This has likely been discussed in limited detail at some point in time, but I would like a current perspective on the situation. I am looking to get a new external drive to store incremental disk images on and as the laptop has an SSD I was wondering if it would be practical to also get an external SSD for saving the images. Would it be able to take the daily wear and tear of something like using Macrium's incrementals forever backups or am I safer staying with a traditional external drive with disks in it?
for my money, you should go with a hdd since you're gonna be using it as an external backup drive. you won't need the performance advantage of an ssd for an external backup drive. and hdd's are cheaper than ssd's, so you can get more storage space for the same price. but, and that's a huge but, hdd's are more prone to (mechanical) failure. i mean, yes, ssd's are more prone to wear and tear but their lifespan is now much longer than what it was in their early days.
xxJackxx, I use an internal M.2 NVMe SSD for backups. I like the restore speed of M.2 to M.2. Two seconds for a fresh Win10 restore. My SSD is rated at 660 GB of writes daily for 5 years. As I write 30 GB daily I'm not concerned about wearing the SSD out.
Last first - wear and tear on today's SSDs is not a problem. Remember, SSDs essentially support an infinite number of "Reads". It is "Writes" that is limited but with today's SSDs, that number is astronomically high. And since backups, even incrementals amount to 1 write per day - your grandkids will be long dead from old age before that limit is reached. Now for the first question, is it practical? That's pretty subjective. Hard drives still cost less per GB. But as Brian notes, SSDs are much faster. Only you can decide how those factors play into what is the most practical solution for you.
I'd like to thank everyone for their input. I went with a hdd for price reasons. It is certainly getting harder to find one with good overall reviews.
I went with this in 2TB based on reviews. https://shop.westerndigital.com/pro...p10-game-drive-usb-3-2-hdd#WDBA2W0020BBK-WESN It also works on game consoles. I may use it for that at some point.
I'm planning to completely switch to SSD, both for internal and external drives. I've read that prices will soon drop, can't wait. I hate those slow and old HDD's, if you transfer data from an external HDD to SSD, it's still slow, know what I mean.
I tell you what, I don't regret buying the external drive referenced above. I created a full Marcrium image from a partition containing 125 GB of data and it was done in 13 minutes. My previous laptop with the outdated external drive I had for that would have taken an hour and a half. It's much cheaper than 2 TB worth of SSD and fast enough for me.
I would like to comment on speed operations. I have an internal 500 GB Samsung SSD in my laptop. I create daily incremental backups using an external 500 GB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD and an external 1 TB Toshiba hard drive. Both incremental and restore times are virtually the same, variations are about 10 seconds within an overall time of about 2 minutes. Sometimes the Toshiba hard drive is faster than the SanDisk SSD, and vice versa.
Yes, for you it's probably the better choice at the moment, SSD's are still too expensive. Luckily I don't need that much space for back ups, a 1TB SSD or perhaps even 512GB is good enough for me.
