USB External HDD a good idea for expanding backup storage?

[nbstl68]

I was at Costco and saw they had a Seagate 14TB Expansion Desktop Hard Drive for $149. I have been skimming older posts on thoughts of using external HDDs and seeing mixed opinions but fairly old commentary.
I was thinking it is a pretty cheap way to extend my backups longer than a few weeks to use it to just offload recordings older than X days. Also want to use it for storing \ movies for playback casting to TVs in the house.
I assume an actual NAS would be the appropriate way to do this, but for the price of this storage it is tempting.

Has anyone used a large HDD for backup and \ or streaming purposes like this lately, (USB 3.0), and if so, how well did it work for you?

 

[wittaj]

For storage it is OK, but don't use it to record live. Even though USB 3.0 speeds are more than sufficient, they can't sustain the never taking a breath constant stream of nonbuffering video. But the already recorded can be buffered by the CPU to accommodate the changing speeds.

But at the same time, unless you only have a day of storage, the actuality you would look and scrub thru footage over a month old is slim.

 

[Mike A.]

In most cases you can also "shuck" them (i.e., take them out of the housing) to use as a regular drive.

 

[nbstl68]

You wouldn't think one would need month old footage...but I'm a procrastinator. Had a project at the house and I've been "meaning to" grab footage of some of what the workers were doing on specific days. Somehow 3 months later I'm getting around to it and realize it's all gone.

Side note, was also thinking of the extra space for storing Netflix series downloads to go binge watch at a later date. But no wondering how well streaming, (HD, not 4k) would work to a TV from a USB 3.0 attached drive. In theory the bandwidth of USB 3.0 "should" me more than sufficient but... Anyone done that?