Question I need a reliable hard drive for storing digital pictures and movies, advice please

[winr]

Does not need to be fast, just hold a lot of data and be reliable

I will only connect to a PC when I add something

Can be stand alone or installed in a PC



Ricky.

 

[UsandThem]

Buy an external hard drive enclosure, and then put in whatever size hard drive you need in it.

I use a Western Digital Red NAS hard drive in mine, and that particular drive has a 5 year warranty.

Otherwise, you can buy something like a WD My Book, My Passport, or a Seagate One Touch, Backup Plus, etc.

 

[Charlie98]

As always, with any file of value, one is none, and two is one. Backup your drive no matter what you wind up with.

 

[KentState]

As always, with any file of value, one is none, and two is one. Backup your drive no matter what you wind up with.

This is especially true for a drive that is randomly turned on/off just for backups. At least two is necessary in this case and they need to be rotated and periodically validated.

OP, I would also suggest syncing to a cloud service if at all possible. Even though I have multiple local copies, and one at the bank, I also replicate about 1TB to Google Drive.

 

[Charlie98]

OP, I would also suggest syncing to a cloud service if at all possible. Even though I have multiple local copies, and one at the bank, I

That's my strategy, but I don't do the cloud... but to each his own.

 

[Torn Mind]

There are archival hard drives.

There are also Enterprise grade hard drives.

The only good company left is Western Digital.

Those are the only hard drives you should consider for durability.

Desktop grade and the travesty that is unheatsinked externals are a recipe for failure and and opening up your wallet to a recovery service.

Yeah, the following cost $130 five years ago while the desktop grade disks only cost half that. But 44,000 longitudinal hours is good.

 

[Shmee]

The WD Gold I got is pretty nice.

 

[MalVeauX]

Does not need to be fast, just hold a lot of data and be reliable

I will only connect to a PC when I add something

Can be stand alone or installed in a PC



Ricky.

Hi Ricky,

Any external HDD will do this job for you, over USB.

However, keep this in mind: a HDD that is spinning up as its powered on, over and over, is going to take on much more physical wear & tear than a HDD that simply spins indefinitely and rarely if ever powers down. If you care about longevity, put a drive in an enclosure that is spinning 24/7, like a NAS that is always on. And if you care about redundancy, make it two drives in a mirror.

High capacity is affordable these days, you can get two 14TB drives for $200 or less quite commonly now. You're far better off with two inexpensive common desktop class drives in a mirror that never stop spinning, than a single enterprise class drive in an enclosure that turns on/off frequently.

What's your budget?
What capacity do you need?

Very best,

 

[Igo69]

Hi Ricky,

Any external HDD will do this job for you, over USB.

However, keep this in mind: a HDD that is spinning up as its powered on, over and over, is going to take on much more physical wear & tear than a HDD that simply spins indefinitely and rarely if ever powers down. If you care about longevity, put a drive in an enclosure that is spinning 24/7, like a NAS that is always on. And if you care about redundancy, make it two drives in a mirror.

High capacity is affordable these days, you can get two 14TB drives for $200 or less quite commonly now. You're far better off with two inexpensive common desktop class drives in a mirror that never stop spinning, than a single enterprise class drive in an enclosure that turns on/off frequently.

What's your budget?
What capacity do you need?

Very best,

Where can I get 2 14tb for $200?

 

[MalVeauX]

Where can I get 2 14tb for $200?

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-12tb-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-black/6364259.p?skuId=6364259&ref=212&loc=1&extStoreId=862&ref=212&loc=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzPKxuPC27QIV5_bjBx30vwBVEAQYAiABEgKAz_D_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

Shuck it and you're set. I have several of these running in my FreeNAS box.

Very best,

 

[dlerious]

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-12tb-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-black/6364259.p?skuId=6364259&ref=212&loc=1&extStoreId=862&ref=212&loc=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzPKxuPC27QIV5_bjBx30vwBVEAQYAiABEgKAz_D_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

Shuck it and you're set. I have several of these running in my FreeNAS box.

Very best,

The 14TB was less ($190) for BF. Not gonna get them for $100 each yet.

 

[tived]

Does not need to be fast, just hold a lot of data and be reliable

I will only connect to a PC when I add something

Can be stand alone or installed in a PC



Ricky.

Hi Ricky,

there is no such thing as a reliable disk drive or any form or format.

if the images are important to you for personal or or commercial reason, have multiple copies on different drives in different locations

copy 1 on the computer for easy access
copy 2 backup drive or NAS/DAS (local storage) but on primary computer
copy 3+ drive stored off site

this is what we would do in a photography studio

good luck

henrik

ps; buy a couple different disks, don’t use multiple disk of the same batch <not being paranoid ;-) )

 

[winr]

Thanks guys and sorry to not reply for so long

I like the 2 drives in a mirror and a second drive in my main PC .... they run 24/7

USB and an external drive as well .. will look into the cloud

I want to make sure my 13 and 11 year old Granddaughters have pics and movies of the Family

8 or 9 hundred gigs .. budget is whatever it costs

EDIT: true in my experience about running 24/7 or being powered up/sitting on shelf

