External hard-drive for back up

[Whoaru99]

The point I didn't make very clearly is, going off the information given 100(Mbps?) and observed transfer of 5(MB/s?), speed seen is/was pretty close to what one might expect from a 100Mbps system, but 5MB/s is pretty slow for transfering large or lots of files.

[upnorth]

The wireless router might be older, 802.11G which can deliver about 22Mbits per second (54 max) or if only a couple years old it most likely is 802.11N which can deliver up to 600 Mb/sec, but I think the cheaper ones are only up to 200 Mb/sec.

If it is a wired connection that is most likely 100 Mbits/second max. But you don't actually get that due to various overheads.

There are 2 versions of wired. Hub and switch. Hub is half duplex meaning it can only transmit in 1 direct at a time and is susceptible to collisions.

Switched is full duplex meaning it can transmit in both directions at the same time and since it is a more direct connection there are no collisions in a switched environment.

There is a small overhead in switching as it makes decisions on layer to or MAC Addresses. There is a whole pile of gobbly gook I won't go into cuz it really doesn't matter.

Current wireless is half duplex and susceptible to collisions.

Collisions are simple information packet that collide and don't reach their destination. With TCP the packets are retransmitted and UDP(streaming, VoIP, audio etc) their are best effort they are not retransmiitted.

[Scott K]

Yes, large data transfer, in fact 1.87tb to be exact. I had a week of transferring the data, about 50 hours total. The biggest pain was it wouldnt transfer large files bigger then 5gb, so I had to take apart my files, and break them up into small files, then piece them back together on the new drive. One of my programs are 1.2tb alone, so it was a pain breaking it up to a maximum of 5 gb per transfer. The data wasnt being transferred via internet, only through my own router. I had also used wired to the new hard drive, but the data came from my laptop, which I had hooked up wireless, about 15 feet from the router.

Again, once the data was transferred, no issues since. The main problem was the lack of support from the company, the slow data transfer, and the fact I couldnt transfer complete files, do to size of the files. Now that the main data was transferred, adding updates, and small files, there isnt any problems.

[upnorth]

Just did a quick google search on max files size. It is 5 gig or more accurate 4.3 gig if the drive is formatted FAT32, NTFS it is 16TB. And from further exploring it would seem you can't format USB drives NTFS without some finagling.

Read this for a better explanation

[Whoaru99]

I do all my work backups to a WD My Book-style drive connected via USB. I have the HDD partitioned in two with one on FAT32 and one NTFS. There was no problem or special steps to format in NTFS. The backups are directed to the NTFS partition.

Or, by USB drive, are you meaning like a thumb drive/memory stick?

[upnorth]

I don't mess with USB, I have a NAS, but the defaults are FAT32 and you according the article you need to make some changes go NTFS.

[Whoaru99]

The article is about USB flash drives, not USB-connected HDDs.

Here are two of my personal USB-connectable HDDs. Both came formatted as FAT32 and I reformatted them NTFS with no special procedures at all.

[delcecchi]

I had an issue with system images to a 3TB seagate when I got it a year ago. The solution I chose after reviewing all the technical information was to use my old 1TB drive for the system image.

Using Windows backup. The seagate backup program filled the disk and then whined about no space. (1 TB system, 3TB external)