External USB storage experience

[tangor]

Over the years I have embraced USB external for a number of things ... one being building a website for clients, discrete, viewable in web environment, etc.

Some have been on flash, some with the 2.5" factor, some 3.5" factor. A mix of brands has been used ... but I am wondering what kind of endurance/use others have experienced? Still working? No worries? Spinning rust writes/reads reliably. Flash does, too ... to a point.

Thoughts?

BTW, I make bootable external drives with os installed and apache which saves office visits for more hand-holding than I can bill without ticking off the client. :)

When job goes live I get the drive back (not part of the deal) and re-use. So far so good ... but there are all those "horror stories" which are probably hype bs regarding multiple reformats...

What are your experiences?

[keyplyr]

Cloud storage is so cheap and readily available from every device, it's the obvious choice for most everything.

That said, I do have an external 1TB SSD I use for nightly back-ups on my work machine. All else copies to several cloud accounts.

I haven't used any type of disk in a couple years.

Don't know if that's what you were asking, but that's what I do.

[IanCP]

The same experience as your own has been tangor with the sole recent exception with a Windows 10 update all of the USB connections stop and start which is a pain when copying. Even backing up the Samsung Galaxy phone hiccups now.

The problem is not in the drives themselves, some of which are HDD in powered USB adaptor cases, but in the Op system itself.

File explorer is always opening up with contents of drive H, drive L, or drive M all at random then disappear.

Cloud cheap? Not that I heard, especially 25+ Tb

[tangor]

Thanks, kiddies! So far I have been fairly satisfied. Even have a USB hot doc "duplicator" as well which takes 2.5" and 3.5" drives which secondarily functions as "more storage". With 4tb drives in the $45 range this makes sense for swapping in and out client projects, etc (not that 4tb is necessary, merely among the more "inexpensive" out there these days!)