So as the name implies, I make a ton of 4K videos. And I am running out of storage space.
What brands or products of 1Tb or 2TB external memory drives do you recommend purchasing here in Japan? Also is it better to buy it in a physical store or on Amazon Japan?
Any info would be helpful. Thanks
9 comments
Same here, also a video guy.
I’ve had good luck with a few local brands like Elecom, Buffalo, etc. I put those on my TVs. I bought a Buffalo 4TB two years ago, no issues.
I don’t like Western Digital external drives (my cloud) but I ended up buying a second one anyway because they were so cheap and they don’t die. The software is kind of crummy though. You can’t really go wrong with something like a LaCie. Toshiba drives are hit/miss.
Two pieces of advice for you:
1) Price it out not by the drive but by the terabyte. A 1TB drive can run 6000 yen, most 2TB go for 8000, but a 4TB can be found for 8000.
2) Compare prices for internal hard drives and reliable enclosures to bundled external drives. Sometimes you can save a ton.
I splurged on a 12TB recently but I see drive prices have gone up :/
I’ve gotten a Toshiba (iirc) 1 TB SSD in 秋葉原 and a case for it. I use that to store pics but i’ll need another one soon.
Anywho, it was one of those Two Top, ドスパラ, type of places that you see a lot of there. It wasn’t expensive at all but you might wanna check kakaku.com as well then compare with Amazon.
For SSD, I usually look for Samsung, Crucial, and SanDisk. Amazon seems to have the cheapest price for Crucial, and some Samsung.
kakaku.com is the holy bible you’re looking for
For backup or for daily work?
You should know that a lot of the big size drives use technology which may not be suitable for your use so much so it became a major controversy:
> Western Digital, Toshiba, and Seagate have sold SMR drives without labeling them as such, generating a large controversy, as SMR drives behave much more slowly under some circumstances (such as random writes) than PMR drives.
You need to know what’s inside the enclosure. Buffalo and Elecom don’t produce HDDs they just make the enclosure. Toshiba must be avoided. The Hitachi were good but now they belong to one of the big 3 manufacturers
If you can, you should probably consider a NAS. They can be a bit pricey (Â¥40,000 and up depending on specs and size). With a NAS you can set it up speed, redundancy, space.. or a combination.
Popular NAS brands are Synology and QNAP if you want to research some.
Be aware that if you don’t set them up correctly from the start, it can be hard to change or upgrade down the line if you need more space.
If money is an issue, but it still sounds like something you would like, there are cheaper DIY options. Lots of YouTube videos out there on home built NAS’s.
But if you are not interested in that, then any Seagate or Western Digital in your price range should be fine really. Just look at reviews and get one that meets your size/price requirements.
New kid on the block: TEAMGROUP
1 or 2 ? That does not seems to be optimal for price by TB if you want to use it for long term storage.
Just to compare the cheapest using this [https://kakaku.com/pc/external-hdd/itemlist.aspx?pdf_so=p1](https://kakaku.com/pc/external-hdd/itemlist.aspx?pdf_so=p1)
1TB = 5180
2TB = 6500 or 3250/TB
3TB = 8180 or 2726/TB
4TB = 8506 or 2127/TB
If you sort by cheapest by TB, the site will show several 6TB, then 4 and 8.
But those are HHD and not SSD, so if you want to edit footage from the disk, would be better with SSD, but of course, more expensive [https://kakaku.com/pc/portable-ssd/itemlist.aspx?pdf_mdl=on&lid=20190108pricemenu_parts2](https://kakaku.com/pc/portable-ssd/itemlist.aspx?pdf_mdl=on&lid=20190108pricemenu_parts2)
1TB = 9980
2TB = 21490
​
As for where you buy, online on in store, just get it where it’s the cheapest. I’m not saying you should buy the cheapest product available, but buy it where it is the cheapest, things to consider would be the usb type, is it a 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch HHD ? the 2.5 can be powered by usb only and are much smaller, while the 3.5 require a power brick however they can be cheaper.
I hate to be pedantic, but it would be storage drives.
Memory is not the same.
Anyway. Western Digital makes a solid hard disk. I’ve personally had bad luck with Toshiba, but a buddy of mine back home has been using his 2TB drive for about 10 years now. So there’s that. Amazon has alright pricing but I’ve seen some pretty good sales in physical shops. Places like yodobashi honestly aren’t your friend for stuff like this. The smaller computer shops will often have sales.