Are USB flash drives inferior to external hard drives for data backup?

[SW3029]

Most of my files are backed up to the cloud, but I also like having a physical backup of my files too, so I have a 1TB external hard drive for that.

Recently I've noticed that 1TB USB flash drives could be bought for not that much money. From a stability/reliability perspective, are flash drives inferior to external hard drives when data backup is concerned?

 

[rm5]

In short, yes. I've found that thumb drives (flash drives) fail WAY sooner than an external hard drive or SSD. So, for the most reliability, I'd go for an external SSD, but if you're good with the 1 TB hard drive, that's fine, too.

 

[retta283]

Given that mechanical disks are more reliable cold storage, I always err in favor of an external hard drive. Myself, I have had very good luck with reliability of flash drives, but I've only gone as large as 256GB. I've heard that there's something different about larger flash drives (controllers?) which make them less reliable, but perhaps that's a limitation of the past.

With flash drives, the rated read/write lifetime is more of a hard-and-fast rule, whereas with mechanical drives it's more of a rating. You'll see degradation of read/write speeds on flash memory as you approach failure, and eventually things will start to corrupt until it one day just dies completely. With a real hard drive, they can go for thousands more cycles or power-on hours than they're rated for, it's all chance, and even once they fail there is still the possibility for recovery. Not something to be relied on, but with flash, once it's gone, it's gone.

 

[MacCheetah3]

From a stability/reliability perspective, are flash drives inferior to external hard drives when data backup is concerned?

As disclaimed:

[...] perhaps that's a limitation of the past.

In my experience, “flash”/“thumb”/“pen”/“stick" drive endurance is generally far less than SSD/HDD. I’ve used up to 256GB capacity thumb drives for various tasks, anything from occasional file transfers between devices to additional (external) Xbox storage. Probably, about half of them (after several years) reached their wear limit, when the drive goes into lockdown state with read-only access. The HDD failures I have dealt with seemed more like defective drives than expectable degradation.

 

[Fishrrman]

You don't want to keep valued data long-term on a flash drive. They aren't "robust" enough.
Instead, use either an SSD or a platter-based HDD.

How much data (size) do you need to back up/store...?

 

[Ruggy]

I've never found USB flash drives to be particularly robust however a good SD card is pretty much indestructible.
It's usually the controller part that goes wrong with external drives and a really good card reader can be had for under $10.
You can buy really fast SD cards for very very little.
The only real problem with them is they are incredibly easy to lose.

 

[unrigestered]

yes, they are inferior. then again i've been using a USB stick for my backups for more than 12 years without any issues at all.

i won't claim that it's the safe(st) solution, but it can work.

if it's about really important stuff though, HDD or SSD are the far more robust solutions (best would probably a dual redundant solution, one being on SSD, while another copy goes on the HDD)

some also seem to swear by DVD or Blu-Ray, but their storage is comparatively small and depending on your space requirements, you'd soon end up with a box full of disks like it's still 1984 on your Commodore 64.
and they are slow of course