Hard Drive Speed

Most recent update was in September 2024. Who knew?

Just be aware that Windows Defender tries to quarantine some items on the Hirens & Ultimate Boot CDs. Ok if they are on a CD/DVD but can be a pain on a USB stick.

I and a few others abandoned their NAS when electricity prices went up a few years ago. For me, ISTR it was costing well over £100pa to run.

Thank you..... I rest my case... :-)

PCs like the Fujitsu Esprimo Q957 and Q556 consume only around 5 watts when idle, even at today's prices that's probably only about £20/year. I use a Q957 as my desktop machine and a Q556 as my main (remote) backup.

If a typical NAS consumes more than this then I don't see any point in a dedicated NAS at all.

It can be worth looking at the energy saving options in the NAS control pages - quite often there are options to spin down drives and enter low power states at certain times of day (or more likely) night.

P.S. there is also a GPartEd live ISO available for download.....

Norton GHOST was discontinued on April 30, 2013.

Enterprise line

Symantec GHOST Solution Suite 3.x (6.9, was released on 31 October 2018)

You can barely even tell who owns it now. It appears Broadcom owns it or something.

When someone says "Ghost" to me, it implies the old Ghost, from 2001. If the intention was to indicate it was something other than Ghost, you should use the proper listed name in Wiki (such as "GSS" or so).

It's like telling someone to buy a copy of Retrospect :-) Look at the corporate chain for that puppy. Will... not... die.

Macrium doesn't back up all the files. If you tested it, you'd know which files it does not back up and you would know what the consequences are. Each product has a story. This is why I tell people "it takes a year to test backup software to your satisfaction".

Paul

My NAS is scheduled to only operate at times when I am likely to want its services. For my purposes it was pointless to have it running 24/7, so I cut that to less than 25% of that time. Powering up, if I should need it outside those hours, only takes a minute or so.

Well so what? it probably saves £40 p.a. on gas or oil...

My next one will be Pi based. Should save me £100 or so.

Buy a refurbished Fujitsu Q957 or Q556, that is down at similar power consumption but provides you with space for drive etc. all in one nice small box.

I use Raspberry Pis but not as NAS'.

Just an update on how things went, in no particular order as they say:

Any solution that involves imaging/cloning seems to mean booting to the software rather than running it under Windows.

An exception I have is MiniTool Partition Wizard which I used to clone 1 x Iron Wolf Spinner with 2.5 TB on it to an identical drive which took about

SmartSync Pro takes 32 minutes to work its way through the whole backup regime which involves 10 drives with different stuff on them.

The killer is the original copy to an empty drive, I only have to do that if I change the structure of things so it's in my own hands.

Many thanks for all the input :-)

Irony of ironies I discovered that the drives in my DAS (tool free fitting) are supposed to have a plain rail at the bottom and a sprung rail at the top and I had mixed and matched. I turned off my server sorted out the rails and now the server won't power up!

Back to the drawing board....

Nope. The three free cloning programmes I posted earlier all work from within Windows. I haven't used Macrium for some years but I have used Disk Genius & Hasleo to clone drives.

" Disk Genius -

Often HDD and SSD manufacturers will supply a free version of a cloning app as long as the destination drive is one of their models. I used a Crucial app when I replaced a HDD with a Crucial SSD and despite the original drive was literally on its last gasps it took a few attempts but eventually it produced a cloned drive with as far as I can see contains no corrupted files.

Richard