I was planning on just taking the HHD out of one of my dead ones and using that,but at 50 bucks a new one is so cheap it's just not worth the effort to use a old,slow,small one.
I don't really save all that much,and was planning on using memory sticks.
In today's economy,anything less than 100 bucks is "nothing money". Costs half that much to fill up the gas tank in my pu.
@sneakypete YES, roughly, it is not worth using an old drive, in two respects:
First, storage is stupid cheap these days... Speaking of conventional drives, in real terms (omitting the cheezy residential price-point drives), solid serious storage is crazy cheap... A WD Black 1T drive - A terrabyte of room, for roughly 100 bucks... That is a HUGE landscape if you need that kind of thing... But you do not seem to need so much storage.... If you had a thing for movies, and kept a library thereof, well, then a 1t drive might feel cramped. For any type of vid, you need buckets of storage.
I am a data freak. Between my DEV and music, and vid libraries, and in the nature of my business, retrieving data for others (and keeping it around for a month or so) I need some pretty swingin storage. But everyone is different, and you need to fit it to YOU.
Secondly, SPEED. SSD hard drives, built basically the same as a thumb, or as RAM, have eyebrow-lifting performance. SSD drives basically operate at the same speed as RAM does. Super fast. As a gamer, where performance matters, an SSD drive (or an M2, same thing, different form factor) would probably be very desirable - Even as much as GPU... So maybe, considering gaming, and your lack of need for big storage, maybe you should focus on as big an SSD drive as you can stand, bang-for-buck, and live in that... A 512g, still probably under 100 bucks, might be a thing.
But with that comes a caution: SSDs, like thumbs, are durable, and fast, but they have one serious flaw: When they leave, they leave big-time. And they leave now. Poof! Done. Recovery is not likely. So backups become critical.
In your case, with a desktop and a laptop, I would highly consider how to back up between them, each roughly as capable as the other, so that if one fails, the other can suffice, immediately. Programs the same, and with backup, data the same. At the very least, each should back up to the other... That may be a good cause for one of those old drives you have - Hang it as a secondary in the desktop as a primary backup point that can be automated over network...
What is a hybrid drive? Don't think I have even heard of one.
It is kinda a combo between SSD and conventional tech in one drive... The ssd part serves kinda like a monster fat high-speed cache talking to the 'real' drive part... The idea is big storage that functions at the speed of SSD, but they really don't work very well, and have a high failure rate.
I rarely save any emails unless they have some sort of technical information in them related to one of my antique car projects.
My point was that if you have an on-line account, one you access through your browser, you don;t need to back it up, as it really is not 'in' your machine. It's out there, online. If you use an email client, to access say, an email account provided by your internet provider, then that would need to be backed up.
Thanks,the current plan is to keep using this one for stuff like this until it dies,and then use my old backup laptop until that dies. When it does,I will just switch to one of those cheapie 200 buck 13 inch tablets for stuff like this and use my new laptop for playing games. I don't know much about computers anymore,but I see no real need for a smoking fast nuclear-powered computer for message board stuff.
That's right. But like I said above, it would perhaps be prudent to look at them as a primary and secondary, capable of doing the same thing, and backing between the two with that in mind.
My laptop is my main access... I like the portability of it, operating all my machines from it from my LazyBoy or from out on the porch if I want to... But my main-whip desktop is an exact replica (for all intents and purposes) of this machine, to include data. If this laptop sh*ts the bed, other than being stuck at the desk, I will operate seamlessly, with no loss of time or data.
But all of this is still speculation... It could be that your desktop is fine, and all that's wrong is that Windows sh*t the bed. All this HDD talk is dependent upon the HDD being bad, which is not yet a fact... Let's see what that is first. But IF it is so, it will be time to think it out a bit. Even with reoading windows... It is a perfect opportunity to buy an SSD system drive and load Windows on there instead, and use the current drive as storage... If that box ain't running from an SSD now, you will see a very noticeable performance increase - With a reasonable SSD for a system drive being around 50 bucks (256g), the bang for buck is worth it.
So get the diags done, so you know what is wrong, and then forge the path forward, I think.
