I’ve been buying used 8TB HGST SAS drives on eBay for $50USD each, so far no issues but I really don’t care if they die. Basically disposable at that price point.
The sound is determined by what kind of drive it is. Consumer drives are for in-home use and are usually quiet. Enterprise drives are for dedicated server rooms or data centers and can get loud because it’s loud in there already.
I would recommend sticking with consumer level HDDs if this is a concern. The cost per TB isn’t as good.
I bought a 14 TB Seagate Exos and put it in a Fractal R5, which is a very good noise insulating case. I can hear clicking from anywhere on the same floor as that machine if I listen for it.
You could maybe pair two consumer drives together in JBOD to get the space you want, but that’s more expensive.
There’s no hard limit or standard, but I think 14 TB might be the largest you could find in a consumer HDD. The WD EasyStore goes on sale pretty often and sells for a good deal. Those should be quiet and already come in an external case. Look for reviews about it before buying.
If you avoid QLC drives, keep it at a reasonable temperature, and don’t use a drive that’s had a large number of write cycles, it will be fine for a year.
I would definitely read everything on the disk yearly so the controller can detect any weak blocks and rewrite them though. A good way to read everything would be to take a checksum. You can then compare that to the previous checksum to make sure the files haven’t changed too.
Mechanical drives have issues with long term storage as well. When hard drives get older, sometimes they will just refuse to spin up after sitting for a long time.
Want to minimise cost? 128 GB USB drives can be had for around ten dollars. Fifteen dollars will get you 256 GB. Stick with a cheap but reliable brand like SanDisk or PNY. It will last you years with proper care, even with regular use.
I do not really see a reason to invest in a “real” hard drive or external SSD for your use case. There isn’t enough data to justify it and USB drives can take a lot of abuse and still work.
Edit: There are a lot of fake USB drives sold online where the controller has been hacked to report a higher capacity to your operating system than actually exists, for example, reporting 512 GB when there’s actually only 64 GB of storage. If you try to store more than the actual capacity, your old files will be overwritten with the new ones. That’s why you should be suspicious of very high capacity drives (1 TB+) sold online for low prices. I would not buy any USB drive online that claims to have a capacity greater than 512 GB.
Regarding fakes, there are tools you can (and should) run on any new drive. I personally like h2testw, but there are others as well.
You should also avoid sketchy resellers. This includes Amazon, due to their policy of commingling and their response to counterfeits. Don’t buy from Amazon! Stick to trustworthy and first-party sellers. If buying online, make sure they don’t have a third party seller. In fact, probably best to skip any that even have a 3rd party “marketplace” system.
I don’t think there are really any fake 256 GB drives on the market. The real drives are priced low enough that there’s really not much profit to be made from selling fakes. It’s just not that much cheaper to make a 32 GB drive and flash fake firmware than to actually make a legitimate 256 GB drive. Or buy the AmazonBasics brand since only Amazon makes and sells them.
I’d like to second the large flash drive idea. You can get a couple of them and a case to keep them in for less than $50 total and have multiple layers of redundancy
You say that data is critical for your business, have you considered a cloud backup as well? AWS has very cheap storage options depending on the speed the file needs to be available at. Also I’d definitely not go with flash memory, bit flips can be a real danger. I’d go with a 1 TB HDD in an enclosure, additionally to a cloud backup
OP already says that multiple backups and cloud copies exist. I do not recommend mechanical hard drives because they’re inherently fragile. If OP really needs high-quality long-term archival storage that is robust and lasts forever, I will recommend a tape drive and do so with a straight face.
Bit-flipping is, frankly, a non-issue to such an extent that even considering it seriously is moving into tinfoil hat territory.
This was what I was thinking about. I would definitely not use gdrive a a critical backup and the glacier tier at aws should be sufficient and cheaper than a hdd for years
Backblaze B2 is another option. Not sure if its as cheap as Glacier as its hard to compare usage based billing.
I pay about $1-2 USD/mo for 100GB. Storage is about $0.02/day, The rest of the cost is access costs.
I use rclone to do my own encryption. Most of the cost is probably backing up my phone nightly (Round Sync which is rclone on Android). Specifically signal results in a new 400Mb backup every night with 99% of the same data as the last backup.
