External hd

[kharrison]

I noticed that you recommended the g drives.  I seen you recommended the 6 TB hard drive amd I was curious about the 1 TB ssd.  I get the 6 TB is more memory but are ssds faster and more durable?  Just trying to make a good educated decision on what I should use.  I am a hobbyist with a 1 TB hard drive and I need more space. Should I change over and get multiple ssds or get one bigger hard drive?

[Brian]

If you travel around a lot and throw your external in your bag, then a SSD Drive should be something to consider, since there are no moving parts. Basically, a SSD Drive is a bunch of Flash Memory Chips in a case that resembles a traditional spinning hard drive. The benefits to SSD Drives are the read / write speeds, lower power requirements and no moving parts. The downside is cost for larger capacities AND they have a finite write-times; if the drive is rated for 350TB of Writes, then you get 350TB before the SSD Media wears out. But don't over-stress about this, this issue is minor in the grand scheme of things. When SSD Drives first came out, it was a bigger deal. Now, not-so-much. While 1TB SSD Drives are really affordable now, as soon as you get to the 4TB+ range, you are forking out the money to have those larger capacities.

Traditional Spinning Hard Drives have been around since the late 1950's. The technology is proven, reliable and affordable. I recommend Enterprise-Grade Hard Drives, such as the G-Drives. Those type of drives are built better and are usually faster as they platters rotate at 7200RPM instead of the slower 5400RPM. You will know when you have a 7200RPM, because they will have their own dedicated Power Brick / Power Cord, USB Ports can't deliver the power requirements to drive a 7200RPM Model. Yes, you can tell the difference between a 7200RPM drive and 5400RPM, the transferring of data is noticeably faster. The reason I recommend Enterprise-Grade is that they are built better than the "Consumer-Grade" models. I don't screw around when it comes to my data. I want my Hard Drives to be rock-solid, even if I have to pay more for them.

In terms of capacity, buy more than you think you will need. I have a 12TB G-Drive sitting on my desk as I type this, and it's half-full now. So I'm thinking about upgrading my storage within the next few years, but that's going to be way fancier than just an external drive. For your case, if you aren't moving around a lot, I'd opt for a single larger Hard Drive. If you are really paranoid about losing data, buy two and duplicate the drive once a week and keep one off site. But that gets into a whole other discussion.

Without knowing more info, I'd say get a 6TB G-Drive. Keep in mind that the G-Drives come Macintosh Formatted, but it's really easy to convert them over to Windows. Takes about 5 minutes to do, and you have everything you need built into Windows. Just hit me up for info when you get the drive.

[Brian]

I'm also moving this thread to the Windows Forum.

[kharrison]

Thank you so much for the great detailed information.  I put 2 on my Christmas list ☺️