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. IronWolf don’t even come close and are extremely hit or miss depending on capacity.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/
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.
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.
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.
Be careful if you buy a Samsung 8x0 SSD. They have long standing bugs that may cause data loss. They are worked around in the kernel, however you have to ensure that the workaround for your particular model exists in the kernel version you use.
You could check out c/datahoarder. They should be able to tell you about brands, reliability, best practices …
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!
