Reply 20 of 22, by TELVM
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- Oldbie
wrote:... I've read the documentation that came with DiskFresh. It recommends doing the read/write refresh 3 or 4 times per year. This seems excessive to me. clueless1 says that he does the refresh once or twice per year which seems like a much better plan to me. Refreshing a slow USB 2.0 500gb hard drive took almost 16 hours, so this is a very lengthy process to be running quarterly ...
My conservative refreshing recipe for cold storage archival drives (that lay unpowered in a drawer most of the time):
- HDDs: every 6~12 months
- MLC SSDs: every 3~6 months
- 3D TLC SSDs: every 3 months
- Planar TLC SSDs: every month (http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37 … 45&postcount=16)
- USB Flash drives (pen drives): nowadays most budget ones use bottom of the barrel planar TLC NAND == not reliable for any long term storage.
wrote:Another option that I don't think has been mentioned yet is Macrium Reflect. Personal version is free. On my XP time machine I have a 2nd drive that is larger than the 1st and just create images of C: to D: so the backup images are stored on a different physical disk. It's very similar in function to old programs like Norton Ghost or Drive Image. Can be run from and recovered from within the OS or with a Macrium Reflect boot CD (in the event you can't boot into OS).
^ I concur, Macrium Reflect works fine.
Let the air flow!