external hard-drive

[Jack Bulkley]

I use a Samsung T5 SSD. It is small and fast. I have had no problems with mine which I bought on Black Friday when they had a steep discount. Perhaps a 500GB one as a working copy and a HDD as a backup. That is essentially what I do although I have a 1TB T5, a 2TB backup plus another backup on a network attached drive.

 

[removed account4]

Get a solid state drive ( ssd ). No spinning disks no moving parts will last and be fast

 

[MattKing]

Get a solid state drive ( ssd ). No spinning disks no moving parts will last and be fast

This is true, but if they do get damaged, there can be in some cases less opportunity to recover files than with a drive with a spinning disk.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

Prices found via Google without extensive search for 'best' prices...

• 1TB external harddrive, about $45-75
• 1TB externaly SSD, about $170
• 500GB external harddrive, about $37-65
• 500GB external SSD, about $65-90

SSDs are expensive, but way faster. I use a Samsung SSD as a boot drive. One of by backup HD crashed. Luckily, I backup my backups. I replaced it with an OWC mirrored RAID. I have an old Mac tower without USB 3 so I connected my new RAID via SATA.

 

[mgb74]

First, if you're just using the drive for taking your image/video files to and from the computer lab, any drive with 128gb or more should do. Be aware that most manufacturers make different "levels" of hard drives (at least with spinning drives), that varied in price and reliability. An SSD will be less susceptible to damage when carried around. I believe, like most solid state devices, if they fail they tend to fail early in their lifespan. There is more to a hard drive than just capacity; read/write speeds will vary.

I think the teacher's recommendations were in the context of permanent storage and to make sure that students don't outgrow their purchase quickly. Also probably assumes storage of uncompressed images. Not much cost difference between 500gb and 1TB in spinning drives, but still significant cost difference (as %) in SSDs.

You can buy a bare drive (of either type) and an enclosure or you can buy one already within an enclosure. Probably best to buy one already within an enclosure. Either way, make sure it is usb 3.0 or higher (faster), not 2.0. Even if your computer is only 2.0, you'll want the faster interface for the future. Some also have a usb-c interface; might be useful in the future.

Here's one example. You can toggle between 500gb and 1TB and see if the differential makes sense for you. Here's another. Both represent what I would consider the upper end solution. You'd probably find this to be perfectly adequate for your needs.