Personally, I've found that external drives only tend to corrupt if you use them as rw boot drives or if you don't unmount and sync them properly (safe remove /

Personally, I've found that external drives only tend to corrupt if you use them as rw boot drives or if you don't unmount and sync them properly (safe remove / eject) on every use. So yeah, the RasPi idea of having using those to boot might corrupt quickly, but if you use them for a camera or just transferring files between computers, you should be safe.