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So i have a linux desktop and a windows laptop that i bought just. So is it possible to use a single external hard drive to use with both the machine?

My current backup drives are quite full now (1x 4TB ST4000DM004 and 1x 4TB WD40NMZW WD external drive sent from BackBlaze as a data recovery drive) Both have some 600 GB free space left. My particular use case is: I usually back up my files once a month, after copy and pasting, I leave the drives connected to the computer for a few days so BackBlaze can sync up. After that I discoonect the external HD and turn off SATA power to the internal desktop drive, completing my 3-2-1 data backup scheme. I have no plans to switch to a NAS since Backblaze won't back up NAS devices (but PC + external drives totaling 7TB of data is fine to them...) Now, I am wondering if I should go buy an external hard drive or, go for a desktop hard drive or IronWolf. I might not shuck the external drive right away, unless advised to do so. (I do have a hard drive dock, but no SATA to spare on my Aorus elite... I can make room by remove the BD-Burner which burns super important data and old photos to M-disc. Right now I am considering buying a Seagate Expansion Desktop and Shuck it. Interestingly it appear Seagate will not honor warranty if the hard drive was shuck, while WD might. I think I can wait until next year too. Here are few external drives I am considering shucking... Seagate Expansion Desktop, 8 TB (STEB8000402) is only 108.20 EUR (1-year warranty in US?, 2-year in EU?) and appears have a Seagate desktop drive in it, so it probably can be just "plug and play" in a PC WD Elements Desktop, 8TB (WDBWLG0080HBK-EESN) is 118.55 EUR (2-year warranty) and likely a WD80EMAZ, it appears needs 3.3 v power mod (aka cover the 3.3 SATA pin) if I shuck it Other external options: Seagate Backup Plus Hub is at 139.99 (2-year warranty), not sure Seagate will use higher quality drive in the more premium external hard drive models... Seagate Desktop Drive is 137.90 EUR (2-year warranty); WD My Book Desktop 8TB is 142.8 The cheaper external hard drives are really enticing compare to: Toshiba N300 8TB NAS HDD HDWG180UZSVA at 179.95 EUR (3-year) Seagate Barracuda ST8000DM004 at 172.71 EUR (2-year warranty) Seagate IronWolf ST8000VNZ04 at 222 EUR WD Red Plus WD80EFAX at 211.54 EUR *6 TB drives are an option... but they are not that much cheaper: WD Blue WD60EZAZ 6TB are 119.90 Seagate Barracuda is 139.00 WD RED (not pro so, SMR) 155.90 3-YEAR P.S, I do know rumors that drive makers sell inferiors drives as external drives... but I doubt it since in Seagate's perspective, all their external drives need to have 2-year warranty (3 years if in Asia) just like the internal drives, there is little incentive do that for a large capacity 8TB drive. And for WD's case... well no one want their SMR WD Red eh?

Hi everyone, I'm looking to purchase a portable/external hard drive for backing up my computer files, programs, etc. I've been doing quite a bit of research and i'm getting some pretty mixed results on which hard drives have been the most reliable and last the longest. The main consensus seems to be to go with Western Digital, but I wanted to get other opinions. I look forward to your responses. Thanks!

so this summer i'm going to sea for a month and a half with no internet access. I am not allowed to being a laptop but i am allowed a tablet. I own an iPad mini 2 (works great) and a Western Digital 2TB external drive. i want to be able to bring movies and shows with me. I was curious if there was a way to make them work together with dongles or apps or some other way i didn't think of. preferable without jail breaking because if there is an issue i can not reset the ipad.

