Can 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.
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.
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.
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 serverpartdeals 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.
Can 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.
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.
Word for the wise, those externals usually won’t last 5+ years of constant use as an internal.
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.
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.
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 serverpartdeals 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.