Hey folks!
I have a WD easystore 14 TB External HDD connected to my Plex server (running on windows 11).
I am using about 4 TB of it, but not for anything truly important. It’s storing plex media mostly.
I’d like to use it for storing memories. But how do I trust it?
What are good tools for me to keep a check on the drive so that I can hopefully get enough warning when it starts losing sectors?
I have some tool installed based on recommendations online and I started a “surface test” of the disk and it said it’ll take a measly 300 hours. Not ideal.
So, related question for the other people in the comments section here, what’s the best method for copying all your data to other drives? Surely it’s not just copy, paste, then wait?
Robocopy on Windows. RSync on Linux.
These are quick and dirty but work and can pickup where you left off on failure.
others have answered but another option is SyncThing which has a benefit of working across multiple devices including mobile
Storage Spaces for Windows OSes.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/storage-spaces-in-windows-b6c8b540-b8d8-fb8a-e7ab-4a75ba11f9f2
Seems risky, I had really bad experiences with windows software RAID so I’m not sure I would trust such a solution.
It’s quite complex but I use git-annex for this purpose.