NateNate60, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

100 GB is a pretty small amount of data.

Want to minimise cost? 128 GB USB drives can be had for around ten dollars. Fifteen dollars will get you 256 GB. Stick with a cheap but reliable brand like SanDisk or PNY. It will last you years with proper care, even with regular use.

I do not really see a reason to invest in a “real” hard drive or external SSD for your use case. There isn’t enough data to justify it and USB drives can take a lot of abuse and still work.

Edit: There are a lot of fake USB drives sold online where the controller has been hacked to report a higher capacity to your operating system than actually exists, for example, reporting 512 GB when there’s actually only 64 GB of storage. If you try to store more than the actual capacity, your old files will be overwritten with the new ones. That’s why you should be suspicious of very high capacity drives (1 TB+) sold online for low prices. I would not buy any USB drive online that claims to have a capacity greater than 512 GB.