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USB Drive or External Drive for Storing and Playing Back Videos?

Lazmarr

Looking at getting a large external drive for storing and playing back videos. However I am not sure what the best option would be.

Either a large USB Drive or an External Drive.

Which would you say would be the better choice?

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1 minute ago, Lazmarr said:

Looking at getting a large external drive for storing and playing back videos. However I am not sure what the best option would be.

Either a large USB Drive or an External Drive.

Which would you say would be the better choice?

I presume your talking about a USB stick vs a External HDD.

 

External HDD always imo. Unless you need the smallness of a USB, but 2.5'' drives are small AF. A 1TB USB3.0 drive costs 120NZD here and will give you read/writes around 100mb/s. A usb of the same cost would give you eh, 120GB of storage with 60mb/s read and 10mb/s as a best case most likely.

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9 minutes ago, Inrix said:

I presume your talking about a USB stick vs a External HDD.

 

External HDD always imo. Unless you need the smallness of a USB, but 2.5'' drives are small AF. A 1TB USB3.0 drive costs 120NZD here and will give you read/writes around 100mb/s. A usb of the same cost would give you eh, 120GB of storage with 60mb/s read and 10mb/s as a best case most likely.

Yes I was asking about USB sticks and external HDDs.

Smallness is beneficial, especially if I have to travel with it. Also how good would SD Cards/Micro SD cards be?

Using an SD card would allow me to transfer photos and videos from my devices which is always good.

Which are the better options for long term storage.

Gaming PC: Case: NZXT Phantom 820 Black | PSU: XFX 750w PRO Black Edition 80Plus Gold (Platinum) | CPU: Intel Core i5 4690K | CPU Cooler: BE QUIET! Dark Rock Pro 2 | MB: ASUS Sabertooth Z97 Mark S | RAM: 24GB Kingston HyperX and Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz | GPU: MSI R9 280X 3G | SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 250GB | HDD: 9TB Total | Keyboard: K70 RGB Brown | Mouse: R.A.T MMO7

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External Hard drive wins any time over USB unless you are traveling a lot and you don't mind losing your data because you have more chance of some thing going array on a USB then a hard drive.   

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USB hard drives are better, but they’re far less rugged. I recently put my 128GB USB3 flash drive in the wash and it was full of data I didn’t have a back up of. It was fine. Try doing that with a hard drive and you’ll be sad. 

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10 minutes ago, Lazmarr said:

Yes I was asking about USB sticks and external HDDs.

Smallness is beneficial, especially if I have to travel with it. Also how good would SD Cards/Micro SD cards be?

Using an SD card would allow me to transfer photos and videos from my devices which is always good.

Which are the better options for long term storage.

SD cards are worse than USB's I have a 128gb sd in my phone and it's write speeds are crap 20mb/s at best with reads around 80mb/s and this was the best Samsung pro sd I could get. 

~ Main Rig ~

- Ryzen 9 3950X 16 Core 32 Threads - EVGA 3090 KINGPIN HYBRID - 32GB DDR4 3600mhz - 

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- Gigabyte X570 AORUS MASTER - Lian li O11 Dynamic XL - NZXT Kraken X73 + 16 Noctua NF-A12x25 Fans - 

 

~ Accessories ~

- Logitech G915 + G903 - LG C9 OLED PG279Q 27'' [1440p 165hz G-Sync] +  PG27AQ27'' [4k 60hz G-Sync] -
2x 1440p Portrait 25'' Dell - DT 990 Pro Headphones -

 

~ Servers ~

- 100TB NAS + Server's w/ 6700k - 32 + 64GB Ram - NVME Boot - Gigabit Unlimited Fiber -

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The external drive.

 

Just ensure you have backups of the data. I've seen loads of even brand new external drives fail.

Stop and think a second, something is more than nothing.

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