I am considering purchasing several items for an external hard drive enclosure solution for my two 2.5" 1TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drives to run in RAID 1. I would like to plug these in via USB to my MacBook Air until I build my gaming/productivity PC. I noticed that on the ICY DOCK full metal 4x2.4 SATA HDD and SSD Hot Swap Tough Armor MB994SK-1B there are SATA and Molex power connectors on the back. Is there any adaptor to plug this into my computer via USB or is this just for PC's? I also found some other options that are for sure USB powered such as the Syba Dual 2.5" SATA III HD/SSD RAID SY-ENC25024 https://www.amazon.com/Syba-Dual-2-5-Inch-Enclosure-SY-ENC25024/dp/B0081II3FW/ref=sr_1_20?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1487824960&sr=1-20&keywords=2.5"+double+drive+enclosure+SATA This looks like a great option on paper with hardware RAID configurations, but reviews say that RAID 1 is unreliable and years worth of data can be lost. I am wondering if anyone knows if this is a good option? If not, would I be better off going with a dual 2.5" USB 3.0 External Enclosure from Zagall https://www.amazon.com/DUAL-External-Enclosure-SATA-Drive/dp/B004OU7R7Q ? Also, is this the same thing as this BYTECC BT-M260U3 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145096 ? Does anyone know how to configure RAID 1 on Mac OS Sierra? Is it an easy process, or would I be better off getting a physical switch on the external HDD enclosure to control RAID such as on the Syba mentioned above. Thanks so much, I know don't know very much about RAID or the proper enclosures or connectors so any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi everyone, I am working on someone's 7 year old Western Digital external hard drive. She cannot access her data. The power light turns on and it seems to communicate with the OS enough to update drivers, but cannot access the data as the device doesn't appear under My Computer. Currently testing it with a Vista machine. It seems it only functions with USB 2,0. Initio drivers up to date, but yes, still cannot access data. Any other thoughts? It would be nice to retreive the data if possible. I don't know if there are more thorough means of retrieving the data that I'm not aware. Thanks for any help.

Alright so I'm going from a desktop I built a couple of years ago to an MSI GL62 laptop, and I took the hard drive from my desktop and am using an enclosure to carry it around with me for extra storage and whatnot, and I'm trying to move some of my Steam games from the hard drive to that SSD on the laptop. I've tried copying the game folders from the steamapps/common folder on the hard drive to the same location on the SSD, but Steam refuses to recognize them at all. Also when I try to play games off the hard drive Steam still isn't recognizing any games anywhere, and going to the Steam/settings/downloads/steamlibraryfolders section it doesn't recognize my external hard drive on the system. Yes the hard drive is plugged in and works with transferring music, files, etc. Please halp!!

So, i was using my wd green 2 tb hatd and copying my games into it while doing so my hard drive suddenly stopped working. So i opened my hard drive and i found out that my hard drive needle from the actuator arm is broken. So i manually tried to back to disk and i plugged to my pc then i saw that the needle went to disk for a couple of seconds then a click sound occur and it automatically went back outside the disk.(the disk isnt shown in the computer). so can anyone tell me how can i fix this issue. Please help me it has my whole life worth of data in it.

I was using buffalo mini station 500gb external hard drive model HD-PC500U2/WH-AP Problem is when i copy files to disk it was get high at 100mb after it will gradually decreasing and disconnects the disk how would i fix it is there any problem with sata hard drive or internal chip. I didn't remove warranty label

Hi guys, I recently bought a second external hard drive. Copying some movies in to it I noticed that the speed was at max 30-33 MB/s even though I had it on usb 3. After experimenting I realized that when only one of my external HDDs is plugged in, the speeds are as they should. But as soon as i plug in a second ext. HDD they fall down to 30MB/s. I tried all my usb3 ports and nothing worked. I even tried changing the policy to "performance" from the device manager. Is it normal? Is it a limit of the southbridge or something?

