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External Hard Drives for Plex (USB 3.0)
When it comes to external hard drives (2Tb+) are there any brands/models you can confidently recommend? Need a new one (2TB or 4) for my Plex server as my backup drive (WD Elements) died a while ago and couldn't be recovered. So atm, I'm just left with a 1TB Toshiba that has no backups, which is something, I'd like to change asap 
Comments
You coulf also buy any hard drive or ssd you view as confident + USB adapter instead of dedicated external one or use an adapter + an old hard drive.
I've been using a 4tb WD MyBook continually since 2018, works great... Now that I think about it, I should probably backup that drive to a new one lol
I had one of those elements running for about 5 years before I pulled it out, it was running fine I just upgraded it to SSD, had been using it to backup my comp and it was slowwww.
Oldest one I got is a WD 1Tb. 9 yrs and counting and still healthy.
Been using a 3.0 WD Black hard drive for quite sometime for Plex and Linux ISO torrents have had no problems, I've had good success with Western Digital black products in the past .. Amazon link below
https://a.co/d/2eUZ71t
Honestly SSDs are pretty cheap nowadays. They are more reliable and not a spinning disk.
If you want something more reliable, there are Enterprise or NAS drives that are pretty reliable.
SSD makes no sense, in my case I stream all data over WiFi (although it can do gigabit reliably), but with usenet post processing CPU is my limit since it's not that powerful.
That aside I had ordered a 6TB Seagate external drive before settling on a 8TB internal WD Purple (cheap 2nd hand, with warranty, practically new
)
Even for Seemingly same model of External drives there can be different HDDs in the case, might just be a 1 char difference in the long model number.
For WD you can get reds, blacks etc. Its best to lookup online a bit, just search for the model you're looking at and add "shucking", you'll find info on practically every external drive.
But nowadays HDDs are pretty reliable all around, backblaze is releasing their data for their trillion of HDDs each quarter https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2024/