I own several external 2.5’’ HDDs on the 1 TB range where I save my data. Samsung has worked well for me, but now I need more space.

One option would be to buy an external SSD instead of HDD.

Another would be to get an external NVME, but so far I haven’t found cases for them.

Nowadays we even have 1 TB flash drives, should I get one of these instead?

I could also buy 2 0.5 TB micro SD cards instead.

So many options make it difficult to decide.

What brands and technologies do you recommend?

Software is going to be debian based.

  • tartan@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    WD/SanDisk have completely gone to shit. I’d go with Seagate. I have a bunch of IronWolf Pro drives that have been fast and reliable.

  • solrize@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Micro SD is probably the least reliable but all these media kind of suck. You need redundancy and frequent testing etc. A pain. I think it gets worthwhile when you have enough data to fill several spinny drives so you can set up a RAID. That means at least 20TB these days. My own stuff right now is on Hetzner Storage Box plus several mongrel servers.

  • walden@sub.wetshaving.social
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    5 months ago

    I’d say SSD or anything else non-spinning is a waste of money for most people’s needs. There are fringe cases, of course, like people who are editing gigantic video files or whatever.

    I have a bunch of WD HDD’s that I shucked a while ago, they’ve been running non-stop for over 5 years last time I checked and I haven’t had any problems. That being said, I think Toshiba is usually considered “better”.

    Either way, you shouldn’t rely on the reliability of any drive, SSD, HDD, or otherwise. If you have a backup then your worries go out the window and you can live life in peace!