PeterN wrote:

In my case, it mounted just fine - although Knoppix gave some weird errors
but I'm not too worried because after buying SATA and power cables, I now
have two terabyte HDDs in my laptop.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...t_device_2.jpg


Your information is good. Years ago I learned the hard way to keep all
my data on a portable HDD, and back up regularly.

Do you own a car? Do you use battery-based wall-outlet-charged jumper
devices? What happens to those battery-based jumper devices in cold weather
or after 10 years? They suffer from the /same/ faults (even more of them)
than the car battery does, right?

Same thing here with external HDDs.

I have a dozen ten year old Zip drives and HDDs which suffer mainly from
worse faults than do my internal HDDs. For one, the ZIP drive data is lost
forever, because I don't even know how to get it back. For another, some of
the older HDDs suffer from proprietary power supplies, where if I lose the
cable or if the power supply goes bad, I'm hosed. For another, a HDD can
EASILY get corrupted. If I haven't mentioned that yet, just unplug it after
backing up hundreds of megabytes, and then cry (as I did) when you can't
fnid the data except by Recuva, where all the files are flat and the names
are all missing their first character (don't ask me why - just ask me why I
cried).

So I gave uip on external USB-connected HDDs as a backup because they're
even /less/ reliable than the internal HDDs are.

So what's left?
DVD is left.

I guess, when SSD gets to the price of DVD, it will win since you only
write once to SSD, but SSD will fail if it uses a proprietary power supply.

To change the topic slightly: It seems to me that the quality of service
at the Windows store is a few notches below what it was abut a year ago.

I thought the QOS was about the same as at the Apple store when I brought
iPads to them which didn't get anywhere near the range of WiFi that my
Android phones got - and they were worthless.

All the Apple store could do was run bull**** diagnostics which simply
teste that iOS was working - which wasn't the problem (because lack of
radio reception is a hardware problem).

They had absolutely zero real diagnostics that you can't run yourself -
where it seems that the Microsoft Retail Store was similar.