QLC is probably used in these very affordable drives these days. Should I get drive with QLC Nand from brand like Samsung which proved to be reliable brand? Saw their 870 QVC drive. Don't know if other brands are as reliable for QLC Nand.

There is Corsair, PNY, Intel, Kingston, ADATA, Crucial P2, Crucial BX but these are DRAM-less drives, right? I read that Crucial P2 is half TBW of Western Digital SN550. I wonder if TBW is an indicator of reliability and longevity not in terms of how much data can be written but how it is less likely to stop working for whatever reason, provided the end user gives it fair use and does not cause anything that could affect its longevity.

I saw that prices vary whether SSD comes in external housing or as M.2 stick. For example I saw 1TB Samsung 870 Plus SATA3 in external housing being $10 more expensive than 1TB Samsung 980 NVME M.2 stick despite the latter being smaller and faster. Same thing with 1TB Crucial 500MX when I compared it to 1TB Samsung 980 NVME M.2 stick.

So I wonder if QLC or TLC. Whether 3D-NAND or not is the drive I should go with for the purpose of storing data and backing up main OS drive. Whether external casing or M.2 stick. Whether DRAM or DRAM-less. I saw people report some drives diving to 30MB/s after tens of gigabytes of transfer so I assume it will take awhile with 220GB remaining to backup from my main 250GB OS drive.

Thanks

 

[USAFRet]

It matters little what device you back up to, aside from actual capacity.
All my Macrium backups, from several house systems, go to a folder tree on my NAS.

An SSD of any type is NOT needed.

Incremental or Differential?
Either works, and both have different issues.

In Macrium:
An Incremental is any change since the last Incremental. This means that any recovery needs ALL of the intervening Incrementals, as well as the original Full.
But, the Incremental file size is much smaller.

A Differential is all of the changes since the last Full Image.
Therefore, the size of each successive Differential grows and grows. You are advised to delete and start over once in a while, simply due to file size and drive space.
To recover, all you need is the original Full image, and whichever Differential you wish to recover.


For your "220GB"....that only happens for the initial Full image. Let it run for an hour or two.
The subsequent Incremental or Differential is MUCH smaller, and only takes a couple of minutes.

 

[geofelt]

Backup is essentially a sequential process.
Fur that, a HDD is appropriate.
When you send a stream of writes to a ssd, whatever buffers it might have will get filled up quickly and the actual throughput will revert to the native nand read/rewrite speed.

 

[Boris_yo]

@USAFRet All else equal, what if I decided that I might want to install video games too? Would I need something better than 5400RPM HDD for just in case situation like this?

 

[USAFRet]

@USAFRet All else equal, what if I decided that I might want to install video games too? Would I need something better than 5400RPM HDD for just in case situation like this?

Well...if you're going to run games from it, you DO want something better than a 5400RPM spinner.

Or, you have a whole different drive for those games.

 

[Etrius vanRandr]

I also have Western Digital 2TB 5400RPM mechanical drive purely for storage of data.

WEAK SAUCE.

I have TWO 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 in RAID1.

All compensation jokes aside, I don't really recommend SSDs for backups, especially cacheless drives. The cache not only speeds up the SSD but also helps prevent wear in some cases.

Get a big HDD or two and slap all backups on that. Seagate makes consumer drives up to 18TB now I believe, someone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[USAFRet]

22TB
WD
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/western-digital-ships-22tb-hdds-for-mass-market

Seagate
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-is-shipping-22tb-hdds

 

[USAFRet]

WEAK SAUCE.

I have TWO 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 in RAID1.

And the drives in or attached to my NAS that sits in my living room are ~80TB. So....

 

[Etrius vanRandr]

Seagate

I trust seagate more than WD, doesn't seagate allocate more sectors in case of sector faults? I've had less seagate failures than WD failures. HDDs are the only PC part I buy new. I'll buy a used SSD any day.

And the drives in or attached to my NAS that sits in my living room are ~80TB. So....

pff this guy and his Naturally Aspirated Storage, mine's turbocharged. Quad 256GB NVME RAID0 array with the ASUS Hyper M.2 card! With software RAID no less, so if a controller dies my data isn't screwed up beyond all recognition

All else equal, what if I decided that I might want to install video games too?

Regardless of who's ahem drives are bigger, redundancy is good. I have solace knowing that my data is fairly evenly backed up across multiple PCs (desktop, laptop, media PC, NAS). If you can only afford one machine, SSD for OS, HDD for games/programs, and Biggus Drivus for backups. Even a 4TB can back up a whole machine multiple times. Windows also has its shadow copy feature, but don't rely solely on that. I started investing in multiple terabyte storage way back in 2008 when 500GB HDDs were a premium thing at $80. Now you can get a 3TB for that much on Amazon.

 

[USAFRet]

mine's turbocharged. Quad 256GB NVME RAID0 array ...

Stopped reading right there....

 

[USAFRet]

Fine, guess you don't like floppy disks or hard drives.

Either way, it's just a cache array, not long term storage. Updating multiple Steam games at once can saturate a single NVME controller quite quickly.

My NAS is an HP MediaSmart Server with 4x Seagate 10TB and Intel Q9400S. Raid 10 is good, fight me.

Well, your use case is different than mine.

The last time I was concerned about the time taken to update multiple Steam games at once was approximately never.

And even then, my internet pipe would be the limfac, not the drives.

 

[Boris_yo]

I trust seagate more than WD, doesn't seagate allocate more sectors in case of sector faults? I've had less seagate failures than WD failures.

I was typically under impression that WD's drives are more reliable than Seagate's.

Updating multiple Stream video games at the same time at a speed exceeding NVME's 2,500 MB/s write speed is a good problem to have though. The highest internet speed available here is 2.5Gb/s translating into 312.5 MB/s making it a bottleneck to utilize NVME's full write speed, let alone expensive and not practical for a problem that most don't need to worry about.

 

[Etrius vanRandr]

I was typically under impression that WD's drives are more reliable than Seagate's.

The bulk of those failures are three specific models, a 4TB, 12TB, and 14TB. Seagate also makes more drives thus has a larger data set. WD is used in partnership with Dell (most Optiplexes come with WD drives) as such failures in corporate environments are likely not even reported.

Don't forget the average age of these drives, it looks like Seagate's drives are failing of old age and WD's are just straight up failing. Also not in that chart is the most popular Seagate drives, a 2TB and a 3TB, including the ST3000DM00x. In fact I'm not seeing any of the manufacturer's most popular drives in that chart, including the HGST 1TB that shipped with almost every Dell PC in the last 15 years.

HGST is a subdivision of WD and should be lumped under them.

Updating multiple Stream video games at the same time at a speed exceeding NVME's 2,500 MB/s write speed is a good problem to have though. The highest internet speed available here is 2.5Gb/s translating into 312.5 MB/s making it a bottleneck to utilize NVME's full write speed, let alone expensive and not practical for a problem that most don't need to worry about.

You're forgetting that the downloaded archives from Steam are compressed and need to be decompressed and decompression can easily saturate a drive.