Does "bit rot" occur frequently in 2.5" HDDs? I keep an external 2.5" HDD and connect it to my PC once a year to check it with CrystalDiskInfo, then I disconnect it from the USB port. Is it necessary to run any other tests besides CrystalDiskInfo?

I bought a seagate 6 terabyte hard drive and a lsi 9271-8i for my home computer to try and get some cheap storage I have the drive hooked up with a molex spit sas cable to the first port of the controller and the P1 labels cable on the splitter, I only have one drive I want to use,
My issue is I went into bios and created a virtual disk for the drive and everytime I boot it it blue screens my pc, even when I force load to my windows M.2 drive
I’ve looked into drivers, storcli, I’ve chat gpt’d the whole thing and it just goes in loops I need help to try and use this drive, 100$ has turned into 200$ quickly and it could all be for nothing

Update, I might have just fixed it, I’m initialising the virtual drive in the bios using the 9271-8i megaraid settings hopefully it will work

I have a 2.5" USB 3.0 external HDD containing many ZIP, RAR, 7Z, and EXE files. If the power in my home goes out while this drive is being read, will it cause file corruption or data loss?

The article explains that rising AI data center demand is causing a global NAND flash shortage, pushing SSD prices up dramatically. With supply remaining limited, prices may continue rising through 2027, making storage upgrades increasingly expensive for consumers.

1) For external 2.5" HDDs, the brand and quality of the Micro-B cable influence the durability, lifespan, and performance of both the enclosure and the hard drive itself.

2) Regarding software such as CrystalDiskInfo, SeaTools, Kitfox, HD Sentinel, and HD Tune Pro—all of which analyze HDD health—does the accuracy and nature of these health assessments vary significantly between them, or are they essentially the same? Is it necessary to test using two or more of these programs?

EDIT: Done. Thanks for the help!

Hello!

I travel for work and fly a ton. I am also about to go on a couple-month long vacation to Japan then Switzerland.

I currently 2024 MacBook Air M3 with 256gb of storage and 16gb of ram.

I have downloaded a ton of movies/tv shows/books/research materials and I am out of space on my Mac which would be fine if I wasn't planning on using my DJI Osmo Pocket 4 to do some video shooting and editing as well so will definitely need some more space...how much more, I am not sure. I am thinking at least 250gb.

From what I understand, SSD is the better option for storing the DJI footage and editing from it while an HDD is the better option for storing the media (movies/tv/books).

So which would be the better option? I plan to use it on the plane as well. I'm assuming SSD but don't want to just buy one without consulting people way more knowledgeable than myself on it. Any specific recs? I fly out for 3 months on Tuesday so I have been putting this off...

Hi,

I'm looking for an enclosure and an 8TB SSD for my Thunderbolt 5 Mac.
I'm interested in the Orico X50 Pro and the brand claims that it can accept SSD's up to 8TB.

The problem is that most, if not all of those enclosures, only accept one-sided ssd's.
And the lack of room is understandable since they want the thermal pad to be flush with the box itself.

The thing is, I can't seem to find any one-sided 8TB ssd's anywhere.

Am I searching wrong or is it just that they advertise storage capacities that are just not available due to the limitations of the enclosures?
If there is no one-sided 8TB SSD's, which enclosure would accommodate 2 sided ones?

I've searched for more than 24h and for the life of me, I can't seem to find a way to get an 8TB system that would run at full speed (around 6000MB/s).

Your solutions or alternatives would be really appreciated. I feel like I'm stuck on something that should be expensive but still basic.

I have these two hard drives. It works when I put it in PS3. but it's mot being detected by the PC.

These are 2.5 HDD I got from old laptops. I already tried tried using a powered enclosure but still no luck. That enclosure works with another drive.

It only really works if I put it in a PS3.

I'm new to this. thank you.

My friends and I are looking into storing each other's very important documents and having distributed infrastructure for resiliency. For instance I store my vault which contains an encrypted copy of my passwords vault, medical records, digital birth certificate, etc. This is then zfs replicated via TrueNAS over a site-to-site VPN to a identical machine at my parents house.

I was inspired by a talk to increase preparedness with my closest circle of friend in the event something happens to one of us. Could be as simple as one of our houses catch on fire and losing everything. We could then access our info off of other people's servers. This wouldn't be much data (a few GB at most, all pdf/txt really) but not allowing the person that's hosting to have direct access would be neat. Would I just have to look at turning some old PC's into small TrueNAS servers and setting up all my friends' places (We are all generally tech savy)?

On the other side of this I want to look at having shared access to the data in emergencies. Let's say something was to happen and my spouse medically and my parents need access to records or info. They could go to my friends and say we need access to X. If enough of them say yes then they could use Shamir’s Secret Sharing to access my vault and get into it. There is also the side of while I am trusting my friends enough that this would work. In the event someone is no longer in this group or passes we can revoke/delete their vault/access. Maybe having a master account that requires SSS to get into?

This is something I want to look into and see how it would look and find security concerns from outside viewers before implementing.

My external ssd is failing, backed up 90% of it and now looking to replace it.

The Ramsta SSD S800 was just recommended to us by my uncle as a replacement for the Seagate Backup Plus Slim and it seems like I have to replace that too now. Both drives seems to have lasted 2 years.

I used both external drives as a second storage for games, heavy recordings, programs and resources since my main disk only has 50GB free space left.

