tgreenhaw

8TB for under 50 bucks sounds way too good to be true.

delder Loc: Maryland

Name Brand ONLY for this!
Your "Too good to be true " 8 tb probably made like my $40 4tb!

They crib the chips to APPEAR as [any size you want] BUT they start overwriting files once their actual [pitiful small] capacity is reached.
You can use the Internal SSD for workspace as it will have faster access.

You may consider a PAIR of external drives for redundancy.

Suggest portable drives if you plan on moving them!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

When I was in the data storage business, we used IBM (and Seagate Barracuda and Cheetah) drives in our arrays, and of the many tens of thousands of drives we shipped, we never had a single IBM drive fail in my experience (can’t say the same for Seagate).

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Yes, a lot of people have a high regard for HGST.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Yes, my first choice now is WD (Gold) but most of my, and a couple of friends computers came with Seagate Barracuda drives. Barracudas have been historically good. In the olden days we used to get Barracudas first.

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

You do not need to needily spend extra money for SSD drives for storage.
Multiple drives are what is important.
Two drives safer than one. Three even better. I have five of the following drives.
https://www.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/wd-black-p10-game-drive-usb-3-2-hdd#WDBA3A0050BBK-WESN

Right now, they're $120.00.
A 4tb SSD will cost you $400.00.
https://www.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/sandisk-extreme-pro-usb-3-2-ssd#SDSSDE81-4T00-G25

For the price of one SSD you could have three spinners.
Remember safety in numbers. Not speed.
I have never had a small spinner go bad.
I have though given away all my smaller sized drives because I needed more space.
And nobody has said that any of them went bad on them.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

SCSI and FibreChannel Seagate Barracudas and 15K RPM Cheetahs used to be THE high performance drives. Then there was the Cheetah 7 FC drive debacle when Seagate took back reportedly >100,000 drives under warranty after failures. I actually have an old 4GB (yes, GB) SCSI Barracuda in my desk drawer that must be close to 30 years old, and last I checked, it still worked.

MJPerini

I would be wary of no name 8TB for $50 bucks
Generally speaking your strategy to keep the Boot Drive separate from the Data drive is a good one, especially considering the Boot drive is relatively small, and Photo storage can be large.
Your Data drive does not have to be an SSD, but that also depends on how you are using it. Regular HDD's are usually fine for general data storage. For Photos, it depends on how you work and how large your files are in number and size. Depending on your editing application you may need more speed. If you store your photos and say a lightroom catalog on the external the drive access time will affect the speed of your work . Drive access time must include the real world speed of access to files on the drive AND the thru-put of the connection type.
Both Thunderbolt and USB 4 or C are both faster than almost any single drive speed SSD , M2 Flash or 7200 rpm HDD. If your files are not large and your library is small, any modern drive will work. The larger the files and library and volume of work the latest M2 drives will show an advantage. In any case, stick with name brand drives, if cost is an issue buy a smaller good drive. And don't forget to backup whatever you buy.

kenregen

If it were me I would go with a SSD drive any day of the week. Yu may not need the speed but SSD's are much more reliable than any hard drive out there. No moving parts, no heat worries, and yes speed is not a problem for storage, but try and back up 500 photos at a time and see who waits the longest...If, in fact you can get the SSD drive or any other SSD drive...Go for it....Just my two cents from someone that's been building PC's for the last 20 plus years...

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

I have a couple of 80mb Seagate drives I take out every so often for a spin.
They both work just fine.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

What’s really important is to have a local backup and off-site DR copy of your data. ALL drives eventually fail, spinning drives just fail more often. The only reason left to employ spinning disk is cost/TB, and that is changing every year. Spinning disks have had a great run, but the end is in sight.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I think in the early days of IDE we were still using Barracudas.
But that was eons ago, technology wise......

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

An 8TB SSD portable drive is a scam. I have here, in my hand, a 20TB portable SSD (USB-C connection) that is partitioned as 2 x 10TB drives. It cost $50. It took 3 days to copy 2TB to it. The files show up in the directory of it. Around about here because of its speed I decided to flag using it for anything. Also around about here I received some documentation that indicated a scam and that the data almost certainly could not be copied off again. I knew when I purchased it that it most likely was a scam but I was curious. It came from Aliexpress. Aliexpress and ebay still let these obvious scams sell on their platforms possibly because it is too hard for them to examine every product they sell. This was about 3 weeks ago it turned up. The maximum size drive I could have bought was a 60TB monster. An example of very skilfull marketing and misplaced Chinese ingenuity, totally dishonest and fraudulent and it is amongst us. The drive itself is about the size of a credit card but a bit fatter (1cm or to you last bastions of imperial about 3/8") with the USB-C connection in the end. It came with a cable. Also available in multiple colors. Mine is a blue one.
The largest legitimate portable SSD drive you could probably acquire will be 2TB and it won't be $50.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

SK Hynix was the brand I thought was iffy, but apparently, it's a major company. It was founded in 1949 in Taiwan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK_Hynix

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

ALL drives eventually fail, spinning drives just fail more often.

I haven't had one fail in years.
I've replaced a number of them though.
But that because I outgrew them.
I keep two old Seagate drives in a box and plug them in once in a while, well, just because.
They are 80gb's!
They are so old and need both usb cables on older computers which have underpowered usb ports.
There is nothing wrong with ssd drives other than cost.
So, to many people rely on one drive for backup which is not the best, not at all.
Not everybody has or wants to spend so much money on backup drives.
For the cost of two 4tb ssd drives they could have six 5tb backup drives.
That's all.