/b/ - Random

 >>/49678/
Not a gamer but this is my own experience as a media hoarder. External harddrives and computers are great today but the newer operating systems today SUCK ASS and bog down the CPU & GPU with third party bloatware/spyware crap. Therefore I don't use newer operating systems. If you want something for large storage, go with something like Western Digital or Seagate. I've had no problems using either of those for personal storage (at least not yet but I do take precautions and have extra mirrored backup drives just encase the originals were to crash).

 >>/49678/
If they're modern titles, I'd go with the SSD, I dont think there are many current games that need the SSD, but there are some and there will be more in the future, if its just for older titles, or just a place to have them locally that you can move between HDD and SSD, then the extra storage of a HDD may be handy.

If you go HDD, avoid SMR (shingled) drives (most of the barracudas) - you'll do better with CMR drives for faster writes. Western Digital Black drives are targeted specifically to gamers if you want the discount (HDDs are cheaper per TB of storage of course).

yo

Go with what lasts longer and have a couple extra backup copies of your files. Its safe to expect most drives won't last you forever. I just had a harddrive crash on my music laptop and ironically it was completely offline 24/7 after the initial install, had linux as an OS, was never moved around much because of the setup aside the mixer and amplifier/speaker system. Well, it crashed anyway, somehow, so I would recommend having some spare backups for a rainy day.