Recently, My Hard Drive went "Raw" probably because my PC shut down on its own while the drive was connected. I was able to recover all of my files and I looked up online all I have to do to fix the drive is to reformat it back to NTFS. Problem is when I was formatting it it stopped and says "windows was unable to complete the format" so I unchecked "quick format" and it seems to be taking very very long. My files in the drive is atleast 200GB and the drive is 2TB. It is a WD Elements drive. I don't have that much patience and I worry about keeping my PC running for a very very long time. The Data Recovery took about 1 Day to complete and will formatting the drive will take 1 day to complete as well? Is there any other way to fix it? thanks

I have a laptop with only 2 USB (both 3.0), and was thinking to get a hub. I need to connect 4 peripherals: 1. Steelseries Rival 100 Gaming Mouse. 2. Standard USB Keyboard (Willing to upgrade to Steelseries Apex M400 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard or Steelseries Apex M500 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard). 3. Steelseries Siberia 150 Gaming Headset. 4. Toshiba Canvio 1TB External Hard Drive. And I was wondering if I could connect all of them to only one port through the hub. My intended purchase is the following, because I don't have much money to spend, and in Argentina a powered USB 3.0 hub is quite expensive. Anker Ultra Slim 4-Port USB 3.0 Hub Will it work? Or will I have to connect the HD in one port and the other peripherals in the HUB?

Hey everyone, I currently have a Buffalo CloudStor 2‑Bay NAS Server ‑ SATA 3Gb/s ‑ 1 TB. I've had this plugged into my router which I am usually able to access on my home network from most devices. I was also using Pogoplug to access this through the app and online. Pogoplug recently closed their cloud, and when this happened, I can't seem to access my NAS from anywhere but on Pogoplug.com. I am self employed and I work from several different laptops and desktops. My main goal is to just be able to save and access my docs (PDF, excel, word, images) at any time from any device. Can anyone help me figure this out? Is there a way to do this without using pogoplug? Is there another way of configuring this? Thanks!

I have a 3TB WD external hard drive. Somehow I ended up with two partitions on it. One of them was from using it to install Windows (~30GB), but I'm not sure where the one between the 2000GB and 750GB sections came from. I figured out how to remove the partition to the small section from this YouTube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-07MTnNzUI But I don't know how to remove the other. When I right click on these, the only options that show up are: "New Simple Volume" (only on the 2000GB side), "Properties," and "Help" rather than the options I used previously. Everything else is greyed out. I'm guessing it's the "new simple volume" option but I wanted to check with people who actually know what they're doing because I don't know how this works. Also, after I got rid of the 30GB section the thing stopped showing up under Devices and Drives. Not sure what to do about that. Please help

Looking for a 1/2TB external hard drive to keep photos and videos on? Anyone know of a cheap one that is still decent quality?Didn't have much luck on ebay.

Hi, everybody and thanks in advance! So this happened to me recently, I turned on my pc and I wanted to go through my files and delete the useless stuff, but my external hard drive didn't show up. I tried restarting my pc, check the cable connections, turn on/off... without success. The only option left was to get it out of the case and check it directly. It had a Seagate drive in it, since I have a Vorago HDD docking station, I used it but the drive didn't show up either so then I went to the disk management window and this is what it showed me. As you can see the drive does actually appear in the second half of the window, but it doesn't show up normally with the others. So it looks like it doesn't have a drive letter or path but when I right click for the options, the only ones that are available are "Change Drive letter and paths", "Format", "Delete Volume", "Properties" and "Help". I tried them all except "Format" and "Delete Volume" and this is what happens. (I'm sorry about the quality of the next images... I just took the pictures with my phone...) Obviously I did restart the window and then the computer, but the same thing keeps happening. Then I went to the seagate site and downloaded "SeaTools for Windows", used it and this is what it shows. It doesn't recognize the drive... the next step that I know is to connect the drive directly to the computer as a slave.. but I decided that before I continue doing things on my own, I should ask the experts... so, if you have any idea what is happening please do help me out. I really need the files in the drive since I have a lot of stuff from work in there... I'm sorry if this is confusing or too long, I hope you can help me. Best regards.

