Hi,
Looking for external hard drives for fast transfer of large files (photography). My laptop has Thunderbolt 4.
I'm after a 2TB hard drive with a budget of $200, haven't found any sales worth going for so far, any assistance appreciated!
Worthwhile making my own with an enclosure?
SSD*** What were they called? was looking at the Crucial X8
Considering getting an NVME and enclosure: https://www.umart.com.au/product/pny-cs1031-2tb-m-2-nvme-gen…
https://www.amazon.com.au/ORICO-NVMe-Enclosure-Gbps-Support/…
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/738199 which has expired
You can certainly DIY but won't necessarily be much cheaper, but would work fine
Considering getting an NVME and enclosure
I second this, strongly. From experience.
Get a dual protocol m.2 enclosure, like this at $27:
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/234690529642?hash=item36a4a5496a…
And get a cheap slow 2TB NVMe drive. Like Umart's $169 drive. Even the slowest M.2 NVMe drive is faster than 10Gb/s USB.
Its a low cost highly flexible arrangement that lets you mix and match the external enclosure and drive later if you want to.
@GordonD: My concern is on the durability and the inconvenience of failure of these enclosures. Any issues from your experiences?
@Bearlion: All mine still work. But they are occasional use external drives. They don't get used a lot, so they don't have to be durable.
In terms of in convenience of failure, any failure in any part of an external SSD loses you the data. Whereas if you are using an M.2 SSD in an enclosure the failure of the enclosure only requires you to move the drive to another enclosure, or move it into the PC to get back access to the data. So its six of one and half a dozen of the other. Something that's probably more reliable, versus something that's less reliable, but a failure may be less catastrophic.
Diskprices.com reveals one 2Tb external SSD for under $200.
https://diskprices.com/?locale=au&condition=new,used&disk_ty…
HDD or SSD?
There were a couple of external SSDs for about $220ish recently, but if you don't need the speed then $200 would get you an 8Tb HDD for the extra space