Is leaving an external USB HDD plugged in to the computer all the time in any way harmful to the HDD? I am thinking here about the life span and durability of the drive.
Well, I would err on the side of caution on two fronts. If you have a power outage whilst accessing the drive it might prove catastrophic. And as I have pointed out elsewhere, should you have the misfortune of a ransomware attack, criminals are now able to identify the type and model of external drive so should ideally be used off-line. The only other possible issue might be overheating.
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Yea swarfendor makes a good point about ransomware, and the same applies to thunder without surge protectors or unlucky automatic updates that make things misbehave.
If you are indeed talking about a spinning hard disk then depending on your usage it will actually power down and stop spinning when not being read. But this could end up not happening if you have programs that continuously read or write little amounts of data to the drive (like a log file, torrenting or streaming music and video in the home etc).
One thing we can't tell about your usage if it is files you need every day then that means plugging and unplugging every day. If you have to unplug and replug many times a day then that will cause wear on the connectors. Most drives have removable cables nowadays so that just means replacing the cable if one side wears out. But if you are plugging into a motherboard or laptop it also causes wear on that port. In that case it can be better to plug into a (short!) cheap extension cable or hub.
If you only need the files once a week or month or are only writing backups to the drive it is a good idea to unplug so less bad things can happen to it when not in use.
If you are using one of those miniature flash drives then overheating is indeed a concern as swarfendor mentioned: especially when plugged on the exhaust side of a compact PC or the hot exhaust of a high performance laptop tiny USB flash drives can get overwhelmed by the heat even when not reading or writing that many files to it.
One good thing about flash storage though is that it is fine with being moved around. If you have a spinning drive plugged into a laptop you need to not accidentally pull it by the cable when sliding it around. Or if you tend to pick up your laptop while it is on... just picking up the drive while it is spinning is a bad idea! Better to unplug it first unless the drive has 'fall protection' as a selling point. Also spinning drives use more power when your laptop is on battery, and if you have many other hungry USB devices plugged in it might not always provide enough power to get the drive spinning from a standstill causing annoying random errors (even though the drive isn't broken at all).
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Thanks for all the good information. It helps me tremendously to learn as much as I can about technical computer operation.
I deleted everything on the USB SSD HD in order to format it with Linux and not Windows. But now the problem is that it will not mount in order to be formatted and used as storage on Linux. Thanks
If there are no partitions it will not mount, then you wont see it in the file file manager. Can you see if it shows up in "Disks" to be sure? It should still show up when it is unpartitioned or the partitions are in an unsupported format.
If you click on the three vertical dots to the right of the power button, that should open up your options.
And what is the first item on the menu? "Format disk ..." !
See the first attachment. The far right side hows the drop down options available.
"Format Disk" in that top menu is to create a partition table - it will wipe out the existing partition in the process.
To format your existing partition, click the icon indicated (gears) in the image below to get a "Format Partition" option.
Finally, if you want to create a new partition in the free space, select the free space and the icon to the left of the "gears" icon becomes a + sign, which creates a new partition (normally, with a partition selected, the icon in that spot is for mounting and unmounting it.)
Yes that started the format but the process reports taking 23 days. That is something I cannot do so I will concentrate on the free space only. Thank you.
There is a lot to this I am not understanding. If I did find a way to format only the free space, does that mean the massive blue space is still going to be NTFS? It looks to me like the only way I can get this formatted to Linux is to spend the next 23 hours doing it. Right?
Personally I never use Disks.
Might I suggest you download GParted live and copy the .iso to a Ventoy enabled thumb drive and do your partitioning that way.
With GParted you can delete that partition completely so the whole drive becomes unformatted.
Then create one Ext4 partition. It should be quicker than Disks.
Thanks for all the help and suggestions but it is all too complicated for an 80 year old novice to grasp let alone function. I will just not use the device and write it off as a lost cause, Thanks.
Nothing is a lost cause my friend.
Well you can just give it a rest for a bit and come back to it later if it is bringing you down.
It seems like you did format the drive at least once. I'm not sure why the estimate is saying 23 days, maybe it is wrong and completes much faster? It is also possible you selected some unusual options I am not familiar with. If it asks you about erasing, you can choose something that looks like "Don't overwrite (Quick)" but I don't know the specific wording it will show myself.
One of the things I noticed is that at some point the drive was formatted as swap which is usually not mountable and probably part of your trouble. If you can format the drive partiton as Ext 4 it has the best chances of showing up mountable on your Zorin OS.
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I remember selecting erase so I will try it again without it. I do not remember Ext 4 but will look for it again. Thanks for coming back, will do my best.
The latest is I plugged the USB back in and low and behold the "tick" to mount showed up so I mounted it, but it still showed as NTFS. Anyway it did mount so I sent one movie to it then played it and it worked. Next I powered off the computer and when I reloaded it was still there. I tried playing the movie again and it played. Next I powered off the PC (it took an inordinate amount of time to power off, several minutes instead of instantly as usual) the device was still mounted but when I ticked to open it, I got the error attached. So I went back into Disks and found that the tick to mount was now gone. The tick to mount was there earlier both times but then disappeared. Also, I never could get it to format and the NTFS remains.
