Will SQL Server treat a USB 3.0 External Drive as local?

Question

I am a developer who keeps a local SQL Server instance on my laptop. We all do. I am considering getting an external drive to keep backup files and the like.

In an earlier position, I used an eSATA-connected-drive which SQL Server would recognize as a local drive and thus allow direct backup and restore operations with it. In that situation, SQL Server would not let a USB 2.0 drive be treated as local and would require that backup files on that drive be transferred to a local drive before restoring it or that backups would need to be done to a local drive and then copied manually to the external drive (a pain).

Well, time has marched on and I now have a nifty USB 3.0 port on my laptop. My question is:

Will SQL Server treat a USB-3.0-connected drive as local like it would an eSATA drive or will it treat a USB 3.0 drive like a USB 2.0 drive and not allow it to be used as a local drive?

Answer 1

I found the answer here. Turns out it is the disk which reports itself as removable media or not. Windows categorizes it accordingly. Apparently, this has nothing to do with SQL Server except that at least some versions of SQL Server (2008 R2?) will only backup/restore to "local disks".

Answer 2

I just used a USB 2.0 drive the other day to perform a restore to a test environment. I imagine that as long as Windows identifies the drive as a local disk and not removable storage, and the SQL Server service can access the directory, it should work just fine.