About external hard disc

[BlurayHD]

Hi guys I so need to know, using my laptop I have content that I share all time and I was thinking what about if I got this content on an internal hard drive 3.5 but connected by USB to my laptop so people can acces this content full time 24/7 ? I mean, the USB port is gonna fail? broke? or it´s just fine?

Thank You in advance

[ProWo]

With USB 3.0 it should not be a problem.

[jagabo]

But USB hard drives in general aren't real reliable. Probably mostly because they get knocked around a lot.

[BlurayHD]

With USB 3.0 it should not be a problem.

What about 2.0 ?

[abolibibelot]

What about 2.0 ?

Same. The drawbacks are :
– the USB connector (on the computer side) can become flimsy after a while, and prone to random disconnections ;
– the power supply unit of external enclosures is generally on the cheapest side of cheap, prone to fail, and not designed for constant operation ;
– these enclosures are not ventilated (with very few exceptions), which is not a problem at this time of the year but is definitely hazardous in summer.

Depending on how much content there is to share, an alternative possibility would be to replace the optical disc drive (if there's one as they tend to disappear altogether) by a 2.5" HDD of large capacity ; don't know what is the current maximum capacity in 2.5", but 4TB models have become common and it's already a lot of space. Also, some laptop computers have a hidden secondary HDD tray, which is made available on higher-end models of the same series (probably because it's cheaper to use the same blueprint and base components for the entire series), but can be tweaked to actually work by merely removing some extra plastic on the cover (that's what I did on my Toshiba P300).