What is the best external hard drive option to use for storing images?

To put things in a little context…

@harrybarnettw wrote:

Generally, what is the most performant option for a first and second external hard drive?

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Technically, the “most performant” (highest speed) external storage would be an NVMe solid state drive (SSD) connected by Thunderbolt 3 or 4. If you spend enough money (a lot), that type of storage will be as fast as the internal SSD in a MacBook laptop (2000–3000+MB/sec). But for Lightroom Classic image storage specifically, both the speed and expense of that solution is not justified because it won’t be taken advantage of. For most people it would be a waste of money.

Instead of “most performant,” the more practical question is “best balance of price/performance for Lightroom Classic,” and that could be any of the options below connected using USB 3 or 4.

The fastest hard drive will be a 3.5" desktop type which might be 150–200MB/sec, possibly running at 7200RPM. This is a great midrange option between “super fast” and “super cheap.”

The Western Digital My Passport is a 2.5" laptop-sized hard drive, probably running at 5400RPM and, according to some recent reviews, transferring at 120–140MB/sec. That’s appropriate for consumer backups (so it’s marketed for that purpose), and it’s acceptable for use as a backup drive and as a primary drive for photos used in Lightroom Classic. The main need for storage speed with Lightroom Classic is not the access to originals, but access to the Camera Raw cache and Lightroom previews which are constantly read and written to far more often — those should be on the fast internal Mac storage, and they probably already are if you are keeping your Lightroom Classic catalog on the Mac.

You could consider faster external storage if your camera captures very large files (over 20-30 megapixels) or you shoot very large numbers of them in a session.

I’m slowly transitioning to SSDs as the cost of large capacities comes down, but it isn’t to make Lightroom Classic faster because they won’t necessarily do that. My reason is to speed up large backups of photo and video files, especially on trips when time might be limited. To achieve that, both the primary and backup drives need to be capable of higher throughput. But if yours is for home use only, the data sizes are modest, and you can let a backup run for a while, a My Passport type of compact hard drive should work out just fine.

@gary_sc wrote:

Oh, and almost forgot: do not use a portable drive (one that gets its power from the USB cord). It needs to have external power via a power cord. That's a good sign that the drive is intended for long term use.

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I would not necessarily agree with that. There are very few 2.5" hard drives and SSDs that still come with an AC power supply. Also, with USB-C Power Delivery capable of delivering enough power to drive a laptop, USB-C external storage isn’t necessarily going to be more reliable long term if it had an AC power supply.

As has been stated, the brand is not all that critical, most brands are good to very good. But since you're doing the right thing to have a backup for your drive, the chance that two drives are likely to fail at the same time is very remote. However, if your house burns down, both drives may not survive. That why I have two drives, as you plan, AND I also have a cloud service that backs up my iMac AND my primary image drive.

I should add that I have a 3rd drive to take in my Mac's Time Machine.

I will add that 1 TB is not all that much (nowadays) for image storage. Whatever amount of storage you think you need, at least double it.

I will also add that you do also need software to keep your image backup date as good as your originla image data. Personally I use Chronosync, it has proved to be an incredibly powerful and mostly easy software to use. It also does checksum so that it adds up the data that it's about to copy and compares that with the data that's been written to verify that things went well. While I strongly recommend Chronosync, ANY software to do this should have some form of checksum or keep on looking. That is critical.

Oh, and almost forgot: do not use a portable drive (one that gets its power from the USB cord). It needs to have external power via a power cord. That's a good sign that the drive is intended for long term use.

Good luck!

I have 2 WD 5 TB external drives, one for my primary image storage, and one as a backup. I also have a 2nd backup in the cloud. Storage is very inexpensive now - ~$110 for a 5 TB drive.

There's no such thing as "best". A lot of solutions work well.

I would not consider replacing your existing external HD unless you are having problems with it, or need more space. Speed of the disks where you store your images is relatively unimportant with Lightroom Classic. It really doesn't matter what type of drive the backup is, as long as you feel the manufacturer produces quality drives.