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.
HDDs last best when not moved, as they dont lose the data that much when you dont use them. But they turn around, 24/7. It is insane. They use lots of electricity, produce heat, noise, and wear out without you doing anything.
SSDs have little tear from just being connected to a machine, they just dont do much. To my knowledge they also last longer a lot of times. But they are not as good for permanent storage and should be connected to power every half year or so.
I would always go with normal SATA SSDs, cheap, cool, just work.
NVMEs are so damn hot, small, expensive, often I dont see the reason.
HDDs have moving parts and can break if handled boldly, yes. But other than that they are more durable. SSDs (no matter the port or protocol) are always limited in lifetime by the program-erase cycles of NAND flash. It’s a bit more involved, but maybe read up on what the Flash Translation Layer does, if you are interested. The gist is, that an SSD may only be fully rewritten a thousand or so times (depending on the quality of the flash) before it breaks.
SSDs are more expensive but have no sector-based search times and are faster.
Reliability can go bad for both sides. That’s why RAID exists.
You should look at power settings. HDDs can power down when not being read from or written to. It extends the time you wait when you need the data on them but can save on their lifetime / electric / heat.
I wouldn’t be so sure about the lifetime - spinning up and spinning down put far more stress on the drive components than simply spinning at a constant rate.
