I’m starting a personal project that involves make a vlog just talking about what my life is like and what I’m up to so I can rewatch it in a few years or show my kids what my life was like when I was younger. I would plan to do these vlogs maybe once a month or so and want to be able to copy it over to an external drive and forget about it the rest of the time. I would prefer not to use cloud storage services. Any recommendations for this use case?
Buy on price and/or warranty. With the warranty being the only guarantee of being made whole in product during that period.
For your use, an SMR drive is feasible since their original intention is exactly what you’re proposing, write few, read many. But there are actually very few consumer SMR drives on the market and they’re not necessarily cheaper than non-SMR drives.
https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY
https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/ap-en/company/news/news-topics/2020/04/storage-20200428-1.html
In addition, all 2.5" premade externals >500GB are SMR.
Mantras:
No such thing as good, better, best drives for consumer use. Too many variables.
Any hard drive/storage device can fail at any time, for any reason, at any time without notice.