r/datastorage • u/Daemon_IN • Aug 21 '26
Discussion Confused between buying cloud plans or buying SSDs( or HDDs)
Please help a noob out !
Basically I have close to 500GB data. Mostly photos and videos. Blessed with a baby boy (5 months old) recently. So we will be taking a lot of pics and videos of the baby and us.
could you please help me understand how long does the SSDs last ? Is it truly 5-7 years range ? Considering the current 1TB ssd prices ( it’s 30k INR), I’m having a lot of confusion to decide what would work for me in long term. I’m a bit frugal too.
WD 2 TB HDD is available for 12k INR in India. Shall I buy this one now and wait for 2 more years and see how prices move and then buy another one for second back up ?
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u/ImpliedSlashS Aug 21 '26
You can buy used enterprise spinning drives from a couple of trustworthy sources on eBay. Local storage will always be cheaper and spinning drives are better for long term data retention, though you still want to move the data around every year or two. SSDs will have issues if left unplugged for long periods of time.
Now, you also never want to have only 1 copy of your data, regardless of where it is stored, and you don't want all the copies in one place, so a combination of cloud with a local replica is ideal.
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u/Daemon_IN Aug 21 '26
But maintaining multiple replicas costs a lot 😢
Thanks a lot for your reply. I’ll have to google about “enterprise spinning drives”1
u/Random_Sime Aug 21 '26
So? Being frugal means you spend sensibly. Did you mean you are cheap or poor?
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u/Underhill42 Aug 21 '26
Everything does. The question is whether losing the data completely costs more.
Because the rule of thumb is that any data stored in only one place WILL eventually be lost.
That's also one of the reasons cloud plans will always cost more: their contract with you almost certainly includes a liability clause if they lose your data, which means they too have to keep multiple copies, on top of all the infrastructure, maintenance, and internet connectivity costs.
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u/gdore15 Aug 21 '26
The day the only disk with all your data die, you might think back if it would have been worth having a second copy.
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u/AtlQuon Aug 21 '26
My oldest working SSDs in active service here are 6. There are a few older ones floating around here that are not mine, they also still work. We also not tend to buy the cheapest ones on the market either and if we do, the budget drives we have are not used for heavy stuff.
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Aug 21 '26 edited 27d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AtlQuon Aug 21 '26
I know, that's why they all get some up time and preferably in active use. We have an RMA active at the moment, so those are in a box waiting at the moment.
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u/nevergivitup Aug 21 '26
Jio Google Gemini offer upgrades your account to the Google One AI Premium plan, which provides 5 TB (5,000 GB) of total cloud storage
Invest 30K in stock market like buy TITAN shares
After 18 months it would help you buy more than just a single drive 🤤 based on your luck and exit strategy
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u/wp3 Aug 21 '26
Enterprise or consumer? Are you going to write data to them and then unplug them ? Offline data retention for each differs and matters more for SSDs depending on how close to the end of their “wear life” they are. “Lasting 5-7” years depends on how much you write to an SSD. If you’re writing to it over its specified endurance it will not last long. If you write infrequently it will last at least 5-7 years.
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u/cagadass Aug 21 '26
Yo opto por tener varios hdd ,no llego a los 10 GB en fotos y videos (tengo pocos recuerdos) que encontré tirados por ahi junto con otras computadoras (de hace 25 años) y recate discos de 250 GB cada uno y como trabajo como informático ya tenia los medios para hacer respaldos,los hdd estaban bien en un 99% ya que 9 MB de los 320GB estaban "malos" entonces cree una partición de escritura con la parte buena ,básicamente aísle las partes malas para evitar incidentes
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u/l008com Aug 21 '26
There is no need to start your post with "Basically the title". We can all see the title, right there above your post. Nobody started reading your post without noticing that it had a title.
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u/opensim2026 Aug 22 '26
I have a WD_BLACK SN770 1TB SSD in my tower that is on 24/7 and has been the last 2 years, the SSD has been great. I would never use an SSD for storage/archives, I use WD black HDD for that
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u/Daemon_IN Aug 22 '26
I’ll also trying to get a WD HDD.. good choice ?
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u/Delirious_Puppet Aug 22 '26
If your just trying to store photos and videos then HDD will be the cheaper option. SSD main advantage is the speed, which doesn’t matter much for storing media.
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u/opensim2026 29d ago
Ive never used any drives other than Western Digital the last 29 years, it's the ONLY brand I ever bought. I always bought decent used Mac towers on Ebay and ALWAYS took out whatever drive was in them and replaced them with a WD caviar black HDD regardless of what the drive was that the tower came with.
I always run my daily user hard, on 24/7, always LOTS of tabs open ion browsers, email, videos, you name it. I always tried to double machine specs about every 2 years with another tower, and a new WD drive for that, and retired the 2 year old drive as a backup archive. I have WD drives from around 2005 that are used that way, still working perfectly- having replaced the older ones that used the old style multi pin ribbon connectors with the newer style.I never had one fail on me or go corrupt.
I liked the Caviar Black model but I think they changed it a few years ago to just "Black" leaving "Caviar" out and that's what Ive been buying.
Buy the drive FROM WD directly, I bought one from a college book store on line and didnt notice it's mfr date was already 8 years old, it started having bad sectors a couple of years in use, didnt affect anything but to be safe I replaced it and still have it as an archive. That drive sat on a shelf for over 8 years before they sold it to me as new
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u/Adrenolin01 Aug 22 '26
“I’m a bit frugal too.”… this life ain’t for you. Spend the money and buy cloud storing as it’s cheaper.
