☝️ Quality and features in external hard drives change over time. First, look at what you need.
☝️ External hard drives
When choosing an external hard drive, consider physical size (for portability, 2½-inch drives travel well), speed (5400 RPM is common for durability, 7200 for speed), and capacity (2TB minimum these days). Reliability varies, and manufacturers seem to cycle from good to bad and back again. Focus on your needs: size of backups, number of backups, additional uses, and, of course, your budget. Backing up is crucial regardless of drive specifics.
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0:00 Good External Hard Drive
1:00 Considering physical size
2:45 About speed
3:40 Capacity
4:00 Things to think about
6:00 Brands
7:45 SSDs?
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Watch next ▶ Can an External Drive Fail? ▶ https://youtu.be/TMl9YJP93F8
Absolutely not. Rotating media is obsolete.
get a samsung ssd …mean time between failure is much better, and they are much *MUCH* faster.
they can keep up with thunderbolt 4 – 40 Gbps.
Avoid the 2gb canvio ready, mine was mfg in first half of 2024, and taskmgr shows that it always has random 0kb 100 percent hiccup freezes during copying, and it’s severe enough that I’ve gotten current pending sectors warnings in crystalinfo more than once now, also gets as hot as 48c during long reading or copying.
another option would be to get an internal SSD drive that matches your computer and a USB adapter to plug into your USB port. then use it as a backup and you can put it in your computer if your main drive craps out. you can backup to it, use it to store files, or clone to it if you need to
I have had excellent results using WD 3.5” Internal Black drives with an Orico external drive case. Yes, they are a bit big and use external power…so are not as portable but you can buy a 1tb WD Black drive for about $70 and the case for about $20. These are super reliable and as a back up drive will last a decade or more.