| I don't know about your specific needs or wants for this second hard drive, but I use an external hard drive in an enclosure with my laptop. I use cloning software to make a fully bootable copy of my drive, which keeps me covered on all fronts. Not only that, but since the external drive is bigger than my internal drive, I created a partition which stores any large files that I would like to archive. It's worked out great for me so far, but then again I've never had a hard drive fail on me. I'm just hedging my bets.
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