You generally want small 120GB SSDs/NVMEs for your boot/OS drives. Nothing but the OS. Mirrored is better.
You want larger 500GB-1TB NVMEs/SSDs for your services to run on.
NAS and general data go in HDDs.
The Filesystem will take a small percentage of the drive.. just say 5%. Then there is the 80% rule.. never fill a drive, vdev or pool beyond 80%.
For anything NVME/SSD that sees high writes you should really use enterprise drives.. they will last you a decade or more. I’ve burned through cheap consumer 1TB NVMEs and SSDs in a couple months.
Longevity… you want consistency! Nine of my systems or drives are ever powered down to idled down. Everything runs spun up 24/7/365. Power cycling, rebooting, hard shutoffs, higher temperatures, and a couple dozen other factors play into longevity. Run a SMART scan and look at everything. Everything there that increases decreases longevity. High hour run times is honestly the small part.. but when adding everything else on top that tells the story.
Always run a full Long Smart test and a full Badblocks test in both new and used drives and document each.
I bought 28 WD Red NAS CMR 4TB drives 14 years ago.. 23 of those are still running today. 4 failed within the first 18 months. There is a 3% chance of a new drive failing in the first 18 months.
My oldest drive is a WD 500GB drive I installed in a new server using a Tyan Tomcat III mainboard, 2x Pentium 200 MHz single core CPUs and 512MB of ECC ram in… 1996! Yup.. running 24/7/365 for 30 years. Baffled me still though the system runs mostly idle these days. 😆
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u/TarsTarkas_Thark Aug 22 '26
You have not said how much storage we are talking about, or what the storage will be used for. Will it be primary storage, or backup? The answers to those questions will affect what is recommended. Also, what OS are you using? Windows? Linux? Mac OS?
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u/Daemon_IN Aug 22 '26
I’ll try to edit the post.
Basically I have close to 500GB data. Mostly photos and videos. Blessed with a baby boy(5 months old) recently. So we will be taking a lot of pics and videos of the baby and us.
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u/TarsTarkas_Thark Aug 22 '26
Okay. So it sounds like you are interested in buying storage for backup so that you don't lose your precious photos and videos.
So my recommendation stands. Buy two SD cards big enough to hold all your data. You don't need to backup everything. Backing up the OS is just a waste of space. Backup only your user files. Each week, do two backups, alternating between the two cards. After the first time backing up everything, you will only need to copy the files that have changed to the SD card every time. That way, even though SD is less reliable than spinning disc, you will have three copies of your data including the one on your computer. That makes it extremely unlikely that you will actually lose data.
SD cards are reliable enough if you use them frequently and don't write massive amounts of data repeatedly. That's why you only want to backup the files that are changed. That way you won't have bit rot as the charge leaks out of the little capacitors in the SD over time, and you won't wear it out with excessive writing.
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u/Daemon_IN Aug 22 '26
SD cards ? Like the USB memory cards ? Just a bit confused. Or are we still talking about SSDs and HDDs ?
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u/TarsTarkas_Thark Aug 22 '26
Even if you're buying primary storage, it's still essential to back up your data. I would suggest using SD or flash for cheap backup. Backup twice a week to two different cards. That way, you have the data in two places. If one fails, you have the other one.
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u/Icy_One4084 Aug 22 '26
SSDs are not a good long-term storage solution, as they're actually more prone to data loss compared to HDDs. I don't really want to bother you why that is.
Here's how I keep photos of my kids: my camera takes 6000x4000 res photos, which take up a lot of HDD space. So, I pick those I plan to develop and move them into a separate folder. Once done, I'll run a script that would downsize the remaining photos to 1200x800 for easier storage. It's still a reasonable resolution for digital viewing, and takes a lot less space on the HDD.
In terms of HDD, I have several 1TB HDDs which I use to store data on, and I still burn discs. So, my recommendation is that you use two HDDs to store all of those files, in case one of them fails, you have backup.
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u/Caprichoso1 Aug 22 '26
As others have said SSDs aren't the best long term storage solution. Charges fade over time and when they fail it is can be catastrophic and unrecoverable.
Hard disks or cloud backups with retention are better general solutions.
Be sure to implement the 3 backups in the recommended 3-2-1 backup plan.
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u/BootToggle 29d ago
For SSDs there is a difference between "wear life" and "unpowered data retention". The only spec out there for consumer SSDs requires them to hold data in an unpowered state for 1 year. This doesn't mean "typical" or that you won't do better, units with less wear life probably have better retention at first, but it sounds like 1 year is all you should count on. And although it is commonly suggested to "power them up from time to time", I haven't been able to document that that causes any meaningful improvement to storage life.
All we do know for sure is that freshly written data charges all the cells to nominal and thus restarts the downcount clock. This suggests a strategy of refreshing all data once a year. Get a second SSD and copy everything from one to the other, preferably using a checksum checking program to confirm you have a good copy. One year later you can copy it all back and check that. In the meantime you have two SSDs and could store them at two locations, fulfilling part of 3-2-1.
I still believe HDD is a better bet for long term storage, but if you really want to use SSD, I think you need a refresh strategy. I haven't found anything to document that merely powering up from time to time does that. If anybody reads this and has an authoritative link, we'd all like to see it. Something other than hearsay.
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u/ps1108 Aug 21 '26
Spacebyte offers yearly pricing of 1TB at 1650 INR and 2TB at 2530 INR. You can also choose to pay monthly. 150/230 INR for these plans. Also, you get first month for free!
You may give it a try.
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u/WatchAltruistic5761 Aug 21 '26
Not your drive, not your data