Any advice for copying 2TB of data? Heat or other dangers?

M

MScrip

Gawd
Joined
Feb 8, 2004
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I've got a 2TB WD Green drive as an archive drive... and I backup that to another 2TB drive in an external enclosure.

I'm getting ready to buy a pair of 4TB hard drives to replace the pair of 2TB hard drives... which means a lot of data to copy at once.

Is there a special way or best way to copy the data from the old drive to the new drive?

Speed isn't a problem (I will be installing the drives internally for the initial copy)... but I was mainly worried about heat.

Can hard drives handle hours and hours of constant writing? Should I break it up into smaller chunks to let the drives rest and cool down?

I've never copied this much data at once. It took a couple years to fill the drives in the first place. I do video production and photography so I can sometimes generate 40-50GB in a weekend. It adds up quick!
 
Can hard drives handle hours and hours of constant writing?
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Yes. Every drive I get in must pass a 4 pass badblocks test (before I trust it to my data - too many DOA drives) in which every byte of the drive is written to then read back 4 times for 8 total passes. 4TB 5XXX RPM drives take 50+ hours for this test.
 
Yes, absolutely.
Even my consumer drives can take 40-90hours of consistent punishment during rebuilds and 1GB+/s transfers.
 
The drives are able to tolerate permanent access, as long as they are not overheating.
They should stay below 50°C, better 45°C. I have seen a lot of drives without proper airflow.
 
Thanks to everyone!

Aesma said:
What do you do to ensure data consistency, though ?
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I've never done anything to ensure data consistency. I just run a sync program to mirror changes on one drive to the other.

What do you recommend?
 
Additional info... I use FreeFileSync and I noticed there is way to "compare file content"

Is that a way to check data consistency?
 
Can corroborate freefilesync or teracopy, but freefilesync is better IMO for transfers of this size.

Enable consistency checking, do bad block tests before transfers.
 
NixZiZ said:
Can corroborate freefilesync or teracopy, but freefilesync is better IMO for transfers of this size.

Enable consistency checking, do bad block tests before transfers.
Click to expand...

In FreeFileSync... would I do consistency checking by setting "VerifyCopiedFiles" to TRUE in GlobalSettings.xml?

Is that all I would need to do?

Like I said earlier... I've never done any sort of verification before. I just copy the files. :)
 
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