Most reliable portable external drives?

[GanChan]

I always get initially excited about the portable external drives I see on Amazon, only to read on about failure-related nightmares from angry users. Of course this is going to happen to some degree in any make/model. But which of these products have served you particularly well or have a particularly good reputation for reliability?

I would actually prefer a HDD to an SSD, even though they're more mechanically fragile than SSDs, because they seem more cost-effective and they can be totally wiped/erased when I'm finally ready to get rid of them. My old 500G Western Digital is still chugging away after 10+ years.....but it just sits on my desktop, so it doesn't see much rough-and-tumble action, temperature change etc.

 

[Fishrrman]

It's a crapshoot. A guessing game.
That's about it.

 

[LizKat]

For about the last ten years I've used mostly LaCie Rugged drives and have experienced no failures. I have about 8 or 9 of them. As they age, I swap them out from daily or weekly use to being redundant archives of purchased video or music. I have a couple now that I'm about ready to wipe and take to the next annual e-waste festival in my county.

I have a couple WD drives that are clones I don't update any more, they represent 'frozen' older MacOS setups in case I need them sometime to run older software on data I might need to export or convert.

Caveats: I use laptops, not desktops. My backup strategy is clones with periodic updates, plus a usually once-daily backup that is run at my option via Time Machine... plus some redundancies in terms of special archives of purchased video, purchased audio etc. and 'frozen' clones at point before a major OS upgrade. So bottom line these drives don't get a lot of use. Nonetheless I'm pleased at never having had problems with any of them.

 

[GanChan]

Is ADATA an OK brand? They seem to have some ruggedized SSD options....