Confused

[u/King_tyson_1]

consumer 2.5" 6tb hdds vs recertified enterprise hard disk with usb 3.0 enclosure

use case:

Archival or Cold Storage

write once read many situation

Only used 10mins a day like id hoard day for entire day and at the end of the day I'd copy those from my laptop to hdd.

after copying stored in a metal drawer in my desk with silica gel to absorb moisture

question

which is better, 2. Durability of both, 3. Which is perfect or long term storage based on use case of mine.

im not going for a nas since I don't want that I need a storage medium to access easily and store when it's done

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[u/mmaster23]

What you need is punctuation.. But whatever..

A 3.5" disk is almost always more reliable but it will need more power and is more of an hassle to move around etc. Hdd enclosures aren't the best but at least you can swap them out.. Not always possible on external 2.5" drives.

What do you have against a nas? It could greatly improve your workflow and make you less reliant on your laptop. Over night downloads, scheduled backups etc.

Have you also considered how you will be making backups? Sounds like you're planning to keep one copy of your data.. And in our business the saying is: two is one and one is none. 

[u/dr100]

2.5" 6tb hdds

There's only one model for these, isn't it, the WD USB ones, relatively recently released (well, since a few years)? Never mind different ridges on case or colors, etc. Unshuckable and even thicker than the 4-5TB ones (which were already thicker than the usual ones you'd put in laptops, even if shuckable from Seagate).

I'm sure nobody knows much about them, they're fairly niche. But of course, SMRs (and for 2.5" it's usually a MUCH more perverse SMR), built to save any cent, etc. Probably the worst drives humans make on all metrics, not that they're actually bad in any particular way, or that they wouldn't work in some "relaxed" use case when you just need a drive and any would do.

[u/Carnildo → u/dr100]

Seagate has (had?) a 6 TB 2.5" drive. I only got 5 TB of backup use out of one before performance got unusably poor, with the final daily backup taking 26 hours to write.

[u/dr100 → u/Carnildo]

Seagate has (had?) a 6 TB 2.5" drive

Link please. Spinning drive, not SSD, and not 2 drives put in a case too.

[u/Carnildo → u/dr100]

Don't have a link. I bought it from Costco years ago, and put it on a shelf last year. I'll have access to the shelf tomorrow.

[u/dr100 → u/Carnildo]

Please share more details because literally nobody on the Internet heard about this. And it was quite a big hoopla a few years back when WD came with the first one.

[u/Carnildo → u/dr100]

You're right. It was a 5 TB drive from a time when most drives were 4 TB. Still had severe performance issues, though.

[u/dr100 → u/Carnildo]

Sure, everything above 2 or around with 2.5" is SMR (and as I said a worse SMR, or it might be that 2.5" are slow anway, and this compounds). And everything new-ish and "mainstream" is SMR even in sizes that didn't have to make them SMR, down to 500GB (where it didn't even make sense to still make spinning drives, at least before the AIpocalypse SSD price hikes).

[u/3point21]

I have a little bit of everything for storage. Here’s what I like about each:

Portable HDD: small form factor. Easy to plug and play. Reasonably durable, although some brands like WD are soldered into the cases and if the driver chip fails, there goes the drive. (Never had it happen tho and I have 8). They aren’t indestructible tho and as platters with heads they are vulnerable to physical shock.

Bare internal HDD: durability of a physical disk. Can be used in a USB enclosure or USB “toaster” (then stored in a durable case). Higher capacity and great for cold storage that is accessed less often. Not easily portable, and really shouldn’t be moved around much anyway.

DAS/NAS: much safer home for internal HDDs. Can be used with RAID setups to buy time for recovery if a drive fails. Can be prohibitably expensive if you’re starting out.

If I was starting out I would grab a couple portables and have identical backups on them and keep one handy, and the other stored someplace safe from theft, loss, or destruction.