It helps monitor real-time temperatures, examine the spin-up time of your hard drive, and do short or long tests. You may use SMART characteristics to anticipate when a hard disc will become faulty. Since you also say you'd like to backup things to another external drive from time to time then imaging definitely sounds like it would be a more appropriate solution since when making an image you can typically save some space as long as the drive/partition you're wishing to image isn't loaded completely with non-compressible items like audio or video files (because they're already compressed as it is).Īs for imaging software, there's tons of apps out there for it: Acronis True Image, Macrium Reflect, CloneZilla, Drive Image XML, and many many others, it's just a case of you perhaps testing some of them and see which one best suits your needs and purposes. DiskCheckup is another free hard drive testing software used on nearly any drive. Click on 'select a disk to clone to' on the next screen, and pick the new drive. This copies all contents of that drive to the destination drive. You find the 'clone this disk' option below the drive once it has been selected.
Cloning implies that you want a real-time availability backup which is what RAID-1 supports, but in this situation it might be more useful in some respects to instead just use that second SSD for image storage purposes, maybe. The main hard drive with Windows is listed with a small Windows-icon in front of its name and drive letter.