External Hard Drive for Storage

[Skyedriver]

Looking for an external hard drive for young son so he can back up photos, school work etc.
In the past I've used Seagate HHD, have one 500GB and one 1TB
But I'm old and a luddite
What's the best and most reliable nowerdays?

SSD or s that just a glorified memory stick?

[21TonyK]

Is a memory stick not a simpler option?

[hoegaardenruls]

You probably won't go far wrong with another Seagate, or Western Digital if it's just for backups.

SSD is more than twice the price of a spinning disk, and personally I wouldn't need the performance that much

[Road2Ruin]

Depending on the amount he wants to back up, maybe a Dropbox or one drive, that automatically backs up to the web may be better. Under a certain size they are free.

[Mr Pointy]

Road2Ruin said:

Depending on the amount he wants to back up, maybe a Dropbox or one drive, that automatically backs up to the web may be better. Under a certain size they are free.

Definately this. Dropbox or Onedrive would be my choice - you can't drop it or leave it on the bus.

[Funk]

Yeah, no point spending enormous sums on SSDs just for backup disk. I got a 4Tb portable drive from Amazon for £85 the other day for example. Much of a muchness between WD and Seagate, both are decent enough. That 4Tb drive I linked to is an 'SMR' disk (Shingled Magnetic Recording) which is actually designed for backup use.

Or just get Office 365 with 1Tb cloud storage - make sure it's properly protected with a decent password and 2FA.

[xeny]

Funk] said:

That 4Tb drive I linked to is an 'SMR' disk (Shingled Magnetic Recording) which is actually designed for backup use.
A.

I think that's more a case of it's a SMR drive so it has poor performance for random writes - so perfectly fine for the initial backup, not so good if you need to update individual files later.

[hairy v]

I just bought a Seagate Expansion 6TB off amazon for £115. Arrived next day, simple to use and works fine straight out of the box.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07C7V494X/ref=twister...

[extraT]

Western Digital my home. Backs up everything alutomatically via WiFi or data on phone.

[Funk]

xeny said:

Funk said:

That 4Tb drive I linked to is an 'SMR' disk (Shingled Magnetic Recording) which is actually designed for backup use.

I think that's more a case of it's a SMR drive so it has poor performance for random writes - so perfectly fine for the initial backup, not so good if you need to update individual files later.

Unless they're monster files and it'll be more than fine in normal use.

I have several SMR drives and their overall performance is excellent. Most people won't even know that drives they're using are SMR and for 99.9% of the users it doesn't matter at all.

[Skyedriver]

21TonyK said:

Is a memory stick not a simpler option?

He's had a memory stick fail on him. Lost some stuff.

seems SSD is over kill.

Think he backs some stuff to Cloud, it's one of those things where we need to instill into him to "back up" "back up" "back up"..especially as schoolwork is involved more and more.

[Penelope Stopit]

Skyedriver said:

21TonyK said:

Is a memory stick not a simpler option?

He's had a memory stick fail on him. Lost some stuff.

seems SSD is over kill.

Think he backs some stuff to Cloud, it's one of those things where we need to instill into him to "back up" "back up" "back up"..especially as schoolwork is involved more and more.

Never have only one backup, two flash drives would have prevented the loss of data

[xeny]

Skyedriver said:

He's had a memory stick fail on him. Lost some stuff.

seems SSD is over kill.

Think he backs some stuff to Cloud, it's one of those things where we need to instill into him to "back up" "back up" "back up"..especially as schoolwork is involved more and more.

If he's broken a memory stick (having dealt with a thousand or more of the things, I think I've seen one "just fail"), I'd not hold out much hope for the long life of an external mechanical drive. Is what he does small enough it would fit into a free OneDrive or Dropbox account?

They can be arranged so the default place where documents are saved ends up sync'd to the cloud automatically.

[CloudStuff]

Synology + Backblaze, overkill - perhaps but teach him how it's configured. It'll be fun!

[Mr Pointy]

Skyedriver said:

Think he backs some stuff to Cloud, it's one of those things where we need to instill into him to "back up" "back up" "back up"..especially as schoolwork is involved more and more.

Just arrange it so that his working folders are inside the Dropbox folder & he doesn't have to do anything - it'll sync any changes or new files automatically.

[tribalsurfer]

Probably a bit of an overkill but I run a WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra NAS. Can set it to auto backup, has resilience. Can use it as a DNLA server to stream. Even auto backs up my phone photo's as and when I take them.

[RizzoTheRat]

Does he need it to be portable or need to it to back up stuff from home? If the latter a NAS drive sat on your home network might be a better idea because he never has to touch it, so it's not going to get lost or broken.

I Dropbox/OneDrive/iCloud/etc are very good options for more portability though, and allow you to automatically back up photos from a mobile which is useful too.

If you go the Dropbox route check if any of your mates use it as they'll get some extra space if they refer you.

[Skyedriver]

Penelope Stopit said:

Skyedriver said:

21TonyK said:

Is a memory stick not a simpler option?

He's had a memory stick fail on him. Lost some stuff.

seems SSD is over kill.

Think he backs some stuff to Cloud, it's one of those things where we need to instill into him to "back up" "back up" "back up"..especially as schoolwork is involved more and more.

Never have only one backup, two flash drives would have prevented the loss of data

Oh agree, I've two external hard drives to the lap top plus most stuff on the lap top is on the old lap top with the knackered lid but he's young, knows everything and had a strange little USB stick that looked like a cuddly panda. Basically just lost a few hours work and lesson learnt.

[AlexC1981]

xeny said:

If he's broken a memory stick (having dealt with a thousand or more of the things, I think I've seen one "just fail"), I'd not hold out much hope for the long life of an external mechanical drive. Is what he does small enough it would fit into a free OneDrive or Dropbox account?

They can be arranged so the default place where documents are saved ends up sync'd to the cloud automatically.

Indeed. I dropped a hard disk drive about 6 inches once and broke it! They are too delicate to get chucked in bag and taken to school regularly. Anything can fail, even SSDs so always have two or more backups.

I would expect the toughest option would be an SSD in a removable caddy. If you break the caddy the SSD should still be good.

[Skyedriver]

ash73 said:

Teach him to eject before withdrawing.

Thought it was the other way around.

Oh, no I see, that's something else and he shouldn'r be doing that at 14 anyway..............