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[Blade2.0]

Wanted to get an external HDD for my series x to out older games on it and save my SSD for only Series X games. Amazon has an external for 50 but I can get 1TB USB flash sticks for less than that.

Is there a reason to not go for the cheaper 1 TB sticks over the external HDD? And when did flash memory get cheaper than externals anyways.

 

[nush]

Is there a reason to not go for the cheaper 1 TB sticks over the external HDD? And when did flash memory get cheaper than externals anyways.

Size, components and moving parts. If you're going for a stick make sure you are 100% paying for a real one, not the cheapest one that looks real.

 

[Blade2.0]

Size, components and moving parts. If you're going for a stick make sure you are 100% paying for a real one, not the cheapest one that looks real.

Was going to go with SanDisk.

 

[TransTrender]

Most of them are incredibly slow and will be terrible compared to an external drive.

 

[PSYGN]

They are slow and not as resilient.

 

[nkarafo]

Mechanical hard drives made the last decade are faster than USB sticks.

USB sticks also tend to be unreliable. I don't trust files bigger than a couple of GBs with them. I still only use smaller, 32GBs sticks because of that.

 

[Quasicat]

A year or so back I noticed the same thing when the external hard drive on my Wii U started clicking. I found a Sandisk 128 gb USB stick for $10 and plugged it in. It runs games perfectly and I’ve had no issues.
I would imagine, as long as it is a good brand, you should be good.

 

[futurama78]

When the tech did good

 

[German Hops]

Sandisk seems to be a solid brand.

 

[EverydayBeast]

The series X comes with 1TB NVMe SSD, if the USB 1TB is cheap I would try but would focus on deleting existing content, save space.

 

[Blade2.0]

The series X comes with 1TB NVMe SSD, if the USB 1TB is cheap I would try but would focus on deleting existing content, save space.

I'm a man that likes to have every game DLed that I want to play. I mostly want the external for older games that don't run much faster on the SSD anyways or that take up too much space. Like CoD Warzone. I don't want to have to keep deleting it and reinstalling that monster of a game. But I also don't need it on the SSD because it isn't optimized for it anyways.

Edit: I bought a 4TB external when I got my PS4 pro back in the day. Like I said. I'm a man that hates deleting stuff.

 

[acm2000]

Usb sticks tend to have awful transfer speeds if you don't spend a decent amount

 

[Somebody_Important]

I wouldn't rely on a USB stick to store anything important. If it dies, good luck recovering data from it.
And hard drive is more reliable.

 

[StormCell]

Usb sticks tend to have awful transfer speeds if you don't spend a decent amount

I really don't get this, but then again I haven't browsed the web to look at read/write speeds. It used to be that as soon as flash sticks became a thing, they were several times faster than the current hard disk drives. Of course, SSD has come along and HDD's have continued to improve in transfer rates (but are still pretty damn slow), so it's hard for me to imagine a flash memory device being slower than a mechanical hard disk...

I wouldn't rely on a USB stick to store anything important. If it dies, good luck recovering data from it.
And hard drive is more reliable.

Again, I really don't see why this has become a thing. I've got thumb drives from over 15 years ago that still work. It's amazing to me I've still got files from college. On what planet is a mechanical hard disk drive more reliable than the thing with no moving parts? If you're really worried about recover-ability, you're best off using a disc. I suppose if one of these mechanical drives dies, you can turn it in to a shop to recover your data... but that's begging for any of your personal files to end up in someone else's possession.

 

[Somebody_Important]

Again, I really don't see why this has become a thing. I've got thumb drives from over 15 years ago that still work. It's amazing to me I've still got files from college. On what planet is a mechanical hard disk drive more reliable than the thing with no moving parts? If you're really worried about recover-ability, you're best off using a disc. I suppose if one of these mechanical drives dies, you can turn it in to a shop to recover your data... but that's begging for any of your personal files to end up in someone else's possession.

I'm just going of my experience. I've had several USB sticks fail over time. I've also heard of a lot of cases where people store important stuff on them and then they die. I just wouldn't recommend it.