On its own, no, but it can be used, like any cloud storage solution, as part of a robust backup strategy. Particularly, if the desktop sync feature is enabled, every client machine that has the sync application installed will download and synchronise the contents of the Google Drive locally. If the Google Drive servers go kaput this still means you’ve essentially got several off-site backup copies of the data on Google Drive.
I agree with tapes if the data is large and not accessed frequently. Magnetic tapes are still one of the most information-dense mediums, surprisingly. WORM tapes are Write Once Read Many and are used by serious large enterprises for long-term archival storage.
As NateNate60 mentioned: USB Flash. I second this as a cost effective alternative to anything else. Corsair Survivor, Sandisk Exteme Pro and Kingston DataTraveler Flash drives to 256GB are cheaper than anything else and just as reliable.
Should you want to go the SSD route, the Corsair MX500 drives purchased with any external esata or usb chassis is the most reliable option for the price.
Yeah but we’re talking 2.5 inch drives, and we’re talking about less than a terabyte of storage. There is no good reason to pick a physical drive HDD over an SSD when they’re practically the same price at that storage level. SSDs are simply safer to move, there are no moving parts, dropping an SSD isn’t that concerning, dropping an HDD can easily kill it. I mean think of this this way. There IS a physical reader that goes across the entire disk. That doesn’t exist in an SSD. It’s hard to do, but you can realistically take a hard drive and just SHAKE it to death with your hand, make the reader fall out of place. While shaking a solid state is more like just shaking a giant flash drive.
Magnetic storage will likely last longer, and as it is a much older tech, is less likely to have firmware bugs and other problematic surprises. Plus, as you can see on diskprices.com, the cheapest medium per TB remains magnetic storage.
Then there are tapes. The drives sure cost a hefty sum, but if you have loads of data to backup, this is likely the cheapest option.
Finally, optical. Optical is great in the sense that is is physically a ROM, so data cannot get compromised by mishandling or other staff mistakes; but it still can have issues with the reflective layers peeling away from disks.
So, in the end, I would personally not recommend using SSDs for data backups, out of precaution. Sure, SSDs will likely retain all data just fine for years to come, but I want to be able to store data for as long as possible, with the peace of mind that only magnetic storage will afford me. Plus, if your data is worth backing up, it is worth whatever extra price or effort you will have to do with.
As for the other options, well, they all have their use case, but I don’t see much advantage for them in the general use cases. Just make backup copies of your data on magnetic drives, in a few physically different locations, with proper access control.
I had SSDs go bad, and mechanical hard drives too. The major plus for me is that with HDDs, it is somewhat predictable, while with SSDs it has always been sudden (in my experience, at least).
However, there are more parameters to consider. The storage temperature, the relative humidity, to backup frequency, etc. In the end, if you want a 100% time proof solution without caring for the costs, engraving a crystal, storing it underground in a lead-lined container, is probably the surest way to go. Everything else is a compromise.
Oh yeah, I backup all configs 4*day. The good thing about torrenting is even if I had catastrophic loss, as long as I have the list of torrents it should repopulate (assuming someone’s seeding).
Of course I also want to self host my personal photos/videos, and I can’t afford to lose those. I’ll have to look into seeing if any solutions support local storage plus maybe object storage as a backup.
This would be my recommendation as well. Either a shuckable external drive or a standard 3.5" drive with a USB 3.0 enclosure so you have the option to slot the drives into a NAS or server in the future.
May I ask: are you sure you need a media center with transcoding? Because it may be totally sufficient for you to access files through a file explorer and play them with VLC/mpv or whatever else. Having a media center is only really useful if you need external access to your media. I set all that stuff up once, then realized i never watch shows/movies on the go. And if I do, i know beforehand and can copy the raw files to the device i plan to watch on.
For drives, Shuckstop has a table of current shuckable drive prices. Shucking is usually the cheapest way to get new drives, you just have to get them out of their external case (or in your case, leave them in and plug them into your pi, ideally with some sort of fan). There’s also ServerPartDeals for refurbished enterprise drives.
Personally I run 1 NUC with a 8TB USB-HDD and mirror it once a week to my other Pi4 with the same HDD.
Those were kinda cheap at 150€ each but the performance isnt very great.
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