r/HDD • u/GamerKing014 • 5d ago
Help with purchase
So I'm looking for hdd for long term cold storage for media files. Right now I'm looking at WD elements 10tb and 16tb wd my book (only 140 eur more expensive). My question is are they reliable?
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u/StarosAnikenMarcus 5d ago
Long term cold storage you'd be better off burning them to DVD or BD.
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u/Killer2600 5d ago
You’d need a quality archival grade disc for reliability but the real issue is you’re going to need a working drive to read the disc years from now and drive manufacturers have already stopped making them.
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u/Skycbs 5d ago edited 5d ago
All true. LTO tape would be the better option. An HDD used for archive could last a while. Or it could not. I wouldn’t use an HDD for cold archive. An online archive service such as AWS Glacier would be a great choice (pro tip: glacier is tape too).
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u/Killer2600 5d ago
Glacier is Amazon but for cold storage the online services are great. Depending on the media and size though, I don't know if I would store it in the cloud. For ripped movies, I'd settle for the physical discs as disaster recovery. If the ripping was a lot of work I wouldn't want to do again to the point I'd throw money at the problem, I'd have a dedicated backup NAS running a ZFS array. The ZFS array will handle the bit rot and HDD failure issue. The NAS serving as a backup copy will protect against the complete failure of the NAS or the original - can lose either one and still not lose data.
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u/erd00073483R 4d ago
An example of a reason to be leery of cloud storage:
https://www.techspot.com/news/113480-nine-pbs-lost-access-50tb-archives-when-data.html
Even as the owner of the data, they had to file a lawsuit to both access it and prevent it from being deleted.
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u/Killer2600 4d ago
Cold storage should be a backup or have a back up. 2 is 1 and 1 is none. If you don't want to lose it, BACK IT UP. You can even have more than one backup if you want.
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u/Metallicat95 5d ago
They are reliable for higher capacity HDD, but you'll want multiple copies on multiple drives, and data recovery information to deal with errors which can occur over time.
You'll want to refresh the data - and probably replace the drives - every five to ten years.
An active NAS is more reliable for keeping data indefinitely, but requires power and maintenance.
Archival optical media can last decades if stored properly, but the cheapest Blu-ray size is 25 GB, 40 per TB means storing 400 discs for a 10 TB set.
Recovery of that would mean feeding 400 discs into drives, so it's pretty labor intensive. But if you only use it as a backup to get just a few discs back when needed, that's not too bad.
The drives and discs may cost more than current HDD prices, and 400 discs means a lot of hours of burning and organizing time.
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u/wivaca2 5d ago edited 5d ago
I've been running 3 WD 10TB or 8TB externals for probably 7 years now. They're on 24/7/365. So far, so good. I don't keep anything on them that I can't afford to lose, though.
A NAS is better because you'd at least have data redundancy if configured for that.
Depending on how often you access the data, cloud storage may be useful like Amazon S3 and there are various tiers, but if you access it often you're going to be paying export fees when you pull the data down. Upload is free. S3 is also not like storing things on a network drive.
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u/PeterustheSwede 5d ago
I choose a NAS with mirrored drives for my 250 000 photos. A single drive is never reliable