On topic for World Backup Day, Amazon's "Deal of the Day" today is Samsung SSD portable solid-state hard drives for anywhere from 25 to 31% off list.
The larger sizes are still pretty expensive, but they're more reliable than spinning portable drives and great as scratch disks among other things. The 1-terabyte size is only $178, marked down from $250 (Newegg's best price is $218). The 500GB size is only $98. The ones on sale are USB 3.1. By the way, this is a top recommended brand of external SSDs according to several review websites.
Deal ends in 15 hours as I post this, but these deals often end early because Amazon runs through the sale stock. Get 'em while they last.
Mike
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Geoff Wittig (partial comment): "I love this drive, and just bought my third 2TB unit. They're tiny, they're much, much faster than traditional hard drives, and in principle they're much more reliable because they have no moving parts. Every photograph I've taken and saved for more than 25 years fits on one of these units with room to spare. My circa 1.3TB archive can be transferred from one of these drives to another in less than two hours. So it's easy for me to have a complete copy of all my photos off-site at my office, another copy in reserve at home, and a third I use as my working drive with Photoshop."
I recently upgraded my aging HP laptop with an internal 1TB Samsung SSD. My RAM is limited to 8GB which was making it run very slowly with Lightroom and Photoshop, especially when both were running simultaneously. The SSD now allows me to increase the size of virtual memory and since it is solid state it is very fast, almost like having more RAM. Performance with LR and PS is noticeably better. Upgrading to an SSD is a great way to extend the life of older computers. Also, no defragging necessary with an SSD.
Posted by: James Hildreth | Sunday, 31 March 2019 at 01:15 PM
I love this drive, and just bought my third 2TB unit. They're tiny, they're much, *much* faster than traditional hard drives, and in principle they're much more reliable because they have no moving parts. Every photograph I've taken and saved for more than 25 years fits on one of these units with room to spare. My circa 1.3 TB archive can be transferred from one of these drives to another in less than 2 hours. So it's easy for me to have a complete copy of all my photos off-site at my office, another copy in reserve at home, and a third I use as my working drive with Photoshop.
Because I'm paranoid I also back up a full copy to a pair of separate traditional hard drives, because they're cheap now. But this takes up to 12 hours or more, so it's harder to do casually.
I'm not tech savvy enough to set up my own RAID or automated back up. But the little T5 drives make my low-tech manual method very easy.
Posted by: Geoff Wittig | Sunday, 31 March 2019 at 05:36 PM
Terrabyte (sic)? Worrying perhaps?
Posted by: Michael Martin Morgan | Sunday, 31 March 2019 at 05:56 PM
I have the 512GB version on a USB-C to USB-C connection to my Mac Mini (2018). I can't tell the difference in speed between the external SSD and the Mac's internal SSD. Blazing fast.
Posted by: SteveW | Sunday, 31 March 2019 at 06:24 PM
Something you might want to research is the write-limit on SSD drives. I was surprised to discover that SSD drives have a limit to the number of times that data can be written to them. It is admittedly a LOT of times but if you're moving a lot of data often, you could bump up against the limit. I found a little utility that will tell you the health of your drive call CrystalDiskInfo
Posted by: Dennis | Sunday, 31 March 2019 at 09:07 PM