Hello.
Historically, I’ve had the following USB spinning hard drives (all 2.5”):
- WD My Passport: 1 TB: personal stuff and old files, as this was my first external drive; this includes photos, videos, class recordings, old images and screenshots, music, software from the 90s and early 2000… stuff that I don’t want to get rid of. It’s at 80% full.
- Toshiba Canvio Basics (1TB): Movie backups, classified by genre, and game backups. 96% capacity.
- Toshiba Canvio Basics (yes, I love how good and reliable this model is) (2TB): Series, documentaries and anime backups, as well as other content from the internet such as podcasts or video-podcasts. It’s at 60% of its capacity.
- Re-used Hitachi drive (256GB): it’s health is low, but it still works, I use it as the only ExFAT drive if I need to use it on a machine that doesn’t support my current files system (APFS). It has a lot of random stuff.
Now, those are the traditional spinning external drives I’ve always had. On the other hand, during the recent years, thanks to different sales, I’ve managed to get the following Samsung T5 and T7 SSDs.
My plan when I got this new T5 and T7 Samsung SSDs was to be able to carry with me the same information but with much less weight, and keep the older 2.5” hard drives as a long term storage/backup, without actually using them unless when I want to back up something very important.
My new portable SSDs are the following:
-T5 500GB: I intend to use it to carry it with me to the university, store class recordings (including video) that usually take 1GB each, and my device has only 128GB on board. I want to use it as a high performance pen-drive.
-T5 1TB: here, I’d thought to store the same personal data, such as photos or videos or old files that I already have on my WD My Passport (1TB)
- T7 2TB: intended to use as a media SSD, because of it’s big size. However, I’m not sure if I should use it to store my academical recordings (remember, ~1GB per file), or just put there my favorite movie and series backups. Or maybe both? But having already 1TB 2.5” HDD just for movies, and another 2TB 2.5” HDD for series+anime backups and other Internet video content such as videopodcasts, I’m not sure if putting here my favorite content (duplicate) is wasting this 2TB SSD.
-T7 Shield 4TB: And when I thought I had enough SSDs to fulfill my needs… I saw a sale on the T7 Shield 4TB SSD, at less than half the price. Obviously, I had to get it. So now I have this 4TB SSD that I can carry with me with EVERYTHING I have on the other SSDs, in just one drive.
However, when I go to the Uni, the SSD I want to carry with me is the T5 500GB. It’s the cheapest and everything on it will -hopefully- be backed up.
My main doubt is (option A) wether to use the T5 1TB SSD for personal stuff that I already have on the WD My PassPort, but that’s not data I use too much. In this case I would use the 2TB SSD for my classes (long term) AND my favorite media content such as movies and shows.
The alternative (option B) is to use the T5 1TB for storing my classes long term (short term is what the 500GB is for), and leave the 2TB SSD just for non-personal media.
In this case (option B), among the personal data from the WD drive, I could make a selection, i.e. all my personal photos and memories and PDFs and documents, and put them on the 4TB drive along with the media stuff and my uni stuff to have everything in one drive.
I could also use this 4TB SSD to sort all the duplicates I have on every hard drive, which I suspect they are a lot. I think it’s easier having all in one drive.
Don’t worry about privacy, as I’m formatting all the T5 and T7 with encryption and a 16-20 character long password, a different one for each drive.
How would you use the 4 SSDs if you were me?
You can also comment on my hardware if you want. The Toshiba Canvio Basic were cheap and extraordinarily reliable and silent hard drives that still work perfectly after more than 10 years.