All of smaller spare drives crapped out sitting .... the drives in my PCs that run 24/7 still are fine

2 of them are over 7 or 8 years old



Ricky

 

[MalVeauX]

All of smaller spare drives crapped out sitting .... the drives in my PCs that run 24/7 still are fine

2 of them are over 7 or 8 years old

Those 7~8 year old drives are ticking time bombs, it's not if it's when. You might wanna make sure they're backed up. Run a diagonstic to see how many errors and sectors and be prepared to see some numbers. Even if the drives last another few years doesn't mean the controller itself won't eat it or that a specific sector goes poof and corrupts a very important piece of data that breaks it. I know you know this, just throwing it out there since they have nearly life time expectancy already on their bones.

Very best,

 

[pauldun170]

Thanks guys and sorry to not reply for so long

I like the 2 drives in a mirror and a second drive in my main PC .... they run 24/7

USB and an external drive as well .. will look into the cloud

I want to make sure my 13 and 11 year old Granddaughters have pics and movies of the Family

8 or 9 hundred gigs .. budget is whatever it costs

EDIT: true in my experience about running 24/7 or being powered up/sitting on shelf

All of smaller spare drives crapped out sitting .... the drives in my PCs that run 24/7 still are fine

2 of them are over 7 or 8 years old



Ricky

For the hard drive, WD.
You have several options

Elements (Portable) - Simple and to the point. 2yr warranty
Elements - Simple and to the point. 2yr warranty
Easy store - Best Buy specials, similar to Elements

My book - 3yr warranty. Long feature list.
Passports (Portable) - 3yr warranty.

There are couple of variations but for basic backup....not worth writing a novel.

8tb drives used last year had a batch that ran obnoxiously hot so I vote avoid playing that lottery (unless you plan on shucking)

For less than a terabyte of folders, guesstimate your growth rate and go with whatever you price fits your budget.
2tb might seem fine but might suck if you have a year where you decide 4k videos for EVERY family function.
4tb seems like a nice minimum.

For cloud storage, a lot of folks have storage and don't even know it

If you have a Microsoft 365 account (Family or Personal) you already have 1tb of storage.
Pricing for growth

Personal Cloud Storage – Microsoft OneDrive

Save your files and photos to OneDrive and access them from any device, anywhere. Learn more and get 5 GB of free personal cloud storage today.

www.microsoft.com

If you are an Amazon prime Member you have unlimited photo storage and 5gb video


If not, Google One 2TB is $100

Plans & Pricing to Upgrade Your Cloud Storage - Google One

Google One has cloud storage plans for everyone. Discover what each plan offers, including access to Gemini Advanced with the AI Premium plan.

one.google.com

 

[winr]

I read where some of the drives are using SMR instead of CMR ..... any have a preference ??

Seagate shows all there BarraCuda Pro drives are CMR .... there 1 tb Baracudas as well

Do they even make 1 tb HDs anymore ?? ...... if you bought an unused one, is there still a warranty ??

Gonna email and see ..... also WG is adding PRO to the red drive I read denoting it is a CMR drive



Ricky.

 

[MalVeauX]

Yes, avoid SMR in general. Don't monetarily support that practice, as it's cheaper for a reason. They got busted slipping SMR into drives without telling people and the community lashed out hard and so they didn't put SMR in any larger drives and started labeling what was SMR. Most people using these big drives are not just using them solo, they're being commonly used in different configurations with other drives in arrays of different types. SMR is really bad for scaling with other systems like this. CMR is superior.

You will find very little HDD in the 1~2TB range because SSD is already there now. So the HDD market will be at the 4TB and up spot.

If you want good life span on your HDD's, ideal is CMR, high capacity, 5400~5900RPM (slower is good because it's less heat and pressure), working in tandem with some sort of redundancy, so operating in pairs or greater. That's for storage though. If you want a high capacity working environment, that's different, and that's where people are getting several 1~2TB SSD and going RAID on them for a higher capacity SSD speed working environment (mostly video editing, etc).

Very best,

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

I suppose backing up to a cloud service might be OK for additional storage you don't need full time access to. Keep in mind, if you don't have web access due to an outage, you can't get to that cloud storage. Also, I would not consider that secure by any means. What's out there is available to anyone.

I have a couple of backups, but probably not enough. Recently picked up a 4TB WD EHD (Passport I think) and am doing backups to that for now.

On recovery of a failed drive, no one has been able to answer a question for me. When a HDD fails and won't boot, there is at least a chance you can install it in another machine and read it to copy files from it. Failing that, you can send it to a recovery service who can remove the platters and read them in another system. Of course that's expensive.

But what happens if an SSD fails? Obviously there are no platters to remove.

 

[winr]

Just bought one of these straight from Western Digital, is a CMR with 5 year warranty

Have pics and movies on 2 PCS now, the WD Black drive is going in a new build and will get the pics/movies as well

Also, stuff is going on flash drive and the best blue ray disks I can find


Thanks for all the info and advice yall !!


Ricky.

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