Hi I have a few 4TB Gen4 NVMe drives, which are fine. But, I'd like to buy a 20TB+ drive for storing images/videos a bit longer. What are the best options? I'll be using content on the drives infrequently so speed is not SO important. Thanks
If you're talking proper long-term storage, tapes. They're slow, but you'll not find better for price-per-gigabyte nor longevity. The downside is the drives cost a fortune... Otherwise, are you looking for an internal hard drive or an external one?
As above from Gareth. If internal, I always look at certified refurb enterprise Seagate with very low hours. They have usually been DOA, repaired by Seagate and are usually more reliable. Food for thought.
Sorry, not tape. Internal is fine. External is fine. I don't need to be able to move the content around physically. If I do, I'll move to ssd first. And SATA
There are "archive" drives for specifically this kind of work... but they don't seem to make 'em in "big." So, like Andrew says, pick up a couple of enterprise-grade drives and you're golden - they're all much of a muchness. Why "a couple?" Well, I'm assuming two things here: you're not planning on backing up 20GB worth of content; but that losing files would be an annoyance. So: RAID1. I have a much smaller 6TB mirror - plus backups, 'cos RAID Is Not A Backup - and it guards against silent corruption, which when you're looking at multi-terabyte long-term storage is a real risk. Is that file you haven't read in five years still actually there, or full of holes? I dunno what OS you're running, but I use btrfs for my mirror - it includes checksumming on both data and metadata, and if corruption is found it can automatically repair the file from the other disk. I run a scrub once a month, which re-checksums everything - so far, no errors (so, yes, granted, I've never actually found out if the "automatically repair the file" trick actually works...)
Windows 11. I'm not really fussed about resilience. If it dies, I'll whinge a bit and then get on with my day. But, I hear what you're saying.
Have you considered a nas with a couple of drives in a mirror or even a 4 bay with smaller drives in a raid 5? As others have suggested if the data can't be lost please plan a backup also. This could be as simple as a usb HDD.
I'm not really bothered about resilience. This is mostly to get them off my SSDs when I haven't had the chance/desire to review stuff yet.
Looks like there’s a good outline of your options already posted. The main question, which I think you’ve already answered, is “can this data be lost with no consequences”. If it’s data that absolutely must be kept and stored then you’re into NAS territory, with redundant disks, RAID arrays, and all that jazz. The criticality of the data will drive the level of redundancy you need; the more important the data, the more failure-tolerant the setup needs to be. Ideally you’d want unused cold or hot spares, in case a drive ever does go pop, and the ol’ reliable “3-2-1 backup” strategy is essential: 3 copies of the data, in 2 different locations, 1 of which should be off-site. Edit: And what’s more important than simply having the backups is testing that the backups work - a backup you can’t restore is not a backup. However it sounds like this is data you’re not fussed about losing. In which case… grab the biggest rust spinner you think you might need and slap it in the PC - job done. If you need portability then grab a USB3 enclosure. USB 3.0, 3.1 Gen 1, and 3.2 Gen 1 should all be fine; they’re all 5Gbps, which at the theoretical max speeds is just shy of the theoretical max speed of the SATAIII bus. You rarely achieve the theoretical maximum speeds in the real world, so you only really need faster USB (or Thunderbolt) if it’s an NVMe SSD.
Your limiting factor is the HDD itself. There's not a HDD currently manufactured (as far as I know) that can sustain anywhere near the theoretical limit of SATAIII or USB3.0. You might get half of it, if you're lucky.
Theoretically. 3.0, 3.1 Gen 1, and 3.2 Gen 1 are all 5 gigabits per second (625 megabytes per second), and the maximum data transfer rate you’d usually achieve in the real world, under ideal conditions, is around 3.2 to 4 gigabits per second (400-500 megabytes per second). SATAIII has a maximum rate of 6 gigabits per second (750 megabytes per second), but when you account for the SATA protocol’s data encoding that reduces the effective transfer rate to 4.8 gigabits per second (600 megabytes per second) - again, under ideal conditions. In reality you’re going to be more constrained by the spinning rust hard drive itself than the SATAIII bus - as @noizdaemon666 said, you’re unlikely to find a rust spinner that ever saturates SATAIII in the first place. And USB3 enclosures are cheap as chips these days - as long as it’s at least “USB3.0” (or whatever the hell stupid new name that the USB-IF comes up with next) then you’re good. There’s still a question of the quality of the enclosure itself, but if you stick to known brands - Startech, UGREEN, Sabrent, and so on - you’ll be fine. The usual Amazon advice applies, steer clear of the “smash your face into a keyboard and use whatever comes out” brand names
But, as a counterpoint, remember that USB has dramatically higher CPU overhead than SATA (which, granted, is less important now we've all got stupidly fast CPUs), and the caddies aren't usually designed (properly) for 24/7 operation and can cook the drive - especially if you're copying 20TB to the thing in one go. If you're never going to move the drive anyway, I'd go for an internal (and, indeed, did exactly that.)
This is true, and another factor - at least in terms of transfer rate - is the nature of the data itself. Large multi-gigabyte files transferred in contiguous blocks are going to transfer faster than thousands of kilobyte-sized files. But when it comes to USB enclosures, the question there really is how critical it is for this drive to be portable. If portability is an absolute must-have requirement then you have to take the risk of making the drive sweatier than it would like to be when transferring lots of data. It all comes back to a question of use case: what do you want it for, what are you writing to it, and how often will the drive be under heavy read/write load?
