I own several external 2.5’’ HDDs on the 1 TB range where I save my data. Samsung has worked well for me, but now I need more space.
One option would be to buy an external SSD instead of HDD.
Another would be to get an external NVME, but so far I haven’t found cases for them.
Nowadays we even have 1 TB flash drives, should I get one of these instead?
I could also buy 2 0.5 TB micro SD cards instead.
So many options make it difficult to decide.
What brands and technologies do you recommend?
Software is going to be debian based.
WD/SanDisk have completely gone to shit. I’d go with Seagate. I have a bunch of IronWolf Pro drives that have been fast and reliable.
Entirely depends if you count HGST as Western Digital or not, because they by far dominate the back blaze reliability scoreboards. IronWolf don’t even come close and are extremely hit or miss depending on capacity.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/
HDDs last best when not moved, as they dont lose the data that much when you dont use them. But they turn around, 24/7. It is insane. They use lots of electricity, produce heat, noise, and wear out without you doing anything.
SSDs have little tear from just being connected to a machine, they just dont do much. To my knowledge they also last longer a lot of times. But they are not as good for permanent storage and should be connected to power every half year or so.
I would always go with normal SATA SSDs, cheap, cool, just work.
NVMEs are so damn hot, small, expensive, often I dont see the reason.