External storage solutions? (Hard drives, SD cards, etc)

  • 🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Sanshain

Sanshain

Avatar? I don't need no stinkin' avatar.
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Joined
May 3, 2015
Basically I'm looking for reliable external HD brands, after having 2-3 80-90$ USB drives die horrible lingering deaths on me in the last few years. All I want to do with them is stick a whole load of digital files on them for when powercuts and other doomer stuff makes streaming unfeasible. Anyone here have good experience or proper technical knowledge regarding which drive brands and storage mediums can actually stand the test of time and won't magically disintegrate after a few years stuck on a shelf in a normal air conditioned room?
 
Look for drives with 5 year warranties. Everyone has a Seagate bad/WD bad anecdote but the higher end drives do last a long time, usually well beyond the warranty (also an anecdote but that's the best I can do). If it were me I would buy a bare drive and some kind of enclosure instead of an off the shelf external drive.
 
Tape drives. External USB disks are shit in general.
In case tapes are too slow and information is really important - build your own home NAS server (just watch out for SMR drives: you do not want them in RAIDs of any kind. For NAS OS use TrueNAS, for example. Do NOT buy WD My Book NASes and similar ready-made shit which is slow and may delete your files due to buggy update, build your own like a real man.
 
Tape drives are cool, but be careful which LTO# you buy, the $/TB is still important to calculate, $30 a tape can trick your brain into thinking an LTO4 is economical when it isn't.

If you want even more flexibility consider a homelab, they are fun to work on, good for job skills, and you can do other stuff with them as well as just file storage. (More expensive than a few HDDs and a NAS ofcourse)
 
ebinxxl said:
Tape drives.
Click to expand...
Since you mention it: in the modern day, is there any reliable way to read tapes without keeping a copy of the exact hardware and software setup that you used to write them?
I have a bunch of old tapes from 1994 lying around and I'm curious what's on them, but it seems like there's no practical way of finding out.
 
LTO tape is great for archiving/storage, but not really practical for casual usage.

ebinxxl said:
Tape drives. External USB disks are shit in general.
In case tapes are too slow and information is really important - build your own home NAS server (just watch out for SMR drives: you do not want them in RAIDs of any kind. For NAS OS use TrueNAS, for example. Do NOT buy WD My Book NASes and similar ready-made shit which is slow and may delete your files due to buggy update, build your own like a real man.
Click to expand...
^This. Build a NAS server, it's not hard or particularly expensive. The dearest part of mine was the UPS, which I got used for around £300, and that isn't strictly necessary.
 
r/DataHoarder advocates buying cheap TB/$ external hard drives and taking them apart to use in a NAS.

The reason I feel the need to specifically cite reddit is, if you are going to consider it, check there first which drives are "ok" to do it with. They call it "shucking" and I assume the posts there are just them confirming with eachother if a model is known to contain a CMR or SMR drive, but I'm not sure if there's more to it.
 
Whatever brand of external USB drive you get, buy two.
Two is one, and one is none.

I have a Drobo network drive, which seems to be doing fine.
 
My advice. Buy a USB sata dock. Then buy normal sata HDDs. No SSDs, but spinny/platter types. They're cheap and reliable. Use a half decent brand, and whatever size is going cheap. I have drives going back a decade, if not more, and they still work.

And because they're cheap and get bigger all the time, after a few years you can consolidate a few drives onto one, making for extra redundancy. I think I spend £40-£80 a year, depending on price and how much stuff I'm backing up.
 
Judge Dredd said:
My advice. Buy a USB sata dock. Then buy normal sata HDDs. No SSDs, but spinny/platter types. They're cheap and reliable. Use a half decent brand, and whatever size is going cheap. I have drives going back a decade, if not more, and they still work.

And because they're cheap and get bigger all the time, after a few years you can consolidate a few drives onto one, making for extra redundancy. I think I spend £40-£80 a year, depending on price and how much stuff I'm backing up.
Click to expand...
Nowadays they also make shit like this if you're looking for something more compact:
www.ugreen.com

USB 3.0 to SATA Hard Drive Adapter

UGREEN SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter Cable with UASP for 2.5" 3.5” Hard Drives Disk HDD and Solid State Drives SSD
www.ugreen.com www.ugreen.com

It's a powered usb to sata adapter, it allows you to just attach any drive you have to your computer and use it as an external. It works well, and it fits in a tiny box. Plus it's a bit cheaper than a dock.

That way you aren't limited to just explicitly external HDDs. Internal ones are almost always cheaper and they sure seem like they're more reliable; used externally for cold storage they'll pretty much last forever so long as you don't expose them to any extreme conditions.

ebinxxl said:
Tape drives. External USB disks are shit in general.
In case tapes are too slow and information is really important - build your own home NAS server (just watch out for SMR drives: you do not want them in RAIDs of any kind. For NAS OS use TrueNAS, for example. Do NOT buy WD My Book NASes and similar ready-made shit which is slow and may delete your files due to buggy update, build your own like a real man.
Click to expand...
Oh yes, if there's anything I've learned from my time online, it's that people who do autistic crap like building their own NAS servers to store basic digital files are definitely the manliest of men and certainly not the most likely to have a nervous breakdown and wind up posting pictures of themselves wearing rainbow striped thigh socks on Twitter.
 
ebinxxl said:
Tape drives. External USB disks are shit in general.
Click to expand...
External USB drives are first made from drives where something failed in the automated assembly process, like screws not being driven correctly. They're fixed up and are often fine but that's one reason they have only one year warranties. On the other hand the OP's assumption that he'll be able to avoid environmental extremes puts tape into play, that's the sole area in which hard drives shine for archival purposes.
Kosher Dill said:
Since you mention it: in the modern day, is there any reliable way to read tapes without keeping a copy of the exact hardware and software setup that you used to write them?
Click to expand...
This has become somewhat better with LTO tape, where the general guarantee is that a drive will read two generations back and write one generation back (there was an exception to this when the magnetic media was changed). As a practical matter they're going to live only so long, you'd have to do as you outline for the hardware but that could be pretty cheap with used equipment from companies that slowly migrate their tapes as new LTO generations are developed.