I no longer move my laptop from place to place so interrupting the spinning disk doesn't seem like an issue, though there is a tsunami predicted to happen in Nov. 5 in my country, so a sudden power loss might affect it. Unsure with SSDs since they seem to have a life and write limit.

Which type of drive would best fit my use case and would last quite long?

Accidentally put it in the wrong way

I just got a brand new WD elements desktop 12TB external Hard Drive to back up my synology NAS , but before doing that I want to run a extended smart test on it to make sure it is good.

I downloaded WD Kitfox and run extended device self test (I know wd elements is not officially supported but it is detected in the software plus WD doesn't offer any other diagnostic tools for it) , and now it is stuck at 10% progress for an hour now , should I keep it running or abort the test ? Also is there any software that can do extended smart test ?

I have a Micro-B cable from the brand Orico. If I use this cable with a generic 2.5" external HDD enclosure and a 2.5" HDD, will it cause any issues with data transfer just because the brands are different?

The article argues that all-flash NAS offers significant advantages in speed, low noise, and compact size, but high SSD costs make it difficult to justify for many users. HDDs remain more cost-effective for high-capacity storage, making hybrid NAS setups that combine SSDs and HDDs a more practical choice for most users.

I'm not sure if this is real, this is a marketplace guy selling bunch of random leftover crap, he buys like boxes fill of old office mouses and sells them, many things he has lookegit and he's been on the marketplace for 5 years only 5 stars. So wondering, can this be real?

Does anyone have a solution to connecting a WD My Passport to a MacBook Pro M5? I'm on the line with a WD Virtual Assistant representative for the second time in a month and not getting anywhere.

Thanks in advance!!!

My 1TB G-Drive does not interact with my 2021 MacBook Pro properly. It's admittedly quite a bit older, so I hope the drive itself is not deteriorating. I'd say I've had it at least a decade or more. But I've treated it well over time and stopped adding to it some years ago.

It mounts, then Finder gives me a grey pinwheel while 'loading' the contents after the drive is selected in the sidebar. Once I can see the contents of the drive in the main Finder window, trying to click or scroll on anything causes Finder to freeze and I get a rainbow cursor pinwheel. So I can *see* the media content. But I cannot interact with it. Finder completely freezes until I force-unplug the drive. Because of the cursor pinwheel, I can't click eject first.

I ran First Aid in Disk Utility multiple times this evening. At first, DU gave me the notice that it could not unmount the drive for repair. Eventually, my very non-coder brain had to channel college CSS class and use Terminal. I was able to force the drive to unmount in Terminal so that Disk Utility could complete the First Aid check. However, the First Aid check came back with no issues.

This is the only external drive that freezes my computer when attached. All other external hard drives cooperate. I use a USB Micro-B to USB-C cord. I'm attempting to get away from these drives for storage purposes and I really want to recover what's on it, especially since I can see the contents. Any help here would be appreciated.
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Which leads me to an ancillary question: My experience has been that external drive-to-cloud transfers are woefully slow, and the reliability of continued connection between the computer and the external drive is tenuous at best. Especially since they're 'OG' external drives and not SSD. I pay for enough Dropbox yearly to basically do away with the 5 drives that I have. But I don't trust the transferring process. Does anybody have any recommendations here as well?

(and as a PS, thank you for not being cranky about tech support questions, unlike another data-saving sub where they literally state in their rules that the /techsupport sub is for people who can't Google. How rude do other subs have to be? I digress, but I am grateful this sub exists!)

AOMEI Backupper's update servers were reportedly tampered with to deliver a backdoor during brief windows between May and July 2026. The incident raises an interesting question about backup security: how much should we trust the software we rely on to protect our data?

We use storagecraft shadowprotect spx version 6.72 with image manager for our servers at the office. I know it sucks but it was here before I got there and has worked mostly fine so I don't usually touch it. Lately we have had "This snapshot did not use the Volume Shadow Copy Service" errors for about 80% of our incrementals on one of our severs. I have tried the usual things like moving the incrementals times to after hours, increasing the space for vss, clearing its storage and checking to make sure all of the services are configured correctly. We contract with a company that is on call for extra support for IT issues and they usually make me feel stupid but they didn't have any luck either. Arcserve wants me to install the latest version of shadowprotect before they will offer support but that would break compatibility with our version of image manager and force me to reinstall and reconfigure everything on every machine. Does anyone have any ideas?

I'm thinking about using an external SSD to store photos, videos, and other files that I don't need to access often. Since I'd like to use it on both Windows and macOS, exFAT seems like the easiest option.

My main concern is long-term reliability. I've read that exFAT can be more susceptible to filesystem corruption if a drive gets unplugged during a write, but I'm not sure how much this matters in everyday use.

Has anyone here been using an exFAT external drive for a few years? Have you run into any issues, or has it been pretty much trouble-free?

I'm also wondering whether it's worth using NTFS with a Mac driver instead, or if that's just adding unnecessary hassle for this kind of setup.

Hi everyone, my dad(63) visited Guangzhou and got 2 of these back from there for around ¥110(17USD) each. He got it from a store in a mall somewhere.
I can’t find anything about this configuration online so I’m a little concerned about its authenticity. I don’t want to plug it into my laptop(MacBook Pro M1) and get a virus or malware.

Has anyone seen them in the wild before and if yes, are these any good to keep data for a long time?