The title of the thread is deceiving since this thread's more about the OP's excitement over finding a microSD adapter that will fit his needs than it is about said solution being the "best" method.
Both options (hard drive vs a smaller adapter/card combo) have their merits and it's pointless to argue about which is better since each of us have different needs and values.
Hard drive pros - cost per gigabyte, huge capacity.
Hard drive cons - size/weight, power drain.
Card/Reader combo pros - size/weight, low power consumption
Carrd/Reader cons - cost per gigabyte, limited capacity of cards.
I typically don't need terabytes worth of data on an average day so I totally understand the preference of physical size over capacity. I can appreciate the need for having larger storage capacity though so definitely understand how one would prefer hard drive over card/reader combo.
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