Where I think tapes shine that they're explicitly intended for long term archival storage unlike disks including vastly greater physical robustness, and they're cheap enough you can have more total copies of all your data in various places. For software, I recommend keeping it simple, like use Gnu tar to make full and incremental backups, it'll be a very long time before that won't be available.
 
If the data you need to store isn't in the TB range then DVD/BR/MDisc is a simple way. Single layer DVD holds 4.7G and BR holds 25G.
If a lot of the data are videos then just burn them as playable discs that you can play on your standard TV BR/DVD player to make them even more universal in the future.

Optical media is low capacity and slow. But it has the advantage of you can burn it once and then forget about it as long as its stored correctly. DVD drives are basically free and BR drives are cheap enough to stockpile.
m-disc.jpg
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
If you have an uncapped internet connection then AWS is an option. They have incredibly granular pricing that borders on full spectrum autism.
Click to expand...
I'm concerned about political, competence and honesty risks from AWS, but both they and Microsoft's Azure have some cheap archival options, AWS Glacier Deep Archive in particular at $1 per month per TiB, Azure Blob Archive at twice that.

Pricing, well AWS decreased the autism for the original Glacier offering, saying it had previously better reflected their underlying costs. And one thing to emphasize is egress costs, these two companies' offerings only make sense for recovery from real catastrophic disasters where you're insured and getting your data back is a relatively small part the hassle and what you'll be spending in recovering from a fire, hurricane, whatever. Not sure there's any good client software for them.

At the opposite end of cloud offerings is rsync.net, which charges a lot for your at rest data allocation but nothing else, and it's extremely flexible in the clients it supports. Uses FreedBSD and its ZFS to offer snapshots going back seven or so days by default so that can help rescue a single accidentally deleted file if you realize it in time. And the company is the complete opposite of the above cloud giants, there's every possibility you'll deal with the owner at some point on random issues like billing, sales, tech support etc., he's a really good and hands on guy.

In between are a whole bunch of generally more questionable mid-tier companies like Backblaze and their B2 object store offering, Google which now has an archive option but it's Google, Oracle but it's Oracle etc.
 
Judge Dredd said:
My advice. Buy a USB sata dock. Then buy normal sata HDDs. No SSDs, but spinny/platter types. They're cheap and reliable. Use a half decent brand, and whatever size is going cheap. I have drives going back a decade, if not more, and they still work.

And because they're cheap and get bigger all the time, after a few years you can consolidate a few drives onto one, making for extra redundancy. I think I spend £40-£80 a year, depending on price and how much stuff I'm backing up.
Click to expand...
Unless they're somehow fucked from the start, HDDs can last way longer than most people realize, especially when unpowered. I had 2 old internal HDDs from 20 years ago. Finding a pre-SATA compatible dock was a PITA but I had no issues pulling the data from them.

Same with a drive from a dead laptop my buddy remembered he still had photos of his newborn daughter on after 10 years. I thought it was data rescue time, but the drive spun up without issues, not a single bit out of place.

---------------------------

Some tips for OP from personal experience. To simplify things for the absolute layman:

There's currently 2 tiers of HDDs. One are the cheap consumer-grade ones with SMR technology, and everything else. SMR drives are at least 25% cheaper per GB. They're reliable for long-term storage, but only if you plan on backing up your shit on them, disconnecting them, and putting them into storage.

If your use case involves lots of random read/write access and active use, like watching a movie while file sharing, providing cloud storage to friends and family or use in a NAS, avoid SMR at any cost unless you enjoy your drive frequently locking up while it dumps its buffer and re-shingles drive tracks for endless minutes on end.

For such use cases get an Enterprise-level HDD like WD Red or Gold, Toshiba MG09 and so on. Those are rated for much higher data througput, 24/7 usage, quicker access times, much higher MTBF and usually come with a standard 5 years of warranty. They're gonna cost a lot more per GB than SMR drives, but that's the sacrifice you make for performance, flexibility and reliability.

Also remember: Everything that's backed up in 1 place isn't backed up at all. Always keep an extra copy of data you can't afford to lose, ideally somewhere off-site.


serious n00b said:
Like what / how
Click to expand...


USB drives hold an internal charge that allows them to retain their data. This charge may last months or even years but it'll eventually deplete. When that happens - data gone. You can prevent this by occasionally copying the data to a new thumb drive to make sure it has a fresh charge, but they're still a lot less reliable than mechanical drives, especially for long-term storage.
 
Hathungor said:
USB drives hold an internal charge that allows them to retain their data. This charge may last months or even years but it'll eventually deplete. When that happens - data gone. You can prevent this by occasionally copying the data to a new thumb drive to make sure it has a fresh charge, but they're still a lot less reliable than mechanical drives, especially for long-term storage.
Click to expand...
That's not a death of the drive tho.
 
Dergint said:
r/DataHoarder advocates buying cheap TB/$ external hard drives and taking them apart to use in a NAS.

The reason I feel the need to specifically cite reddit is, if you are going to consider it, check there first which drives are "ok" to do it with. They call it "shucking" and I assume the posts there are just them confirming with eachother if a model is known to contain a CMR or SMR drive, but I'm not sure if there's more to it.
Click to expand...
Gotta be careful with shucking. Some need special adapters to integrate, some just stop working, and most are shit quality green drives anyway.

Research heavily before committing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom