hdd or external hdd

bettz

bettz

bettz

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I need some extra space for games and roms and was wondering what would be the cheapest & longest lasting option?

I've space in my computer for another sata drive or would it be best to just get an external

I'm looking at minimum of 4tb

Any advice on what i should be looking at?

So far this is what im looking at

Seagate BarraCuda 4 TB
 
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Depends on your usage.

A NAS could be worthwhile as it'll store music, movies, TV shows, and able to be accessed from any PC, tablet, or phone on your LAN. Also offer RAID options, add more storage, ie single, dual, quad bay etc.

Look at £ per TB. 4TB probably not good VFM.
 
nlel1975 said:
Cheapest option is the 4TB internal spinning drive. If you want 4TB SSD of any kind you'll have to up your budget massively.
Click to expand...
Its mainly for storing roms for my steam deck & to move some games over too
 
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hornetstinger said:
Depends on your usage.

A NAS could be worthwhile as it'll store music, movies, TV shows, and able to be accessed from any PC, tablet, or phone on your LAN. Also offer RAID options, add more storage, ie single, dual, quad bay etc.

Look at £ per TB. 4TB probably not good VFM.
Click to expand...
Ive never really understood NAS

I hardly use my pc as it is anymore just needed extra storage for roms,music etc mainly use my steam deck.
 
A USB HDD connects to one computer via USB and is fast and useful for a single PC. You can access that USB HDD from other devices, but first you need to share the HDD and that computer needs to be on.

A NAS is basically a computer with one or more hard drives where each device and computer on your LAN can access those drives. They can usually have services running ie plex or roon video/music server. They allow multiple drives, adding, removing as needed.

If you know you need a NAS, you know.

If you just need a single HD for backup then USB HDD is fine.
 
Yeah I've got two external SSDs connected to two machines. 2TB Crucial X6 capable of 800MB/s reads and 1TB Fanxiang USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 capable of 2000MB/s reads. The Crucial is permanently connected to my Mac as a Time Machine drive, which is Apples built in backup software for macOS.

The Fanxiang is permanently connected to my Win 11 PC as a backup drive and I'm running the free Veeam Agent software which is similar in operation to Time Machine.
 
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If you have a router it is very likely to have a usb port which you can plug an external drive in it and have it show up as a drive on any device on the network. Though speed would be limited to whatever your network is. This is if you want a single storage point usable by multiple devices without going for a NAS setup.
 
Varys said:
Aren't external USB external drives really slow compared to internal SATA?
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Really depends
On what external drive
If you mean mechanical drive then yeah slow
Solid state external is a different ballgame
And what ports your motherboard has
Recently bought a corsair EX400U
Up to 4,000MBs
Though Best I have managed is 3,200MBs
For read and for write 3,000MBs
Not sure what's stopping it reaching max speed
But that's still massively faster than internal sata
You would need internal or external nvme to beat it
 
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