I use a USB HDD for all plugged into the rear. It can be expensive to get a large card for recordings and tricky to get a fast enough SD card to use for timeshift/swapfile, this can hamper performance if the swap file is put on a slower card.
Best bang for buck is a USB HDD in a caddy. It's a little more bulky and you can hear it spin up sometimes compared to a sd card or alike but if storage size is what you want can't beat it.
I have all picons, 2 timeshift streams and have managed to record 8 channels at once without any loss of performance.
There is a slight issue placing everything on the HDD, some things are accessed all the time such as timeshift & epg so IF everything is placed on the HDD the HDD will be in constant use when it doesnt need to be & therefor shorten the life of the HDD, this is where the SD slot comes in nicely to save your HDD working so hard
A USB hdd will be fine. It's what they are designed for. Sd cards have smaller life spans than that of regular hdd's because of wear leveling to the cells they arnt designed to be in constant use with a swap file or time shift. Ssd drives are different. If you are worried about lifespan invest in a WD red or purple drive. Reds are for Nas and purple are new edition designed for cctv systems which effectively is what the time shift is behaving like.
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Also hdd technology is standard. You know what you are getting with a 7200rpm drive for example. The problem comes with trying to get a good sd card or USB stick with read times etc. Standard hdd's are mature and the read speed has not changed much with sata3 speeds being very fast. The killer of most hdd's is the startup of the disk, the bearings seize up, so if you watch little TV having the disk go into sleep often can wear it out quicker but we are still talking years worth of life. Sd cards have limited writes to each cell. The interface tries to compensate by using each cell evenly but constant use burns through them very fast. Experience has shown me this. And that is even spending out on SanDisk expensive cards. Yes the performance is greater than regular hdd's but they don't last as long and quite frankly the zgemma is not going to utilise the whole USB bandwidth so you won't notice any performance increase with an sd in the side. Getting a fast sd card class ten or above would be recommended if you did go down that route.
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