USB Flash Drive or Ex HDD?

[Disco5]

Need a portable device to store photos & films on, so a usb flash drive or an external hard drive is needed.
Both seem roughly the same price and are host powered, but which to go for?
Would look at 128GB Flash or 500GB Ex HDD

 

[Jetster]

The data is safer on the hard drive

 

[natr0n]

A 128gb flash is actually 118gb fyi

I would go with the 500gb(465) drive in this situation.

 

[Folterknecht]

The data is safer on the hard drive

For long term storage in one location yes. But certainly not short term moving from one location to an other, USB sticks usually can take a good beating compared to HDDs.

 

[Athlon2K15]

Depends if you want performance with this solution. Most external HDDs will top out around 120 MB/s, I have flash drives that can easily double or triple that.

 

[RejZoR]

Price capacity, portable HDD's. You can get 4TB portable drives for like 120€ which is stupid cheap compared to any kind of flash drives.
But flash is more shock and magnetic resistant as well as faster in some cases. But costs way more and comes in smaller capacities.

I'm using a 2TB WD Elements drive for movies and it's awesome. Small enough to carry around, huge capacity and is powered from USB cable alone which makes it functional even on laptops, LCD TV's and car stereo without a problem.

 

[mongobird]

A flash drive is subject to random data loss. Events like radiation can aggravate loss. Not recommended for long term storage.

A conventional harddrive is less likely to have random data loss, but is subject to "wear, tear and risk" at power up and power down, and during transport. Long term store is more reliable than flash drive by 10x or more (duration and probability of loss). However, over time there can be interface compatibility issues. I would plan on cycling through the harddrives every 10 years. This assumes that you run them several times a year for updates, and that they are generally not "transported".

For greatest reliability, I urge burning DVD or blu-ray data. Longest archival expectation. Personally I use blu-ray discs however, frugal users, and those without a blu-ray writer may wish to use DVD.

If you go to optical media, I suggest having a couple of RW media around so that you can prototype burns which have things organized the way you like them. RW media is not as stable as RO media, so your archive should be on RO media. But prototyping burns on RW media, while slower, will allow you to temporarily backup things, and to configure your volumes so that you have things laid out the way you want them to me.

At one point (8 years ago) I did extensive research on this for a major corporation concerned about data integrity and storage times, so if there are specific questions I can help with, feel free to ask.

 

[Kursah]

Need a portable device to store photos & films on, so a usb flash drive or an external hard drive is needed.
Both seem roughly the same price and are host powered, but which to go for?
Would look at 128GB Flash or 500GB Ex HDD

Depending on your budget, you might consider a home-grade NAS with RAID 1, 5, 6, etc. You can buy one, build one or re-purpose a PC into one. Data redundancy is key in mitigating data loss for sure. I also agree with the disc storage media for things that aren't going to change or be updated or accessed frequently.

The cheap USB HDD's people get from Costco and the likes don't tend to last...usually its not the HDD but the power supply or logic board, and now they're made with the USB interface at the board rather than a SATA to USB adapter so you can't simply take the drive out of the enclosure and re-use.

What you do and spend here depends on just how important your data/pictures are to you.

 

[kajson]

If you go for a hdd, I can strongly recommend:

https://www.medion.com/gb/shop/desk...ternal-hard-drive-2-5-md90174-50047250a1.html

you can get 10 pound discount if you sign up for the newsletter.

The reason is, the thing I hate about all drives that are not USB type C, the flimsy'ness of micro usb connector, even the most robustly advertised drive out there has the horrible micro usb connection solution which will break very easily,, my gf had a hdd that had to be "liberated" from it's extremely sturdy enclosure because the micro usb connector broke down.

Medion uses a clunky square connection that will never break, the actual hdd inside is a Western Digital, which will allow you to use all WD backup software from their website because of this fact.

 

[monim1]

Go with the external HDD. Though it's size is bigger, it is safer than USB flash drive. Also you will get more storage.

 

[P4-630]

I have my photos and music on USB stick, an internal SSD, on a internal 2.5" HDD and on External 2.5" HDD.
Always have multiple copies of my most important files just to be safe.