Photo Storage: Flashdrive vs. External Hard Drive

[hvulpus]

I am trying to travel as lightly as possible and, seeking to store at the end of the day the photos taken on my travels, is there any reason not to take a lighter flashdrive as opposed to the more cumbersome external hard drive? I will also be backing up to a cloud box, though the transfer via wifi in some places may be slow or non-existent.

Thanks for any wisdom here.

Howard

[wq9nsc]

I have used flash drives a lot and never had one fail but given their small size and low cost, I would back up each file to two drives to be safe if the images are of high value to you.

Check write speed when buying a flash drive, some of them have very slow write speed relative to their read speed.

I use big external hard drives (traditional platter type, not SSD) ONLY for long term archival of original RAW files.

An "in-between" solution is one of the smaller external SSD drives which is a little larger than a typical USB flash drive but generally offers significantly faster transfer speed.  They are light weight and I sometimes use one when bringing large files between my home and office rather than transferring them via network.

Rodger

[zakslm · Accepted solution]

Rodger,

I agree.  About 6 month ago, I switched from using a USB External Hard Drive and flash drives to a Cruicial 1Tb SSD USB-C drive that is about the size of the plastic case for a 49mm filter, but thinner.  I've traveled with it and use it for storage and use cloud storage for redundancy as well. 

When I transfer images from an SD Card, I store, edit and save those images as JPG's on the SSD drive.  I don't think my USB-C is the fastest way to transfer files from SD Cards and save edited images etc., but it works for me.  As you said, it's significantly faster than a USB flash drive or an external USB hard drive.

Cruicial SSD USB-C drives like mine come in storage capacities up to 4Tb and I'll bet other manufacturers sell similar products.

Good luck!

LZ

[hvulpus]

Thank you guys very much!