External SSD Drive for Storage

This is what I could so for now, for my workstation:



These parts were available due to current shortages... And I still need to wait 14 day for it to be built.
I've never seen so much crisis in order to find PC parts due to this Bitcoin & Covid happening world wide.
2-3 years ago I could easily save at least $500-1000 on the same parts.

As long as the OP is sure that the external drive will not be dropped, perhaps an HDD will be as reliable as, if not more reliable than, an SSD.

graphomet said:

I had initially put for my PC build The crucial P1SSD 1T $125, because of its price convenience, but my work colleague kept on nagging about the speed which is at 3000, so he convinced me to get the Samsung 980 pro, like the one you mentioned, which came at $260 where I am located.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's almost impossible to tell any speed difference between these drives in the real world. On paper and benchmarks, the difference appears incredible, almost night and day. But booting windows, launching apps, taking a backup and playing a game you won't be able to really quantify the difference.


I own one of these 7000MB/s drives, the WD SN850 which is neck and neck with the 980 Pro. I've moved games on my system off the sn850 because it was starting to hit 80% capacity) over to a standard 2TB sata ssd that only clocks in around 500MB/s, so 14x slower and honestly....can barely PROVE a difference with a stopwatch.

I understand that when you build a PC you always want to try to get the best and fastest components available. That's also the same reason I paid $450 for the 2TB SN850...why get a slower drive when a faster drive is available? But when I was getting close to filling up that 2TB PCIe Gen 4 drive, I could not justify paying close to $350 for another 2TB SN850 for my second M.2 slot, when I could get a 2TB sata SSD for about $160 that would appear just as fast for my games and other files. I try to save that fastest space for VMs where I hope I can actually gain some type of advantage by the faster transfer rates.

Why a external drive for data on a Desktop?
I have a small SSD (128G) for windows and programs + Lubuntu and a 1T internal HDD for data.
I also have another 1T internal HDD for backup (power cable is connected only for backup).

If the data drive you´re intent to buy is 1T or less, go with a SSD. If bigger go with a professional first grade HDD.