What is the best external hard drive in terms of privacy, security and storage capacity? Should I wait for a better one coming soon?
I’m looking for minimum 2tb of space (the more the merrier), don’t mind the cost
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Best buy sells these enterprise-grade WD easystore 14TB for $190 every black friday if you can wait a few months.
I usually buy whatever is cheapest. I have a mixture of Toshiba, WD, Seagate, and Orica enclosures plus misc NVMe SSDs.
Most of them get formatted and encrypted with LUKS. The Mac ones get formatted and encrypted via APFS.
https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/external-drives/wd-elements-desktop-usb-3-0-hdd#WDBWLG0040HBK-NESN
Choose the size you want.
It can be found in physical stores too like Media Markt.
Ignore its OS compatibility, it is just a hard drive in a case.
You often can’t shuck the Element drives and they have proprietary controllers.
I’d go for a proper enclosure.
I don’t think that brand matters much from a security standpoint, although I’d avoid any external drive with built-in wi-fi.
If you want a blend of privacy and convenience, one option may be to have more than one partition on your drive. On my portable SSD, I have one convenience/media partition that can be read by all of my devices: computers, tablets, windows computers. My financial/medical/business records are on a luks-encrypted second partition. I could probably have done something similar with bitlocker, but I’m much more likely to pull up my encrypted stuff on a linux machine.
Don’t make yourself dependent on the hardware of data storage in the first place. Backup and if you intend to store anything sensible on it, just encrypt it from the beginning so you don’t have to worry about drive failures or erasing data. The drive itself does not matter much then.
2.5" drive enclosure with any ssd or hd. Unless you need more durable or slightly smaller non swappable drive… Samsung probably makes the best
What do you mean by privacy/security? Unless you’re going bonkers, that’s down to the software you use with it
Maybe “privacy” doesn’t fit the question, yeah I agree. Regarding security then, I see that almost any device comes with encryption by default, so I shouldn’t worry too much.
There are some with hardware-level encryption, they might be licensed as military ones though. All others are somewhat bust. How about ZFS or LUKS for filesystem encryption and not worry about the specs too much?
Very interesting, thanks for the suggestion! I hope it isn’t too hard to setup, I’m not tech savvy
I do it by following online guides, but not sure if there is an easier way. LUKS is like any filesystem you like on top of a logical volume on top of a volume group on top of cryptsetup container on top of a partition. ZFS is any filesystem you like inside a pool, and can support error correction and encryption. Someone else may know better about ZFS. For LUKS I found this except it doesn’t cover crypttab (automatic decryption when disk is inserted), and for zfs this is probably the standard point of reference. There’s also stuff like veracrypt but I don’t know how it works. LUKS is only for Linux I think, zfs might work for windows also - not sure.
Ok nice research, although it seems to be as complicated as I thought… I’ll still follow the guide, thanks!