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.
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.
Entirely depends if you count HGST as Western Digital or not, because they by far dominate the back blaze reliability scoreboards. IronEolfa don’t even come close and are extremely hot or miss depending on capacity.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/
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.
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!