As far as I can tell, they’re both forms of data storage, but a 1TB flash drive is about $25 cheaper and like 1/10th the size of a 1TB external hard drive. Why would you opt for an external hard drive over a flash drive?
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Those cheapo flash drives are counterfeits that tell the PC that they have more storage capacity than is actually available, then loop around in the memory address space and overwrite existing data as you try storing more stuff on it.
As a simplified analogy, imagine a storage device that can store numbers going from 00000 to 99999, but it tells the computer that it can store numbers from 000000 to 999999. As long as you’re storing a five-digit number, it seems to work fine, but the first digit gets overwritten with the sixth if you try storing six digits at once, resulting in data loss.
The reason hard drives have stuck around despite being slow and fragile due to their mechanical parts is precisely because they’ve remained cheaper per gigabyte than flash memory.
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