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NVME SSD for OS and SATA3 HDD for archive

Lowseling

Hi everyone,

 

Recently I bought a 500GB NVME SSD for my computer and, while I'm waiting for it to arrive, I'm planning how to use my actual storage. I currently have a 2TB SATA3 HDD, my plan is to install the OS (in this case a linux distro) on the SSD and use the HDD for archive, but I have a question about it.

Since I'll use the HDD to store OS backups and save files like photos etc. I'm thinking whether is a good idea to keep the HDD inside the computer or consider buying an external enclosure to use it as an external HDD. The advantage of having the HDD inside my machine is that I can run automatic backups for my OS (like daily backups in case I break something) but I don't want it to bottleneck my SSD even when I'm not using it, I don't know if I explained myself well here. In my plan I'll not store any OS partition on the HDD, I'll simply mount it, so it will be used only when needed, but I don't want it to impact on my SSD startup times/general performance too much. My worry is that with the HDD permanently mounted the performance of my SSD would drop significantly.

Can you give me any tips on what's the best way to proceed or if my solution would not really impact the performance too much?

 

Thank you,

Giuseppe

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They should have 0 impact on each other, no need to mount/unmount your HDD they can work in tandem without any issue.

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28 minutes ago, Lowseling said:

Hi everyone,

 

Recently I bought a 500GB NVME SSD for my computer and, while I'm waiting for it to arrive, I'm planning how to use my actual storage. I currently have a 2TB SATA3 HDD, my plan is to install the OS (in this case a linux distro) on the SSD and use the HDD for archive, but I have a question about it.

Since I'll use the HDD to store OS backups and save files like photos etc. I'm thinking whether is a good idea to keep the HDD inside the computer or consider buying an external enclosure to use it as an external HDD. The advantage of having the HDD inside my machine is that I can run automatic backups for my OS (like daily backups in case I break something) but I don't want it to bottleneck my SSD even when I'm not using it, I don't know if I explained myself well here. In my plan I'll not store any OS partition on the HDD, I'll simply mount it, so it will be used only when needed, but I don't want it to impact on my SSD startup times/general performance too much. My worry is that with the HDD permanently mounted the performance of my SSD would drop significantly.

Can you give me any tips on what's the best way to proceed or if my solution would not really impact the performance too much?

 

Thank you,

Giuseppe

Its not a problem. You can keep the SATA3 HDD mounted permanently if you like, it will have zero impact on the SSDs performance.

 

NVMe uses the PCIe bus, SATA uses the SATA bus. The 2 things are entirely disconnected from each other but even if both drives were SATA or NVMe, the performance of one won't affect the other.

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Having a hard drive connected to your computer won’t degrade performance of your SSD

An external drive has the advantage that you can store it in a different place. So even if your computer is destoyed you would still have the backup.

Please keep in mind:

I may be stupid.

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6 hours ago, Kaboom1 said:

Having a hard drive connected to your computer won’t degrade performance of your SSD

An external drive has the advantage that you can store it in a different place. So even if your computer is destoyed you would still have the backup.

This is something I've thought about and I think that I'll do it in the near future, but I'm thinking about buying a good backup solution instead of simply converting an internal HDD into an external one. Thank you for the tip 🙂

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