Which Is More Reliable Flash Drive or External Hard Drive?
Flash Drive
- Long lifespan when not being used.
- More durability.
- Degrades faster.
External Hard Drive
- Degrades slower.
- Less physically durable.
- Designed for frequent read/write cycles.
A flash drive is more reliable for carrying files from one place to another. That’s because flash drives don’t depend on any moving hardware. So, they are very stable. Even the inexpensive flash drives can survive a fall or rumble around in a box for a year. They are not very reliable for long-term storage, though.
External hard drives are typically designed to store files and applications for longer than flash drives. Because of the underlying technology in a flash drive, they quickly degrade when you use them repeatedly—external hard drives, whether Hard Disk Drives or Solid State Drives, can stand up to more use. Even SSD external hard drives will degrade faster than HDD ones.
Which Lasts Longer Flash Drive or External Hard Drive?
There are two external hard drive types,Solid state drive(SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD). While not all HDDs are external hard drives, both flash drives and external hard drives can incorporate SSD technology. HDDs tend to last longer than SSD external drives because the physical storage method is more reliable. The magnetic disks don’t degrade the same way solid-state drives do. They do, however, have moving parts that can fail.
Price
In general, the price of external hard drives is higher than flash drives due to its larger capacity, better performance, etc. However, there are some high-quality flash drives whose capacity and performance are comparable to external SSDs. Such flash drives are more expensive than external hard drives, including external SSDs.
Conclusion:
- Due to the above characteristics of external hard drive vs. flash drive and the fact that external drives can be managed more flexibly in Disk Management than flash drives, they have different purposes.
- If you want a storage device to back up your important data, you should choose external HDDs. Finally, if you want a portable storage device to storage games or want to create a portable operating system like Windows to go, I will recommend external SSDs to you.
- If you want a portable storage medium to transfer small files like documents, photos, etc., or you want to make a bootable disk, the USB flash drive will be a good choice.
- Some people may like to use a USB flash drive to create a portable operating system, but they may finally find that the portable operating system can’t run or perform very bad. The reason is that the USB speed is very slow. Of course, if you have a high-quality USB flash drive, you can do that.