SSD vs Flash Drive

londonman81

I need 2TB of storage to archive family photos and videos.

I am trying to figure out the most reliable and long-lasting way to do this and, in particular, I am looking into SSD drives and Flash Drives.

It seems they both come in 2TB but with flash drives being much much cheaper (albeit a lot of them are brands I have never heard of…) while SSD is much more expensive.

What is the difference between them and which is best for storing/backing-up photos and videos?

Thanks

grumpycrab

Buy 2 x 2TB hard disk drives (not SSD or Flash), keep one in your at your house and one at a different location.

londonman81

grumpycrab said:

Buy 2 x 2TB hard disk drives (not SSD or Flash), keep one in your at your house and one at a different location.

Are HDD as robust as SSD? I had heard the world is moving towards SSD. 
I have a HDD drive at the moment which is more than 10 years old and I'm worried it might fail soon by virtue of being mechanical and old, hence why I was veering towards SSD...

Carrot007

londonman81 said:

grumpycrab said:

Buy 2 x 2TB hard disk drives (not SSD or Flash), keep one in your at your house and one at a different location.

Are HDD as robust as SSD? I had heard the world is moving towards SSD. 
I have a HDD drive at the moment which is more than 10 years old and I'm worried it might fail soon by virtue of being mechanical and old, hence why I was veering towards SSD...

Much more so. (If stored right).

SSD/Flash will not start to fail and die. Thye just drop off a cliff at some point. HDD will degrade and let you get the data first.

However you seem to be talking cold storage here so unused drive should be fine from eitehr side (it stored correctly). I would not be trusting archive data to flash.

You want multiple copies as well. And even with GC's comment 2 sounds low to me if those are the only copies.

Anyway as a general rule for thing you do want to keep. Have multiple copies and change the media every 5 years to new ones. Why pay SSD prices for something that is not going to be used? Unplugged HDD are very resilient to even being chucking down some stairs (though don't do that!)

londonman81

@Carrot007

Thanks very much.
Any particular reason then why SSD drives are so much more expensive if HDD are at least as robust?
Thanks again

londonman81

@Mickey666
Valuable insights there - thank you so much.

master PC every time I use it and shut it down, using a very simple script file

May I ask what type of script does this? is it Powershell? And anywhere where I could find such a script?

poppellerant

As others have stated, use hard drives to store your backups on.  Cheap and reliable.  SSDs are still a bit of an unknown, so I wouldn't recommend storing data on one and leaving it unused for a couple of years.  The only benefit SSDs will give you over hard drives is speed - and for backups speed isn't really a priority, whereas reliability is.

I've several Hitachi/Toshiba barebbones 3.5" hard drives which I use in my computer case's drive bay, which I use to perform backups.  Some of the drives are easily 10 years old and are only powered on a few times a year to perform an hour-long backup.

pbartlett

@Mickey666 could you elaborate on what you are doing - are you saying you have 5 backup.drives and you are plugging them.in one after another to copy new / changed files from your pc ?

pbartlett

thanks for that ! my concern was that you were connecting your backup drives all at once or on close sequence which meant of course if eg therr was a problem on your pc (ransomware?) you would find all 5 of your backup drives failing....

perceived wisdom is to rotate your backup drives so eg some are a few months old.

kinger101

You really need redundant back-up.  Which can be achieved in a number of ways using either two or more drives, cloud storage, or both.

IvanOpinion

You obviously consider these photos and videos to be important therefore I would suggest you also (in addition to local storage) look at purchasing cloud storage.  To reduce the amount of storage you need you might want to consider separating them into the 'really cherished' versus the 'everyday' and at least upload the most important ones to the cloud.