External hard drive recommendations?

I've used one of these portable Samsung SSD drives for backups of a laptop. They're very small, utterly quiet, and fast enough for making incremental backups painlessly.

Mind, the above link is for the 1TB version; smaller capacities are cheaper. Though, I'm old enough that $370 for 1TB of flash seems pretty cheap to me.

Also, note that the first one I got died within two weeks, but was replaced without hassle by Amazon. The replacement has been trouble-free.

For that kind of usage, and with that relatively small a total data size, you could probably get by with just a good thumb drive. Patriot has always had good recommendations as a sturdy flash drive.

I really like my portable Seagate USB backup drive*, and it works well as a TimeMachine drive or one you just copy files to.

I’d probably go with a USB thumb drive though.

* Amazon AW affiliate link

Google did a study several years ago and wrote on the failure rates of hard drives. While the study is somewhat dated now, the principle still holds regardless of whether you are talking about SSD (solid state drives) or SATA drives. The summary of that study over several hundreds of thousands of hard drives essentially said that either a hard drive is going to fail early, or it will last for a pretty long time (around 5 years for SATA drives).

Now, SSD drives do tend to be more stable and can last longer than SATA drives, but I would first recommend keeping a copy of your content elsewhere until you get past the first month or two of operation.

As to manufacturer, that's really a Coke versus Pepsi, Ford versus Chevy, Windows versus Mac kind of scenario, where some people swear by one or another, but at the end of the day they're all pretty good.

For portable drives, I usually go with Western Digital, but Seagate, Verbatim, Samsung, Transcend, Lexar, and Sandisk are all reputable outfits. That said, if you are running a Mac platform, in my experience Macs work better with Seagates for some odd reason but it really shouldn't matter in the long run. So, my suggestion is to pick one off Amazon from their recommended listings within your budget and give it a whirl.

Thomas Vail said:

For that kind of usage, and with that relatively small a total data size, you could probably get by with just a good thumb drive. Patriot has always had good recommendations as a sturdy flash drive.

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This. I have a thumbdrive attached to my keychain. Every once in a while, I zip my writing files and copy the zip (with date in the filename) to the thumbdrive.

I also do the dropbox, multiple PCs, backups, etc. But the thumbdrive is offline storage that wouldn't be subject to a ransomware attack, if worst came to worst.

Dennis E. Taylor said:

This. I have a thumbdrive attached to my keychain. Every once in a while, I zip my writing files and copy the zip (with date in the filename) to the thumbdrive.

I also do the dropbox, multiple PCs, backups, etc. But the thumbdrive is offline storage that wouldn't be subject to a ransomware attack, if worst came to worst.

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That's not necessarily true. Malware can absolutely infect thumb drives if they are writeable.

If your hard drive or network is compromised you can't rely on anything that has been connected to it directly or via a network as being safe. If a device has writeable media, either in the form of external storage or writeable ROM or or RAM, be aware that something you don't want may write to it.

Very good point about malware on USB sticks (or any flash media whether SD, micro SD, USB, or CF cards for that matter)

Anything can get corrupted, hacked, or whatever, so don't presume that because it's offline it's safe - as soon as you connect it to a computer, it's connected to anything that computer connects to, including the internet!

My other reason for not recommending a USB or flash drive that small is it's too portable!

Too portable means it's too easily lost. I can't tell you the number of USB sticks, SD cards, and such I've lost simply because of how small they are. Thankfully, I've never lost any data other than maybe a few PDF's or pics I had copied for sneaker-netting, but they are just too easy to misplace or lose, and if you have sensitive data on there, anyone with a USB port could pick it up and abscond with it...

I prefer something a bit larger. Heck, I've even seen people use two-way velcro tape to stick them to the topside of a laptop