Choosing a Drive for Your Cabynet

Last updated October 23, 2026

Your Cabynet lives entirely on a drive you connect to your own computer — that's the whole point. But it also means that drive is the one and only copy of your files. Cabynet's relay only ever carries encrypted data in transit between your devices; it isn't a cloud backup, and it isn't meant to be one. Picking a decent drive, and backing it up, is on you.

What to get

• A real external SSD or hard drive, connected directly by cable. Not a USB flash drive or an SD card — those use cheaper flash memory that isn't built for the kind of frequent, small, repeated writes a constantly-syncing Cabynet produces, and they fail more often under that kind of use than they do for simple file storage.
• A hard drive, for most families. It's the least expensive way to store a lot of photos and videos, and it's what we recommend (see our recommended setup). Give yourself room to grow: about twice the space your files take up today.
• Hard drive or SSD? For the drive that stays plugged into your Cabynet computer, either works. An SSD is faster, silent, and has no moving parts, so it shrugs off drops and vibration (worth it if the computer gets moved or bumped), but costs more per terabyte. For a drive that spends months unplugged in a drawer, like your backup copy, a hard drive is the usual choice: SSDs store data as an electrical charge that can slowly fade when they go a long time without power, especially somewhere warm.
• Portable or desktop. Portable drives (like the one we recommend) run off the USB cable's power, so plug them straight into the computer rather than into a hub without its own power. Many portable hard drives use a recording method called SMR, which can make one very large copy, like your first full backup, noticeably slow; everyday use is unaffected. A desktop drive with its own power adapter is a good choice too, especially for very large libraries.
• A known brand with a real warranty — Samsung, Crucial, WD, Seagate, SanDisk. Store-brand or unbranded drives are where most of the "it just died" stories come from.

What to avoid

• USB flash drives and SD/microSD cards, for the reason above.
• Network drives / NAS shares (SMB, AFP, mapped network drives). Cabynet watches your drive directly for file changes — that works reliably on a drive that's actually plugged into the machine, not over a network share, where the connection can drop or lag without Cabynet ever being told.
• RAID 0 ("striped") enclosures, if you're tempted by one for extra speed. It needs both drives to survive, not just one — that's more fragile than a single drive, not less.

Format and connect it

• Any common format works, exFAT included. Many drives come formatted exFAT so they work on both Windows and Mac, and that's fine: there's no need to reformat a drive that already has your files on it. If you're starting with an empty drive and only use one kind of computer, NTFS (Windows) or APFS (Mac) is a little sturdier if the drive ever loses power or gets unplugged in the middle of saving something.
• Plug it in directly (or through a hub with its own power), and eject it before unplugging. Cabynet can do this for you: in Settings, choose Pause Cabynet, then Eject drive. This matters most for exFAT drives.
• Use a surge protector. It's a cheap way to guard the computer and the drive against power blips.

Back it up

Cabynet keeps your files decrypted, at rest, on that one drive — by design, so you can always get to them directly, drive in hand, without needing Cabynet at all. That design only works in your favor if something else is also keeping a copy. A second external drive you periodically clone your Cabynet onto, or a NAS you back up to on a schedule, is enough — it doesn't need to be fancy, it just needs to exist and actually run.

Every drive can fail. Backblaze, which runs hundreds of thousands of hard drives, saw about 1.4% of them fail in 2025. Update your copy on a regular schedule (monthly is a good start), keep it somewhere other than next to your Cabynet, and now and then make sure your files actually open from it.

Signs it's time to replace a drive

• Unusual noise from a hard drive (clicking, grinding)
• Slowdowns that didn't used to happen for everyday files
• The drive disconnecting and reconnecting on its own
• It's simply gotten old — three to five years of regular use is a reasonable point to plan a replacement before one is forced on you

If you ever do need to move to a new drive, Cabynet's device-setup flow has a "Replace existing Cabynet" option built for exactly this — no need to manually recreate anything by hand.