micky wrote:
Corrected post

I have to make my backing up more frequent.

Right now I use a double dock, with a 3 1/2" drive. (I bought one whose
advertising said it turned off when it wasn't getting input, but
afterwards, when I tried to get the software the ad said was needed,
someone there admitted there was no software and it didnt' do it!!!**)


Is there a 3 1/2" dock that will turn off when not in use, when there is
no data coming from the PC.


I have the impression that those 2 1/4 backup drives do indeed turn off
when I'm not backing up. Do they? All of them? Any that you
recommend? Any you recommend against?

The policy of the drive is one thing.

You can have drives with aggressive spindown (but
not complete power off necessarily).

The problem is, when the computer first boots or is
alerted to the presence of the drive, you get a
drive letter and the partition is mounted.

The OS can "probe" a partition at regular intervals.
For a drive that has entered the spin-down state or
the parked state or whatever, this wakes them up.
Now, all day long, they're doing spin-up, spin-down,
spin-up, spin-down.

And if you had a fancy software that does:

* Dismount
* Offline

or similar, now when your backup software goes to run,
it finds the drive letter doesn't exist and the
backup fails. If the drive is left in an inappropriate
state, there is still trouble.

And you can see here, there really is no happy medium.
No matter what scheme they come up with, there is a
"minus" at some point.

https://superuser.com/questions/4109...hen-not-in-use

*******

For an SSD, it wouldn't really matter if it was
"left spinning". Idle power can be under a watt on
some of them. If they wake up and go to sleep again,
nobody cares.

An SSD might be suitable for "small" backups.

Or, break the bank for large backups, depending
on who makes it and how big it is. For example, a
recently advertised WDC SSD was $100 for 1TB storage.

An SSD with SATA interface, would plug into your dock.

Paul