Choosing Between Flash Media and Hard Drives for Data Backup

Data backup is a necessary part of modern computer care, but there are numerous ways to properly back up important files.

External drives are a great way to do this, but even within that narrowed range there are many products to choose from. The majority of external drives on the market are divided into two categories, flash media and hard drive based media. Here are the benefits and drawbacks of each technology.

Size

Hard drives offer much more storage space per dollar than flash drives, and are capable of holding over 500 gigabytes of data while flash drives rarely hold more than 10 gigabytes or so. Because of this, computer users who are looking to back up their entire desktop computer rather than a specific folder or files will probably need an external hard drive. This also applies to anyone who's looking to store a large quantity of videos or music, as those file types tend to be fairly large (and therefore less suitable for storage on flash media).

Flash media is generally designed to back up only select portions of an overall data set, but the sizes of external flash drives should be more than sufficient for backing up most computer users' photo and documents.

Portability

Both external hard drives and flash drives are extremely portable, though hard drives may require an external power source. This can be burdensome and makes using a single external hard drive with a power source inefficient for use with multiple computers; and while portable external hard drives such as the Western Digital Passport are designed to only need a single USB port to operate, they still tend to be quite a bit larger than the miniscule flash drives on the market. If you intend to use an external to backup multiple computers or move files between several computers, a flash drive is probably your best bet.

Durability