Don't forget to back up to other additional drives!
Consolidating all your data into one drive is very convenient, but if you aren't backing it all up then it's only a matter of time until you lose everything. If you're gonna have a bunch of small drives hanging out you can use them as a backup. You could even set them up into a RAID, but I've never actually done that so i can't vouch for it
Any recommendations for reliable storage? I need new drives but I’ve put off buying any for years with all the bad reviews and counterfeit products making me weary of any deal that seems too reasonable or model with known issues.
I just did some reading, and while Seagate drives had problems around 2012 -2016, they seem to work about as well as any other drive now. I'd go for the best deal, personally.
I’ve had WD since 2008 and have never had a drive die on me. My 2008 drive is currently in my system and has a error, its my torrent drive and I had 1.5 Gbit internet and just thrashed the drive and she’s still plugging away. Had bought a 18tb WD Red drive and it was DOA and got sent back a UltraStar.
Recommendations are difficult, because reliability varies from model to model (even within the same brand) and there is no useful data until a model is more than a few years old. What we can do is follow the data available from an independent source with large sample sizes:
Seagate have always worked perfectly for me (knock on wood). And to avoid counterfeits i only buy hard drives from a physical store of a large retailer chain. You'll pay a little bit more, but really only a very little more, and you'll know that what you're buying is an authentic drive that came directly from the manufacturer
Yes I agree! have an TB external drive and a cloud backup on Dropbox (not my favorite but it does the job for now). I definitely need to get some better automated backup processes in place but it’s a work in progress.
"best" depends on the particulars of your situation. Cloud backup is one of the easiest but over time can be expensive. In the long run buying a second same-sized drive is cheaper than online backup, but it requires more money up front, and having the original and backup in the same physical location doesn't protect against local disasters like a waterpipe bursting flood. There are specialized tape drives for backups, which are cheap per mb and so you can make lots of separate backups which makes your data safer, but they're very slow to read and write. And there's other option too, like optical disks, raid arrays, etc.
Best i can really say is to do some online research to figure out what's right for your particular case.
Very interesting to know, but i just looked it up and it still seems expensive in the long run. Azure's cheapest storage tier is 1 dollar per TB per month. So 5 TB of backup would cost 60 bucks a year, but a 5 TB drive costs about 120 bucks. So after 2 years of cloud backup it costs you an extra 60 bucks a year every year vs. if you just bought a hard drive.
So, oddly enough, I rarely ever back things up. I will back up things that I absolutely cannot afford to lose, but other than that my general thoughts are to leave my data in the hands of the HDD gods.
Sometimes it’s good to have an unexpected clear out… But only sometimes.
I’m also aware that this could entirely just a “me” thing.
No, I do the same. I don’t really have backups at all. Some stuff I have in the cloud, but for convenience more than anything else.
I have my Windows drives encrypted with bitlocker, and I put the recovery keys in the cloud. I recently wiped the OS partition intending to retrieve the keys after reinstall, only to find the cloud provider is having an extended outage… So those drives are inaccessible for the time being. Maybe forever. I’ve barely missed them.
The biggest part of my data by byte is just media that I can redownload. I don’t have anything life-or-death critically important.
Kinda same, though I’d like to figure out how to make a raid setup to improve. Atm I just back up my absolute essentials on every drive, and my dotfiles on one (well, two including my install), my totally-not pirated stuff on another, etc. Tbh I kinda use “I can just redownload that” as a back up method lol.
I save hardrives from old computers because “i might lose something important!”
Im a digital hoarder. I back up my digital existence by buy a new harddrive big enough my old collection fits under like 10 percent of the new drive.
And keep all the old drives.
Theorically if the oldest drives are still readable, ill never have to worry about losing the oldest information to ransomware.
But ive been holding onto some data since before ibm released pentium. Im actually afraid to look at what i have from being a 12 year old on the internet without supervision…
Lol it’s so funny you say that. I got this because I’ve been wanting to consolidate 4 different drives in my gaming pc (about 5TB total). But as soon as I saw this I thought ‘why should I get rid of perfectly good drives? I can have 17TB instead of 12’. It feels like I’ve got the seeds of a bad habit growing lol.
Sounds like it’s time to get a NAS and make a RAID array. Btrfs, mergerfs, Synology’s SHR, TrueNAS’s multi drive size solution, and probably some other options I’m forgetting can accomplish RAID 1 across different drive sizes. Then your files are duplicated to other HDDs in case one fails. Then you can back up to Backblaze B2 to make sure you your data’s backed up off site.
You can do a mixed drive raid solution on Windows with Windows Storage Spaces and backup to Backblaze computer backup for pretty cheap.
This is the upgrade I’ve been planning going from a 2 bay to 8 bay NAS. My wallet is not very happy with me… But the homelab must grow.
Just don’t go all the way cold. Both SSDs and HDDs need to be regularly powered to retain the data stored on them over a span of years. As long as you occasionally access the storage volume, you’re good, but if you’re planning on leaving a drive untouched and unpowered for more than five years, the data might not survive even if the drive does.
For that kind of long term resilience, there’s really only tape drives and optical.
Yes, but hardly because they planned on it. Don’t use unpowered drives to store things! A safe bet is still a bet, data storage should not be a gamble.
I just recently went entirely HDDless in my desktop. I have a singular 10tb HDD external drive that I connect as needed, but I’m considering just moving it over to my NAS since all it does at this point is store dashcam footage.
Really? I haven’t had good luck with WD hdds in laptops and they’re the reason I target Seagate (hdds) or Samsung (ssds). In fact, I got 12 Seagates in my SAN. But admittedly, I haven’t used anything outside of the WD blue line up. Is the reliability that much better? My SAN and it’s hdds are pushing 10 years old and both were previously in use at a data center by a total of 8 Hosts so not exactly easy work. But I’ve admittedly replaced I think 4 hard drives in the past 3 years.
I’m fairly new to self hosting, barely three years into it, so my HDDs are not as old as yours. I limit myself to red WD Pros, so I couldn’t speak bout their blue line. Red Pros are great for my use, which is mostly a Plex server, phone and pics backup, and a few self hosted services.
Noise-wise I find them more comfortable than Seagate, as I can hear my Iron wolf running in my NAS, which didnt happen with WDs. In terms of reliance, my WD is just 3 years old.
Fair enough. It’s great to see someone else getting into self hosting. For me the Seagates’ noise aren’t an issue because the fans on the SAN are so loud anyways. Also it lives in the same room as the water heater, furnace, and AC anyways.
I don’t know what NAS you have, however, I’d like to recommend a few things. My SAN is capable of running docker (Synology RS2416RP+) so setting this up was admittedly pretty easy. But look into running Sonarr, Radarr, Jackett, and Deluge. If you’re running Plex, I assume it’s for media and these programs will help you get more. Sonarr for tv shows. Radarr for movies. Jackett reads torrent sites. And finally Deluge does the downloading. Message me if you’d like some more help with it.
Thanks. Yes, I’ve looked into the Arr suite, but I have not tried it yet because English is not my native language. I’m from mexico and, even though I watch movies an series in English, my in-laws and other people with access to my NAS don’t necessarily want to watch content in English. I’m not aware about whether I can make work Arrs with Spanish content, as I guess it’d be much better integrated with content posted in 1337x, for example, where English is the main language for most media.
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