Hey people of the IoT, I forgot the password on my external hard drive but I desperately need the data inside of it. Any ideas on how to unlock it or copy the data out of it? Its a WD mypassport 1TB

Hi all, I'm going on break soon and have plenty of time to enjoy myself to game after a long hard quarter. I have a dell xps 15 , and I'm playing quite a lot of low spec games like visual novels and psp/roms ported games. However these games comes at a high cost to storage space. My original C drive space is 200g, but I mainly wanna save this space for school work applications and don't wanna clutter it during school with games and other distracting applications. So I knew when I was younger, I put starcraft 1/halo 1 on a usb 2.0 stick and played them together at LAN parties, but is this a viable solution to play games? Should I be getting a external hard drive dedicated to games? Is there a speed threshold I should aim above now like usb 3.0+ or thunderbolt? How about heat? Is cooling an issue, I've noticed my usb devices get quite hot with data transfers. Thanks!

Hi I have a problem my external hard drive is 931GB but when you click on the drive the total amount of data in the hard drive only equals 116GB Any help would be much appreciated The picture on the left is from the outside and the right is on the inside

So I'm planning on getting myself an external HDD in the near distant future for my laptop. It has a 1GB HDD but quite frankly it isn't enough with games, editing software, coding software and music files on. Because of this, instead of going through the whole process of cloning the current drive onto an even bigger one, and then being left with a 1TB 2.5 inch hard drive lying around, the best option would be an external. What am I looking for? Well around 3TB or 4TB would be great, with USB 3.0 or USB C connectivity, and if possible no need for a power supply. Some I've read have had either dodgy casings, they feel very cheaply made, or seem to have contrasting reviews. Cost wise I don't mind too much, I'm expecting to pay around £140/£150 for a decent drive, and frankly wouldn't want to pay much less for a quality drive. If anyone has any good suggestions of what they use, the types of speeds they get and the value for money they think they get or will get for a drive, it will help me hugely! Thanks!

I have a WD My passport External hard drive. I faced a small issue . Whenever I connect it to my PC through a USB 2.0 port, it is recognized , whereas if I connect it through a USB 3.0 port , it is not recognized. What may be the possible reason for this problem and what should I do to get it resolved ?

I have been trying to copy this 30 GB file from my external HDD but suddenly its speed is showing 355KB/s... I have waited for more than 7-8 hrs ...neither it is showing any file corrupt message or file redundancy error....is it a sign of hard drive failure. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BgZckb1gGMK5AnRuB0ykjX8vCdYn5eSL/view?usp=sharing

Hey guys, I have a 1TB Toshiba HDD that I can access before. Then suddenly (I just noticed this after a quick nap) I cannot access the drive. After checking Disk Management (screenshot attached) , my drive suddenly became RAW. I have already found many guides in the internet but I am doubtful of them. Please help

i'm need to clean and organize files on my computer and i'm think of getting a external hard drive? is this one good? https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Portable-External-Drive-WDBU6Y0020BBK-WESN-x/dp/B06W55K9N6/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1549084819&sr=1-3&keywords=external+hard+drive if not whats a good one?

TL:DR - what is a good software (willing to pay) for hard drive recovery, specifically for dead external hard drives. So, at my work there is an external hard drive that I was given that has data one it for a project I am working on. At the moment, the drive is pretty much dead and I do not know how to get the data I need off of it, nor do I know if the data even exists (it's a cluster f*@! of a situation). It's a Lacie drive (so, Seagate) but their in-house free software isn't the best because the data I need are in uncommon file formats, most likely dicom of Nifti. I have looked online at some hard drive recovery software and got my supervisor on board to pay for one, but I am not sure which to recommend. I was looking at EaseUS as an option, but I really don't know if its a decent one, or what to look for to know if its decent. We also have some one or two other older external hard drives that are dead (less important data though) so I was hoping to get something that should work for the main drive retailers (WD, Seagate, etc.). Edit: The drives are pretty much dead, in the sense that when plugged into a computer Windows just prompts them to be reformatted.