Poll of the Day > My dad's external hard drives always die, is he better off getting an SSD?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Is an external SSD less likely to die than a conventional external HDD?

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Probably not. Not sure why his HDD always die though I'd assume if it's due to a user error he's have the same issue with a SSD.

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wwinterj25 posted...

Probably not. Not sure why his HDD always die though I'd assume if it's due to a user error he's have the same issue with a SSD.

I'm pretty sure this is wrong? HDDs are more prone to failure.

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Then I guess the only way for the TC to find out is to take the jump.

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IIRC, HDDs have better data retention strictly speaking, but since you can run into issues with mechanical part failure that might not be much of an advantage to the average consumer. Like you could recover the plate with a new motor but who really wants to do that? It's possible though that even factoring mechanical failures they might have a higher lifespan that SSDs, I don't really remember and this is stuff you can look up on your own if you really want to know.

Personally I've never had any HDDs die on me so I feel like your dad must either have bad luck or is abusing them. For external/storage drives I personally think HDDs are a better option, more bang for the buck, and you don't really huge advantages with SSDs like you do for putting OS/programs on them.

Yes. Generally you're going to want to avoid hard drives at all costs these days. Unless you really need 8 tb of storage right now.

They're going the way of cds and mp3 players and just having one connected will slow your computer down.

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I've had my external seagate HDD for years. It was cheap too and I've had no issues.

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I've had two hard drives die on me, one the internal drive of my computer just three months after buying a new computer (most, but not all of my data was safely transferred by then; I was lucky to get what I did), and an external hard drive.

Both drives had definitely seen their fair share of stress. The internal had been reformatted and partitioned numerous times, and the external one was used to back up my computer once when I was having issues, connected to my Wii U for external storage to play games off of, and later served as media storage that I played videos off of over a long while until I got an error when trying to transfer a file, at which point I completely stopped using it until I was ready to evacuate it. I was able to get almost everything safely copied off before it completely broke down.

So yeah, the more you use them, the faster you'll lose them, keeping important files in multiple locations is critical, and of course try to avoid touching, bumping, knocking, and especially dropping external hard drives, especially during use.

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SSDs don't have any mechanical parts so generally will be more rugged and less prone to shock than a HDD would be. It'll also be able to utilize USB3's transfer speeds a lot better.

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