External drive or internal drive plus dock?

[Supersonicwolfe]

I am looking for buying a external drive for periodic offline back up (plug in bi-weekly or once a month)

Should I go for a desktop external beast like a Backup Plus Hub or a HD dock+Internal hard drive?

My main concern about the latter is the SATA interface is not designed for plugging and unplugging repeatedly, plus I am worried about storing and handling a bare drive often like that. But I also heard HD manufacturers use lesser drive in their external products.

 

And should I buy a regular HD like Seagate Barracuda/WD Green/Blue or more premium ones like Iron Wolf/ WD red?

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I've plugged and unplugged both HDD and SSD internal type backup drives for years without problems.

 

Internal type drives tend to be better quality than external drives. Many manufacturers feel that external drives dont' need to be as good as internal type drives since the external drives don't run as much.

 

I favor using bare, internal drives for my desktop backup drives and use hot swap bays (a type of internal dock) in the computer to plug them into when updating the backups. A good second choice would be an external dock.

 

WD no longer makes the Green HDDs. The new 5400 rpm Blues were supposed to be essentially rebranded Greens but I've seen some complaints of premature failures. Beyond that, I can't really comment on what brand to get since I ditched my HDDs in favor of all SSDs a couple of years ago and I haven't kept up all that much on what is going on with HDDs since then.