Firstly, being new to this group, my apologies if this is in the wrong forum.

Basically, I need to back up about 100GB of data from a laptop with USB3 to a portable drive, on a regular basis. Despite a lot of Googling, I cannot get consistant answers as to which is the fastest, SSD, Conventional hard drive or USB pen disk. Neither can I get much information on actual speeds for different models.

At the moment, I am using a 2TB Seagate SRD00F2 (PN:1D7AD6-500) but this seem extremely slow when on the USB3 port. Isthis model USB2 only??? I ran a speed test using Parkdale and the results were as follows:
Sequential Write: 173 MB/S
Sequential Read: 180MB/S
Random Write: 7.8MB/S
Random Read: 395kB

Also, backing up 84GB of data takes about 9 hours!

I am tempted with either the Toshiba Canvio Ready portable Hard Drive 1TB or the SeagateSTDR1000200
Will either of these give me a considerable increase in data transfer speed over my present one?

Any expert advice would be much appreciated.

Does it have to be USB?
How about LAN?

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Offloading 100GB to a portable is never going to be quick.

Aside from the initial 100GB will the following backups be a completely fresh 100GB ie all new data, or just files that have been added or changed?

Maybe have a read of this first to get a feel.
http://www.acronis.com/en-gb/resource/s ... ckups.html

If it's a full clone you need each and every time, and if the laptop has easy access to the drive, you might consider taking the drive out and cloning it in a PC via a native sata dock.
With care though, this forum is littered with people asking for help having mixed up source and destination drives and realising all too late what they have done.

Also to consider, is backup over the network as noted by pclab.

gl.

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The bottleneck is not necessarily the backup drive itself.

It can be:

- the USB 3.0 "real world" speed, not the theorical one
- which kind of drive you have inside your laptop : if your inner drive is slow (e.g. mechanical drive with small 8MB cache), then it's useless to have a very fast backup drive
- the quantity of RAM of your laptop
- the processor of your laptop (speed, number of cores, caches)
- the controller of your USB enclosure : it is as important as the USB 3.0 itself,

For instance, in USB 3.0 keys, there are huge differences in speeds (especially in writing) depending on the model. Very often, speeds are difficult to find, especially writing ones, excepted for high-end USB pens, where speeds are a sales argument.
There are also differences, but smaller, in speed for USB 3.0 enclosures. (See your PM.)

The speeds that you mention seem me very correct for USB 3.0

The speeds are usually : SSD > High-end USB 3.0 pens > SSHD > Mechanical drives

For mechanical drives, look at the cache size : it's important.

In 3.5'' drives, you can currently find with 128 Mb cache (eg. Western Digital Re4 series)
or 64 Mb cache (Western Digital Re4, Toshiba, ...) which is already very good.

In 2.5'' form factor, thick drives can theorically write faster as they have more platters and heads ; see 12,5 and 15mm models.
For data security, I would advice SATA ones, with a good SATA to USB enclosure.
Such enclosure cost about twice the price of those for 9,5mm drives, as the sales volumes are much lower.
You can also consider using a SATA dock instead of USB 3.0 enclosures.
If your laptop has an eSATA port, there are many docks with eSATA socket.
eSATA is a little better than USB 3.0 as it communicates directly with the drive, without translation.