Personally I have focused on fast SSD storage and utilized the vast, cheap, slow storage available with mechanical drives for backup.
At the end of the day, if an SSD fails, you’re effectively just screwed. If a mechanical drive fails, there is some possibility that the data is recoverable. But moreover, mechanical storage is so cheap by volume that you can just have redundant backup and never worry about it, really.
Ugh. Constant corporate nickel and diming in every facet of life.
And before anyone comments “bUt thAt’s caPitaLism”, yes, we know. It sucks.
I pay about $80/mo and have a 1200 GB cap.
It used to be $50 a month with no cap. But “that plan is no longer available” in my area.
A single drive is always going to be a potential point of failure. Definitely make periodic backups to a different device if you don’t want to potentially lose everything on it without warning.
There are more complicated solutions available, such as a RAID array, but it sounds like you want to keep things relatively simple. In that case, I don’t think there will be a whole lot of difference between 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives – except that there are 3.5 inch drives designed for data center applications which may net you some extra reliability. You’d likely need to get such a drive and put it into your own external enclosure, though.
That said, there’s only so much you should expect to get out of a single drive connected via USB (relatively slower transfers, reliance on the bespoke external bay, potentially not getting warned if SMART status changes).
This is great. R/place is a neat concept on a bad website. Glad we now have one here.
Thanks!
I have a weird one: years ago I called one machine “nudl” (like using one’s noodle but with a weird spelling). Now I’ve got a few different nudls, a strudl, a dudl, and I think there’s a pudl in the closet somewhere.
To my knowledge, that isn’t a consistent pattern (someone please correct if wrong).