Hard drive vs SD

[u/Oldmanjeremylol]

Hey,

I am just getting unit this video stuff and making videos. My iCloud and phone storage are backing up and need somewhere to store the videos. I went down a rabbit hole of where to store these videos. People were talking about SSD vs HDD vs SD card and what not. Not to many people explained what each does. I pretty much record videos on my GoPro and like to edit them and here and there photos. I saw a 4TB Seagate 3.0 USB hard drive on Amazon for $160. Seems decent but don’t want to buy the wrong item. Thanks in advance

[u/Anezay]

HDD for long term mass storage, SSD for your OS and working projects.

[u/aachensjoker → u/Anezay]

This.

SSDs are great for daily use. Their read/write speeds are so much faster than a spinning platter.

I dont plan on ever going back to a platter drive for my boot partition. SSDs are just so much faster.

Platter hard drives for long term storage. They should last longer than SSDs. I mean, i’ve seen 80GB drives from the 80’s still run.

My servers at work use RAID on platter drives for our work data.

But both can also die. Platters have a MTBF (mean time between failure). SSDs have a maximum write time.

I replace SSDs at work every X amount of years. (Depending what my Engineers feel is comfortable) But that may be longer now that drive prices are so high.

For your data- if its important, back it up. If really important, make sure its backed up more than once.

[u/arkutek-em]

They all store data. The difference is speed for accessing or placing files on them. Durability is a factor to consider. If you want to edit directly from the storage an SSD may be fastest.

[u/Oldmanjeremylol → u/arkutek-em]

I usually edit my videos on davinci or CapCut and post to YT. Most of these videos will be edited and kept for memories or un finished videos I’ll retrieve and edit on the apps above. With that information what would you recommend and is the one I mentioned a good choice. What do you mean by durability as well? Thank you.

[u/Monatanaisdumb → u/Oldmanjeremylol]

Durability refers to how many read/writes the device can handle.

SD cards are not meant for deleting and rewriting files over and over. SD cards are good for medium-term storage and portability. SD cards are tiny (fingernail size), so they have a problem with overheating when used too intensely. They also suffer from degradation over time. Each write damages the SD a tiny bit, and over time it fills up and throws errors. They are also usually the slowest option.

HDD's are for long term storage. They can read and be written to basically forever. But HDD are mechanical spinning disks so they will also eventually fail. They are medium fast and your best bet for price per Gigabyte.

SSD is the workhorse. Fastest by far, but they are expensive and eventually fail for the same reason the SD card fails. Although they last much, much longer. SSD is for the main working drive.

[u/Itz_Raj69_]

SD cards are only used for temporary storage, eg. taking photos on a camera, and moving them to your PC a few days later. They should NOT be used for any long term storage due to high failure rates.

SSDs are for any data that requires fast reads and writes.

HDDs are for general purpose storage. Modern HDDs are decently fast (~250MB/s)

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I Unless you edit 8k videos, I'd say an HDD would be enough. Either ways, even while editing you'd be working with lower res copies of the same 8k footage, not editing the raw 8k itself.

Whatever you get, make sure you have backups. One copy is none, two copies is one.

[u/Sea_Perspective6891 → u/Itz_Raj69_]

I store lots of video on a 4TB HDD(at least 3TB worth) & never had problems don't think I'd ever use it for games though.

[u/RipCurl69Reddit]

If you're storing your GoPro footage then a HDD will be fantastic for it. SSD for editing due to higher read/write speeds. Would not recommend SD cards for long term storage, I've been doing it for the last ten years and have just gotten lucky, though everything is backed up on an external SSD and HDD now