I'm looking for a compatible 1TB usb external drive guaranteed to work

Moco

As the title says and after the big ordeal I went through with my previous 1TB external USB Drive corrupting after a certain file limit, I'm looking for a drive that people have experience with and have used that know that it works with the pie. Any and all help will be extremely helpful as I'm looking to purchase it today. Thanks a lot.

Also, I know that technically all drives should work, maybe I just had bad luck but I just prefer not to deal with it again.

caver01

@moco I was going to say, technically all drives will fail--eventually. Was your problem just a hardware failure that caused corruption, or was it seriously some technical file limitation? If the latter, that sounds very unusual to me unless it was related to the drive's format, as there are some formats that limit the max file size etc.

If it was simply a hardware failure, that can be bad luck, a bad batch (maybe a result of damage) or bad quality control. These might be good reasons to avoid a particular manufacturer, but if you ever read drive reviews, you will find people who sing the praise of one brand and badmouth another due to experience similar to yours, and the next review will be someone with an opposite opinion and a good story to back it up.

You don't say so in your post, but are you looking for a typical HDD, or a SSD or a very large memory stick? I assumed HDD.

Moco

@caver01 I have no idea what happened, I'd pull up my recent file post if I knew how(i worked on it maybe 2 weeks ago) I just know that I spent about 6+ real hours working on it with no luck, I was exhausted.

I'm thinking it was a bad HD batch because the drive would become unreadable after a certain amount of files were put on the HD. Right now I'm thinking of just ordering any HDD, based on overall reviews. But if there was someone who had used a particular brand and it worked that would be great news.

Moco

I ended up going with https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TKFEEAS/ref=od_aui_detailpages00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 . Seagate 1tb 50$, cant beat that price, if that doesn't work then it's going to have to be a 256gb usb thumb drive for the same price, a dissapointment but what else can I do.

caver01

@moco Seems like a good price. It looks to be a fairly compact enclosure. Will this be hidden inside your project?

I think you have to take a somewhat "disposable" approach to these projects. I have my system running completely off a large SDcard, and I have to live with the possibility (although I have not had an issue) that the card could get corrupted and require me to reformat. With safe shutdown etc. I should be able to avoid that, and you with your external drive may overcome that problem altogether, but as my project has evolved I have always considered all of the configuration, ROMs and artwork to be just the "working" versions in my arcade cabinet, knowing that I will eventually want to re-image. To that end, everything is stored in a network archive so I can rebuild if I need to.

I hope it works for you. If I do the HDD route, I might simply try to repurpose one of my bare 3.5" HDDs by adding a USB interface. The thing I like about thumb drives though is no noise, lower heat, and no moving parts to fail.