MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Seeking advice on moving Calibre library to smaller hard drive

Quoth · 08-28-2023, 05:42 PM

Makes no difference operating SSD vs HDD via USB mass storage. It's a box and a USB cable. Mount & eject is identical.
The differences are not use, but:
SSD more expensive
SSD is faster (but SATA SSD are a lot slower than NVMe and you might need USB 3.x to see).
Some HDD are 1/4 speed of other HDD, especially cheap backup drives.
An ordinary HDD (not shingled, Hamr, Helium) will last for decades powered off, an SSD can fade.

My Calibre Library is on HDD on PC and Laptop, but both have SSD for OS. I did test 5000 ebooks on the SSD (desktop decent NVMe) and the HDD isn't much different. The FTS is speedy. Conversion OK. Enabling FTS slows down conversion and adding a bit due to index building.

I'd only use an external SSD or HDD if I didn't have enough internal space. I did have an XP VM on a cheap slow HDD via USB - SATA adaptor box and amazingly it was very much faster than the laptop it was cloned from.

A decent external HDD (SATA-USB in a box) will work fine with calibre if the laptop isn't big enough. Though it's slow rather than difficult to clone a laptop HDD to a bigger drive and then expand the partition.
Done it with 40G to 120G IDE on a laptop XP (20 years ago, still works) and 512G to 2T SATA on laptop Linux Mint last year.

08-28-2023, 05:42 PM	#6
Quoth Still reading Posts: 14,137 Karma: 105211945 Join Date: Jun 2017 Location: Ireland Device: All 4 Kinds: epub eink, Kindle, android eink, NxtPaper	Makes no difference operating SSD vs HDD via USB mass storage. It's a box and a USB cable. Mount & eject is identical. The differences are not use, but: SSD more expensive SSD is faster (but SATA SSD are a lot slower than NVMe and you might need USB 3.x to see). Some HDD are 1/4 speed of other HDD, especially cheap backup drives. An ordinary HDD (not shingled, Hamr, Helium) will last for decades powered off, an SSD can fade. My Calibre Library is on HDD on PC and Laptop, but both have SSD for OS. I did test 5000 ebooks on the SSD (desktop decent NVMe) and the HDD isn't much different. The FTS is speedy. Conversion OK. Enabling FTS slows down conversion and adding a bit due to index building. I'd only use an external SSD or HDD if I didn't have enough internal space. I did have an XP VM on a cheap slow HDD via USB - SATA adaptor box and amazingly it was very much faster than the laptop it was cloned from. A decent external HDD (SATA-USB in a box) will work fine with calibre if the laptop isn't big enough. Though it's slow rather than difficult to clone a laptop HDD to a bigger drive and then expand the partition. Done it with 40G to 120G IDE on a laptop XP (20 years ago, still works) and 512G to 2T SATA on laptop Linux Mint last year. Last edited by Quoth; 08-28-2023 at 05:49 PM.