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External Drive

gleneagles
Aspiring Legend
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External Drive

I have a couple of external HDD's that are almost full, mainly with photographs I wish to keep so am looking for a new external drive for storage but cannot make up my mind to go for the standard HDD or go for a SSD external drive.

Must admit I am a bit confused about some adverts that seem to refer to SSD on a HDD.

Anyway, advice on this topic would be welcome.

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18 REPLIES 18
chenks76
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Re: External Drive

if it's simply for storage of files then an SSD is pointless.
you'll pay far more per GB compared to a mechanical HDD and the benefits will be almost zero.
Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: External Drive

@gleneagles - It's exactly as @chenks76 says buying an SSD for what is in effect offline storage serves no real benefit. The only time you'd have any benefit is when you're reading or writing and even then that may be negated if the device is connected via slow USB connection.

If you go mechanical you'll get way more storage for your money. But having said that if you have already consumed two or more external drives you may want to consider getting a NAS box. Which if bought correctly would provide you with some protection in the event of drive failure.

chenks76
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Re: External Drive

i recently looked as NAS and the cost was simply too prohibitive.
the cost of the NAS on its own (without HDDs) was equal to the cost of a few external HDDs.
gleneagles
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Re: External Drive

Thanks for the responses, perhaps part of my thinking was that a SSD would be a more reliable or safer way to store photographs than a mechanical HDD but I fully accept the point you make about costs.

We are born into history and history is born into us.
chenks76
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Re: External Drive

SSDs will and can suffer from reliability issues as well.
safer? well you don't have the risk of drop or impact failure, but data can still be lost due to other factors.
Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: External Drive

@chenks76 - There are advantages to having a NAS if you put the cost aside. Depending on the unit bought you’d at least get RAID 0 along with other services that may be useful to some such as Web and FTP servers, media streaming services and the ability to be accessed from most operating systems. Justifying the cost is the hard bit, but if you're storing important data then a RAID enabled NAS is worth every penny spent.

rongtw
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Re: External Drive

SSD are more reliable than what Chenks76  belives , i have one over 3 years with no problems.

and bought 2 more since Thumbs_Up

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VileReynard
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Re: External Drive

Always keep valuable data in at least two separate places.

You don't need a NAS - unless you need immediate access to your data.

Same applies to multiple SSD's.

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markhawkin
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Re: External Drive

@gleneagles

I'm quite a fan of NAS units. I've a couple of Buffalo units and the Western Digital "My Cloud".

To date I've been very pleased with both of them.

Staring again I might well have spent the money on something from the Synology range. Having said that, the WD is superb value for the money.

If your spare drives are of a decent size then perhaps they could be fitted in an empty NAS case.

I've looked at the D-Link ShareCenter for that purpose although never gone further than looking !

 

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Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: External Drive

For my money I bought QNAP and yes I agree, NAS units when used correctly are great, I have a VMWare ESXi Server that stores its many VM machines on a NAS and uses iSCSI to access them and if the performance is anything to go by you would think they came from disks local to the Server.

chenks76
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Re: External Drive


@rongtw wrote:

SSD are more reliable than what Chenks76  belives , i have one over 3 years with no problems.

and bought 2 more since Thumbs_Up


 

i never said they were unreliable, just that they are not necessarily more reliable than a mechanical drive.

i have some mechanical drives that are 10 years old and still working 100%.

rongtw
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Re: External Drive

No moving parts in a SSD less to go wrong Thumbs_Up

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chenks76
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Re: External Drive

other things to go wrong though.
as i said, not saying they are unreliable, just not necessarily more reliable than a mechanical drive.
feel free to keep trying to get the last word on it though.
Minivanman
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Re: External Drive

@VileReynard

Same here. With USB sticks becoming so much larger memory wise and cheaper they are more than enough to store photographs on - I have just two both of which store the same family photographs plus, they remain on the computer as well.  


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