Windows 10 Laptop Question

monkey44 wrote:
We do a lot of photography work, and store images on an Ext SSD ... so we go from Card >>> LT >>> SSD without stopping in the Laptop. So more efficient in our case to go direct to storage. Then we load what we need for processing right into the main PC, and back onto SSD. Some might not find that effective, but for us, it works better. The Ext reader has always been more dependable, and we use it a lot.

Even when we had our LTs built, we did not install an internal reader.

Backing up images from the SD card to a second storage is a good procedure.

However, the devil is in the details as they say..

SSD drives, just like SD cards also CAN fail even just sitting around, I have had SD cards, SSD and yes even USB flash drives fail..

Failures on solid state storage are always fatal to every bit of data on the device and comes without any warning.

Folks think that just because solid state drives have no spinning parts that it will never fail or lose data when not in use or in use.. That is not true.

If it is data that you do not want to lose, you should have several types of backups.

For PCs, I create backup images of the entire drive (OS, programs and data) using drive imaging software to a separate spinning hard drive.

For just data, I make a copy of my files to another spinning HD..

This way I have tow different ways to recover the data plus at least one way to recover the entire OS, programs and data in the event of virus, ransomware or drive failure..

I also have an external USB spinning drive that has two drives setup as a mirrored pair (know as RAID 1 level). In the event one drive fails all of the data was copied to the second drive will be intact and usable..

Spent many, many years setting up servers for very important mission critical data centers.. If you want it to run 24/7/365 with no down time or data loss, drive mirroring or redundant arrays of drives are critical to the success of that mission.

For personal or light business use, a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device which can be connected to your home network is a great way to setup a mirrored drive or a Redundant array system with out the need for a server depending on the NAS unit..

Alternately, Win10 Pro Workstation does allow at least 5 sharing connections to that PC which you could setup with a redundant array using a extra add in SATA drive adapter that supports arrays..

Under no circumstances use RAID 0 which stacks the drives into a large array with no redundancy.. Lose one drive and ALL data is lost across ALL drives with that one.. people do it to take say two 2TB drives to get one 4 TB of drive space and due to the data being written in stripes across all drives it speeds up spinning drives.. Don't do it..

You can see more info on RAID levels HERE if you are curious..