Portable HDD Guidance
 

I?m looking at two models of 1 tb USB 3.0 portable hard drive. My laptop is 98% full and I deleted tons of stuff.


Interface Transfer Rate
5.0 Gbps (USB 3.0) / 480 Mbps (USB 2.0) Western Digital
or
5.0 Gbps (USB 3.0) Toshiba

Which is your preference and why?

I've had bad luck with Toshiba stuff, so I'd lean towards the WD. What ever drive you get, you should get two, one for backups. 2 is 1 and 1 is none...

Don't get a Western Digital. I just got rid of one that was corrupting data and costing me hours of work.

No point playing the "which is less likely to fail" game because the odds are about the same.

Buy both, and have two backups...

Exactly what he said :2 cents:

Every hard drive will fail at some point.

I have 75 toshiba externals and 16x8TB enclosures with toshiba drives in there. Never had a fail

Thanks. They seem to both be hit or miss. I’ll look for more space so I can backup and use as an external HDD. I found one when I moved but have no idea what size or speed it is. Hopefully I’ll find it again when unpacking the last boxes.

Why waste money on another hard disk? Buy an SSD drive instead. They won't suffer from a head crash if you drop it, they're 50 times faster, lighter, and use alot less power.

This is starting to sound like you're "archiving" (moving files to another disk) rather than "backing up" (keeping two or more copies of the same file)

SSDs are overkill for bulk storage. They're not indestructible, either - out of the 11 SSDs I have purchased in the past ~8 years, 6 have failed. A couple lasted less than a year.

If you care about redundancy (and you should). Get yourself a Synology Diskstation and two WD Red drives.

I went with 2tb WD and Toshiba with 2-year protection. Dell credit rocks!

Are you backing up (additional copies) or archiving?

All drives will fail. The question is "when" not "if"

[QUOTE=rowan;22127064
SSDs are overkill for bulk storage. They're not indestructible, either - out of the 11 SSDs I have purchased in the past ~8 years, 6 have failed. A couple lasted less than a year.[/QUOTE]

Wow that sucks! I haven't had a single SSD fail in the 5 years I've been buying them. Maybe you had a bad batch?

No, some were purchased in pairs but most are different models, and sizes (32GB was mid-range in 2011 :) )

The problem with SSDs is that they often fail suddenly, and completely. Not even detected by the BIOS. A HDD can also fail suddenly, but it will usually give you hints about pending doom, and may continue to function in a degraded state.