External Drives: HDD or SSD, How to Choose, Why They Fail and How Not to Lose Your Data

An external drive is the simplest solution when your computer runs out of space or you need to keep a photo archive, documents and backups. Just plug it into USB and start copying. But external drives are what people most often bring us with the words "it has all ten years of family photos on it". They get dropped, unplugged mid-transfer and kept as the only copy. Let's look at which external drive to choose, why they fail and how not to lose your data.

External HDD: lots of space for little money

Inside an external hard drive is an ordinary mechanical drive with spinning platters and heads. Its main advantages are large capacity and a low price per gigabyte: 2–5 TB is inexpensive. The downsides are relatively low speed and sensitivity to knocks. Dropping or shaking the drive while it's running is especially dangerous: the heads float nanometres above the platters, and a knock can damage them. Portable 2.5-inch drives are powered over USB; desktop 3.5-inch drives use a separate power adapter.

External SSD: fast and shock-resistant

An external SSD has no moving parts. It's several times faster than an HDD, smaller and quieter, and copes far better with drops and shaking. It suits working on video and photos straight from the drive, moving large projects between computers, and travel. The downsides are a higher price per gigabyte, and when stored unpowered for a long time (years in a drawer) an SSD can theoretically lose data, so for a long-term archive an HDD remains a perfectly sensible choice.

How to choose

• A photo and video archive, backups — a large-capacity external HDD.
• Working on files straight from the drive, editing, frequent travel — an external SSD.
• Interface — at least USB 3.0; for fast SSDs, USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbit/s) or USB4/Thunderbolt, or the speed will be capped.
• Manufacturer — well-known brands; cheap no-name "2 TB SSDs" at bargain prices often turn out to be fakes with a fraction of the stated capacity.

File system and compatibility

Drives come formatted in different ways out of the box. NTFS is native to Windows, but a Mac can't write to it without extra software. exFAT can be read and written by Windows, Macs and many TVs — handy for sharing. FAT32 doesn't support files larger than 4 GB. Reformatting erases all data, so it's best to choose the format straight away while the drive is empty.

Why external drives fail

• Drops and knocks — the most common cause of HDD failure, especially while running.
• Unplugging without safe removal — can damage the file system: the drive asks to be formatted or shows up as RAW.
• Connector damage — micro-USB connectors on older drives work loose and break off.
• Insufficient power — through a passive hub or long cable a drive can disconnect and corrupt data.
• Overheating and wear — drives running round the clock in closed cabinets.
• Power surges — especially for desktop drives with a power adapter.

Signs of a fault

• The drive clicks, knocks, beeps, or spins up and stops.
• The computer "thinks" for a long time when it's connected, and File Explorer freezes.
• Windows offers to format the drive or shows it as RAW.
• Files copy very slowly or with errors.
• The drive isn't detected at all.

With any of these signs, don't keep reconnecting the drive or run error checking and repair or recovery programs "just in case" — especially if the drive clicks. Every attempt can worsen physical damage and reduce the chances of recovery. The right course is to go straight to a specialist.

An external drive is not a backup

If important files are kept only on an external drive, that's not a backup but the only copy. The "3-2-1" backup rule says: three copies of your data, on two different types of media, one of them away from home or in the cloud. For a home archive it makes sense to keep two external drives with the same contents, or combine an external drive with cloud storage.

What our technician does

1. Helps you choose an external drive for your needs and checks that it's genuine and its real capacity.
2. Formats the drive with the right file system for Windows, Mac or a TV.
3. Sets up automatic backups to an external drive and the cloud.
4. Diagnoses a faulty external drive without making the damage worse.
5. Recovers data from damaged and unreadable external drives.

A real example

A family in Gldani kept all their children's photos and videos on a single external hard drive. The drive fell off the table while they were viewing photos on the TV, after which it started clicking and stopped being detected. The owner tried connecting it to different computers several times. Our technician immediately stopped the connection attempts and diagnosed damaged heads. The data was recovered almost completely under special conditions. Afterwards we set up automatic backups for the family: a copy on a new external drive and in cloud storage.

Call a technician

If an external drive is no longer detected, clicks or asks to be formatted, don't experiment — we'll come to any district of Tbilisi around the clock. Learn more on our hard drive data recovery, SSD data recovery and data recovery pages.