Portable SSD drives

They're fast, small, light and of course don't have any moving parts; I use a couple of NVMe based ones for work and travel backup and general file handling, very handy.

I think the transition to SSDs has firmly happened - with even major internet and cloud services providers using them as their main means of physical storage.

That said, my personal physical backup at home is still HDD based - but I think it's the last round (pun intended). Next generation will be SSD.

M.
 
SSDs are good for a lot of stuff. I've used them as my operating system drives for 10+ years. Then to NVMes for this about 4 years ago. I moved to SSDs for "current" work space for about 3-4 years ago and now have 2 NVMe drives in my laptop, 512GB + 2TB.

But RAW storage and backups? I have a 500gb spinning portable and about 35TBs in off line backups and a NAS (1x10TB + 2x8TB in RAID 5*). Why? Simple 8-10TB spinning enterprise drives can be found for under $200, 8TB SSDs are $700 for consumer and enterprise? 😂


*Yes I know 2TB is wasted but got a deal on the 8TB drives and already had the 10TB drive.
 
I use HDDs for backups. They cost far less than SSDs, and there’s no advantage to using a SSD to store files that are just sitting there. HDDs are reliable for long-term storage so long as they’re used every few months to write data, and they come in 20+ TB sizes (Seagate recently announced that they plan to get to 50 TB in a few years). SSDs are great for production volumes with frequent file read and writes, but at this time they don’t make sense for backups.
 
Thanks everyone for the information. Much appreciated. For now I'll continue with my exterior HDD, but will keep monitoring prices and information.
Edit: because the SSD in my laptop is quite small, and almost full, I actually use the exterior drive for my photos, another reason I am looking at the exterior SSDs.
 
Rose McGill said:
Thanks everyone for the information. Much appreciated. For now I'll continue with my exterior HDD, but will keep monitoring prices and information.
Edit: because the SSD in my laptop is quite small, and almost full, I actually use the exterior drive for my photos, another reason I am looking at the exterior SSDs.
Click to expand...
Rose, it *is* possible (and not even a big deal) to swap out the SSD/HDD on a Windows computer for a bigger one - any technician worth his/her name should be able to do it at a reasonable price. A full main drive can cause issues that aren't trivial to live with, so ... maybe consider it? I don't know if you're on Windows, though.

M.
 
Rose McGill said:
Thanks everyone for the information. Much appreciated. For now I'll continue with my exterior HDD, but will keep monitoring prices and information.
Edit: because the SSD in my laptop is quite small, and almost full, I actually use the exterior drive for my photos, another reason I am looking at the exterior SSDs.
Click to expand...
Rose, IMNSHO, all SSDs should be backed up onto a HDD, or three.

Data on a HDD formatted with NTFS is almost always recoverable, and fails gracefully over time, often a year or more. An SSD almost always fails catastrophically, in about a microsecond ...
 
John King said:
Rose, IMNSHO, all SSDs should be backed up onto a HDD, or three.

Data on a HDD formatted with NTFS is almost always recoverable, and fails gracefully over time, often a year or more. An SSD almost always fails catastrophically, in about a microsecond ...
Click to expand...

Thanks John. Obviously the article, or snippet I read, had some vested interest by the writer. Maybe a financial incentive to advertise the product .....
 

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