datahoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Mechanical or SSD for offsite storage that’s updated at least yearly? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have about 100gb and growing that is critical for my business. File size growth is slow, so it will be years and years before it even gets to 200gb.

I have multiple local copies and a copy in google drive, but I want to leave a hard drive at my mother-in-law’s house.

I only want 2.5 form factor or smaller as my mother-in-law will be carrying it here when she comes to visit us on the city.

I’m not sure what the recommendation is. I’m not a millionaire, I’m just freelance. So, I’d like to minimize cost.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If you avoid QLC drives, keep it at a reasonable temperature, and don't use a drive that's had a large number of write cycles, it will be fine for a year.

I would definitely read everything on the disk yearly so the controller can detect any weak blocks and rewrite them though. A good way to read everything would be to take a checksum. You can then compare that to the previous checksum to make sure the files haven't changed too.

Mechanical drives have issues with long term storage as well. When hard drives get older, sometimes they will just refuse to spin up after sitting for a long time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

If you avoid QLC drives, keep it at a reasonable temperature, and don’t use a drive that’s had a large number of write cycles, it will be fine for a year.

Sounds reasonable. Maybe even use SLC, some enterprise grade SSDs still offer that.

When hard drives get older, sometimes they will just refuse to spin up after sitting for a long time.

True. I would recommend to replace them after 5 years or if they're frequently in use, after 35000 hours, whichever comes first.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

SLC drives would hold data for a very long time, but they are pretty much only available for industrial use now and come with an industrial price tag. Even MLC is going away, it's no longer available in consumer grade drives and getting harder to find in enterprise grade drives.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

That is true. I was shocked to see that mostly Optane SSDs with SLC are available nowadays (which are 'too fast' for archiving) and nobody else makes SLC anymore. A few years ago you could still find some.

Source: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hdssd&xf=16325_1