Hard drives aren’t great for archival in general, but any modern drive should work. Grab multiple brands and make at least two copies. Look for sales. Externals regularly go below $15/tb these days.
Comment on Say Hello to the World's Largest Hard Drive, a Massive 36TB Seagate
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2 days agoCan someone recommend me a hard drive that won’t fail immediately? Internal, not SSD, from which cheap ones will die even sooner, and I need it for archival reasons, not speed or fancy new tech, otherwise I have two SSDs.
daq@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
Ushmel@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Word for the wise, those externals usually won’t last 5+ years of constant use as an internal.
daq@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
I’ve got 6 in a random mix of brands (Seagate and WD) 8-16Tb that are all older than that. Running 24/7 storing mostly random shit I download. Pulled one out recently because the USB controller died. Still works in a different enclosure now.
I’d definitely have a different setup for data I actually cared about.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think refurbished enterprise drives usually have a lot of extra protection hardware that helps them last a very long time. Seagate advertises a mean time to failure on their exos drives of ~200 years with a moderate level of usage. I feel like it would almost always be a better choice to get more refurbished enterprise drives than fewer new consumer drives.
I personally found an 8tb exos on servedpartdeals for ~$100 which seems to be in very good condition after checking the SMART monitoring. I’m just using it as a backup so there isn’t any data on it that isn’t also somewhere else, so I didn’t bother with redundancy.
I’m not an expert, but this is just from the research I did before buying that backup drive.
Ushmel@lemmy.world 2 days ago
My WD Red Pros have almost all lasted me 7+ years but the best thing (and probably cheapest nowadays) is a proper 3-2-1 backup plan.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 days ago
If you’re relying on one hard drive not failing to preserve your data you are doing it wrong from the jump. I’ve got about a dozen hard drives in play from seagate and WD at any given time (mostly seagate because they’re cheaper and I don’t need speed either) and haven’t had a failure yet. Backblaze used to publish stats about the hard drives they use, not sure if they still do but that would give you some data to go off.
tempest@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
The back blaze stats were always useless because they would tell you what failed long after that run of drives was available.
There are only 3 manufactures at this point so just buy one or two of each color and call it a day. ZFS in raid z2 is good enough for most things at this point.