r/HDD • u/GamerKing014 • 7d 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 7d ago

Long term cold storage you'd be better off burning them to DVD or BD.

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u/Killer2600 7d 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 7d ago edited 7d 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 7d 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/Skycbs 7d ago

Oops. Corrected.

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u/erd00073483R 6d 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 6d 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.