backups: external USB drive or internal drive with USB cable?

If I'm never ever going to take the drive out of the house, can I just externally use an internal drive and cable as needed? I shouldn't need the external drive's housing to protect the drive, right?
Thanks.

You could but the internal drive doesn't have to be USB unless there are no available SATA socket or power supply extension to plug in a drive. If you have a mounting bracket available could use either a 3.5" or a 2.5" drive but most desktops won't have the 2.5" so would need an adapter for the mounting. The main difference is the external USB is more convenient for portability, don't have to open the case to take a drive out. And many folks like the USB so as to unplug and store. As for the 3.5" HDDs, they need more power than what the USB can provide, both 5VDC and 12VDC and the 2.5" drives only need 5VDC.

Sure, though a cable like that doesn't provide enough power for a 3.5" hard drive. I use two sets of bare drives with a dock, one set stored off-site and rotated monthly. I keep the drives in their anti-static bags and am careful with their handling and storage.

I have a 2TB SSD in one of these, works awesome.

Bob1212 said:

If I'm never ever going to take the drive out of the house, can I just externally use an internal drive and cable as needed? I shouldn't need the external drive's housing to protect the drive, right?
Thanks.

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The cost of a proper housing is not much more and protects drive to some degree against physical damage.

Also the SATA connector is easily disconnected and could end up corrupting data if it disconnects whilst in use.

Many now come as a convenient snap together enclosure rather than screw fits.

In the end, your data is more valuable.

Bob1212 said:

If I'm never ever going to take the drive out of the house, can I just externally use an internal drive and cable as needed? I shouldn't need the external drive's housing to protect the drive, right?
Thanks.

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You sure can. Typically you would have a power supply too that would plug into the drive to power it up.

cereberus said:

Also the SATA connector is easily disconnected and could end up corrupting data if it disconnects whilst in use.

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That's a very compelling thought.

Bob1212 said:

That's a very compelling thought.

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You could say the same thing about any external drive. If anything, a USB connector is easier to accidentally dislodge than a SATA+power connector. Listen, when backing up to external drives, the best practice is to unplug them when not in use and store them in a safe, hidden place. The former guards against wear/tear and ransomware, while the latter guards a little against thieves. If you're really serious, you'll do as I mentioned earlier and store a second set off-site and rotate with the at-home set on a regular basis. This further guards against thieves and also catastrophes like fire, flooding etc that could befall your home.

One of the nice things about using bare 3.5" drives is that I can fit six in a standard small safe deposit box at my bank. You're not going to be doing that with external enclosures. About the cable you posted, as I mentioned earlier, it won't provide enough power for a 3.5" drive. Unless you're planning on using 2.5" drives or an SSD, I highly recommend buying a dock, preferably a dual dock. A drive in a dock in its fixed location is a bit more robust in use than a bare hard drive sitting randomly on your desk.

As for reliability concerns, I've been using bare 3.5" hard drives for 15+ years with docks to backup (currently) 20 TB of data, and guess what, I've never accidentally dislodged a cable or lost data. I'd bet most people don't maintain a hash database and check against it at least a couple of times a year, either, in addition to checking after migrating to new hard drives. Just store them in their anti-static bags as I mentioned earlier, and hide them away in a drawer or cabinet, or keep them in a padded laptop bag or similar in case you have to bug out, which is what I do, and it also makes it easier to transport the sets when rotating them.

barreleye said:

Unless you're planning on using 2.5" drives or an SSD...

I've never accidentally dislodged a cable or lost data.

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1. I'd been thinking of using the 1TB HDD from my recently deceased laptop, unless I can get it going with some soldering. Then adding in the mix a 2.5" SSD, because of what you'd said previously about rotating backup drives.
2. Come to think of it, when i was trying to revive my dead laptop, it was fairly hard to get the connector out of it in place on the MOBO. But would it loosen up a lot after repeatedly plugging/re-plugging?

I want to do this mainly for Macriums. Thanks for the detailed reply.

Bob1212 said:

1. I'd been thinking of using the 1TB HDD from my recently deceased laptop, unless I can get it going with some soldering. Then adding in the mix a 2.5" SSD, because of what you'd said previously about rotating backup drives.
2. Come to think of it, when i was trying to revive my dead laptop, it was fairly hard to get the connector out of it in place on the MOBO. But would it loosen up a lot after repeatedly plugging/re-plugging?

I want to do this mainly for Macriums. Thanks for the detailed reply.

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I've never noticed any change to the connectors on the bare drives I've used for backups over the last 15 years. I'm using two sets of three drives right now, and I may have used around 20 drives over this period. With a dock, you slip the drive vertically into a slot, and good ones have a button you can press to give a bit of ejection assist as you pull the drive out.

BTW, every 3.5" dock I've seen also accepts 2.5" HDs and SSDs. I'm really partial to docks over those cables if you can't tell. lol

BTW, every 3.5" dock I've seen also accepts 2.5" HDs and SSDs. I'm really partial to docks over those cables if you can't tell. lol

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I've used drive docks for several years, usually 2 bay models that accept SATA drives, a mix of 2.5" and 3.5". One I use is an Eaxer usually connected to Win11 that also has USB 3 ports and one of those is for charging. Nice part of the Eaxer is it has hardware cloning, cannot be connected to a computer for the process, hasn't failed me with making bootable clones yet. Another I have is a BlacX connected to my Linux computer.

Berton said:

I've used drive docks for several years, usually 2 bay models that accept SATA drives, a mix of 2.5" and 3.5". One I use is an Eaxer usually connected to Win11 that also has USB 3 ports and one of those is for charging. Nice part of the Eaxer is it has hardware cloning, cannot be connected to a computer for the process, hasn't failed me with making bootable clones yet. Another I have is a BlacX connected to my Linux computer.

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I've been using this StarTech dual dock SATDOCK22U3S V2 since 2013. It's USB 3 so very fast, and despite being old, the 16 TB WD Red I recently bought works fine in it, as do SSDs and every hard drive I have going back to 2006 models. I mentioned the model number, because one of the two independent power switches died, they don't sell the part, and I bought their latest model to replace it. The newer SDOCK2U33 was a downgrade because (a) it spun down inactive drives, which I don't want (Windows would spin them up to safely eject!), (b) the two power switch LEDs no longer reflected the online/ejected status of the two drives, which is a great feature, and (c) an old Samsung 500 GB drive inexplicably wouldn't work in it (not really important, but still). I returned it and bought a SATDOCK22U3S for parts off eBay, from which I salvaged a switch. The SATDOCK22U3S V2 is perfection to me, and I hope I never have to replace it.