i want to buy a few hard drives for backups.

What is the most reliable option for longetivity? i was looking at the wd ae, which they claim is fit for this purpose, but knowing nothing about hard drives, I wouldnt know if it was a marketing claim…

  • rekabis@lemmy.ca
    0·
    4 months ago

    If you want longevity and shelf stability, tape drives are the way to go. You can get them in very large capacities, even into the hundreds of TB.

    Their benefit is that they have no internal motorized components, they are a lot like VHS videocassettes - two spools with tape. This makes them very shelf-stable, unlike hard drives which can have their spindles seize up over time.

    They also have absolutely epic data densities. You could store on one tape the contents of dozens of the largest hard drives currently available.

    Their downside is that you need highly specialized hardware to read and record them. And this makes the hardware quite expensive.

    So why don’t we use tape drives to store data? Because they store said data linearly - great for writing once, terrible for finding or updating said data - and because they are slow. You want to get to a file 20Tb in? Enjoy scrolling past every single byte up until that point.

    But for cold backups, there ain’t nothing better.

    • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      We recently researched these for work.

      They tick a lot of boxes - lots of space, reasonable speed, great cold storage figures. Reasonably priced tapes. Agree, they’re the best thing. The slow read speed isn’t quite as bad as expected (They can go extremely fast in seek mode), but definitely something to consider. We were okay with that for our needs.

      But damn, the price of the hardware was horrendous - we got priced (I think) close to £20k for a suitable drive that met our needs. Completely killed the project. And remember that if you’re doing site replication for DR, you’ll need at least two of them. Sadly, it looks like we’ll be using external HDD’s for a while longer…

    • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      Is there a go-to budget tape system that’s worth looking at? In the past it seemed like getting anything with reasonable density like 10TB+ per tape was so expensive I could buy like 200TB of HDDs for the same price as the drive alone.

      • dragonfly4933@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Don’t buy into tape. It is costly and is inferior to hard drives by most metrics for smaller scale operations. You can easily get 8TB hard drives for less than $20/TB. While tape is cheaper than that, the drive to actually use it is expensive, plus you get all the disadvantages of the tape itself.

        Fun fact: you can probably buy a whole server, external sas card and disk shelf for less than the cost of a somewhat modern tape drive.

        If you are wanting to store less than 100TB of data, it would probably be cheaper to use drives, then in 3-5 years buy another set of disks and still be ahead compared to tape.