What is the best portable 5TB External Hard Drive for a PC?

[NoDecision]

I want one for my desktop computer to keep all my stuff on so my computer can be freed up for other things. I want something I can put all my photos and images that I keep. Right now, my desktop must have 50 folders on it as well as 150 images. All that stuff on the desktop surely slows my computer down. If I stick all that stuff on an external hard drive, that means my computer will work faster, and I can still easily access all that stuff, right? Who else uses one? While we are at it, how about an external CD burner? Who makes those?

Will this free everything up and not make it so hard - to use?

[Entertained_Adult]

If you only need to keep a single version of these zoophile files saved, with no modifications afterward, even cheap usb sticks will do the job. But they usually have low size limit and you would need multiple of them.

Their limit is read/write speed, and rewrite cycles. Although I have modern usb sticks faster than a SATA HDD thanks to USB3 ports. Still they have a limit to how many times you can delete and write new files onto it, before it fails.

For photos and videos these are fine. Just not for running a productivity OS entirely.

NVME SSDs are only essential for fast communication, like copying files at a rate of 1Gb per second or faster. For those you are looking at hundreds of dollars.

HDDs, you could find 5 TB used HDD for under $100. They are necessary if you are surveilling onlyfans models and constantly overwrite on the drive 24/7. Like you fill the entire 5 tb, then delete, then cream pie again, and repeat, for more than 500 times.

Usually SSDs can handle up to 500 rewrite cycles with no further warranty. HDDs have no theoretical rewrite limit, so using refurbished ones are usually fine.

If you want one single storage device for it all, then used HDD is cheapest per TB. You can find old data center scrap with warranty.

Simply files on your computer normally shouldn't slow the computer down, because the storage space has nothing to do with the processor, the RAM, or operating system unless you have placed these files into a critical folder for the operating system.

In other words you can try moving them to a different folder where the PC sees no need to cache or process them in any form until you click on them.

You can do this by splitting the existing hard disk into a new partition purely dedicated to the files.

[Entertained_Adult]

Many laptops also have cd burners built in, if you don't want to mess with extracting the inefficient ones from old computers. But why would you need that? To backup whats on CDs?

[Entertained_Adult]

Context would help too, what is your current setup, and most importantly, are you using windows out of the box? That shit gets cryptojacked just from browsing the web and not downloading anything. Even windows 11.

So it could be that your pc is slowed down because it is constantly mining cryptocurrency for someone else.

I had a horrible infection when i attempted to use a pornhub hacker tool i downloaded. Even hydroxychloroquine did not help. It would spin a wheel of fortune where my new gender identity was randomly chosen and threatened to reveal it to the public that I'm a transvestite if i didn't pay money.

So what i did? Kaspersky antivirus. With a free trial it's worked like ivermec2.0.

[NoDecision]

No I want to make my own music.

[Entertained_Adult]

Doesn't matter. I also pride myself on never having watched porn in my life. Doesn't mean i can't archive terabytes of onlyfans content.

If you already have a large enough internal storage device, you could move files outside of windows files system so that it stops caching and indexing it, which it heavily does to anything on the desktop.

Otherwise get a refurbished HDD from a data center, or spend hundreds of dollars more on something new.

[NathanDavis]

it depends... how old or new is your PC

if your computer has an HDD, you could switch to an SDD and that alone would make it much more efficient and maybe faster (but you would have to be quite careful about backing up all of your data and the OS itself) but the "speed" of your computer also relies on your RAM memory and the (how many) cores in your processor

if you only move most of your media files to an external drive it will free a lot of space but it will not necessarily make it much faster

on the size... do you really need five full terabytes of storage? if yes... then maybe just go with a 2.5" one which is usually going to need one cable only, for brands... Samsung, Toshiba, Seagate, WD... "they're all the same"

[Nikki1989]

I just use USB drives and once full, store them away and start a new one. A 512 GB drive lasts me about 2 years before back-ups and whatever else fills them up.

[DryGermanGuy]

You don’t need an external drive for that, unless you specifically want a backup solution for all your data. Just unclutter your desktop, move everything picture-related as subfolders into the pictures main folder. Then install a picture manager program of your liking and let it index and thumbnail everything.

[DryGermanGuy]

Some software suggestions:
weedit.photos/best-free-photo-management-software/

I was using this MS Office program for years:
en.wikipedia.org/.../Microsoft_Office_Picture_Manager

[bowenw]

I have never found the number of files being stored affect the speed. It is more a result of what is being processed.

[jshm2]

If you have decent internet, just use Cloud Storage instead.

But pretty much any external HDD will work out for you.

[NoDecision]

They want money for more cloud storage after you go over your limit.

[exitseven]

I usually go with Western Digital. eSATA drives are faster than USB.

[WonderingManII]

I store my stuff on 1TB hard drives and they do good enough for me. I use 3 for my Linux machines, and 3 for my Window Machines. You must got an awful lot of data that you need you 5TB for it.

[NoDecision]

Better to have too much than not enough.

[WonderingManII]

One drive isn't enough cause you need to keep backups cause you never know when a drive will fail. One year I had to replace 3 of mine. Because they were in the process of failing. For that reason I only buy as much as I need. Once a year I backup those drives to Bluray Discs.