>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>I use an external USB hard drive as a way to backup my PC (in addition to the cloud backup). Currently, I have a WD My Book external drive of about 600 GB. It still works but a little slow. Plus, I would like a newer (quality wise) and larger size. I am looking at 4 TB USB 3.0 drives (on Amazon). The choices are Toshiba, Seagate, WD. All have tons of reviews.
>>>But they all are not SSD. The only SSD I find is Samsung, twice as much in price, and half capacity (2 TB).
>>>Do you recommend to spend more money and buy a 2 TB SSD or go for a larger conventional drive?
>>>
>>>TIA
>>
>>For "mostly backup" I recommend an external HD, SSD is overkill for infrequent use. Personally I have bought several 5TB WD My Book drives lately, strongly recommended. In Norway I pay 130 USD for it.
>
>Since I posted the message, I thought about it and agree with you. SSD is an overkill for a backup. A 4 TB drive cost from $100 to $130 here. And it should server me nicely.
>Thank you for your input.

Some things to consider:

- Do you need or want backups to complete quickly? Fastest possible is PC internal SSD -> USB 3 or faster connection -> SSD backup drive. PC internal SSD -> USB 3 or faster connection -> mechanical HDD will be much slower. That may not matter if you don't need them to be fast. If you're currently backing up to an HDD, getting a new, higher-capacity one will likely be a bit faster

- These days consumer external HDD drives over 1TB capacity are likely using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording . These should be fine for conventional, sequential backups that don't individually exceed about half the drive capacity. As the drive fills, write performance can suffer similarly to what happens with unTRIMmed SSDs. If the drive doesn't fill to over half its capacity you will probably not notice any difference

- Some kinds of "continuous" backup products such as Windows File History are "chatty", with many small random reads/writes to the backup drive rather than small numbers of large, sequential writes. If these writes overwhelm the drive's internal cache, backup performance to an SMR drive may suffer a lot. Again, you may not notice this if you don't frequently modify lots of large files but if you're doing things like video editing it could be a problem. You might also give some thought to large Outlook PST or OST files (say >10GB) if they're modified frequently (new messages or other items). These could put some pressure on the backup drive if you're using File History or similar

- Pretty much all consumer external HDDs are now SMR. There's not much you can do to avoid that other than to buy your own enclosure and get an HDD which uses CMR (conventional magnetic recording) rather than SMR, and put the drive in the enclosure yourself. These CMR HDDs are usually marketed as NAS or RAID drives and are more expensive per unit of capacity than SMR drives. You then have to look at prices of these drives vs SSDs to see whether doing that makes sense

All that said, if you're just going to be making occasional conventional backups then any consumer 4TB external USB 3.x drive is probably OK.