OT: Moving an external hard drive from old desktop to new laptop

[RULoyal]

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all!

Got a new laptop for Christmas and will be ditching my old desktop. I want to move my Seagate 3 TB external HD for the desktop to the laptop. The external has the backup files for my desktop C drive. Can I just unplug it from the desktop and plug it into the lap top and expect it to work? I assume I will have to redefine a backup schedule. And while I won't be able to restore my old C drive files but would still be able to open them on the external drive - correct?

 

[Upstream]

Is this a USB drive. If so, there should be no problem moving it from one computer to another. Your computer would see the drive just like a USB thumb drive (but with larger capacity). You'll be able to access any files on the drive.

 

[RULoyal]

Is this a USB drive. If so, there should be no problem moving it from one computer to another. Your computer would see the drive just like a USB thumb drive (but with larger capacity). You'll be able to access any files on the drive.

Yup, USB. Thanks Upstream.

 

[T2Kplus10]

Is this a USB drive. If so, there should be no problem moving it from one computer to another. Your computer would see the drive just like a USB thumb drive (but with larger capacity). You'll be able to access any files on the drive.

Yup, simple as that, unplug it from one computer and plug it into the new one.

 

[ashokan]

You might want to plan to get away from that Drive. 3GB drives are more unreliable than other sizes (both larger and smaller are better) and Segate 3 TB drives in particular are sketchy.

"Backblaze, a cloud storage provider, has more than 44,000 drives in its data centers. So it sees failures at a much higher rate than any of us. Because of this, it has allowed the company to put together analytics on drive failure by size and brand...The short answer is that Seagate Barracudas have ridiculous failure rates, HGST has the best, and 3TB drives are time bombs...While the other drive makers had failure rates in the single digits, Seagate’s Barracuda line was well into double digits. The Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB had a 31.68% failure rate, easily the highest, followed by the Barracuda 7200.14 3TB at 26.65% ...Something went really wrong for Seagate. Its 3TB drives were a disaster for BackBlaze, with over 40% of the models failing throughout 2014. In 2013, the failure rate was just 9.6%, so it seems the problems took a while to build..."


http://www.itworld.com/article/2938996/hardware/when-will-your-hard-drive-fail.html

 

[RULoyal]

You might want to plan to get away from that Drive. 3GB drives are more unreliable than other sizes (both larger and smaller are better) and Segate 3 TB drives in particular are sketchy.

"Backblaze, a cloud storage provider, has more than 44,000 drives in its data centers. So it sees failures at a much higher rate than any of us. Because of this, it has allowed the company to put together analytics on drive failure by size and brand...The short answer is that Seagate Barracudas have ridiculous failure rates, HGST has the best, and 3TB drives are time bombs...While the other drive makers had failure rates in the single digits, Seagate’s Barracuda line was well into double digits. The Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB had a 31.68% failure rate, easily the highest, followed by the Barracuda 7200.14 3TB at 26.65% ...Something went really wrong for Seagate. Its 3TB drives were a disaster for BackBlaze, with over 40% of the models failing throughout 2014. In 2013, the failure rate was just 9.6%, so it seems the problems took a while to build..."


http://www.itworld.com/article/2938996/hardware/when-will-your-hard-drive-fail.html

Thanks for the heads-up