Question What is the cheapest data storage media?

[Red Squirrel]

I sometimes buy used drives but I'd never use them in production. They tend to be used as part of my backup pool or other situation where a failure is not really the end of the world. I kind of treat them like tapes.

Been meaning to fully redesign my backup setup though to make it more automated as right now they are basically just rsync scripts and the job needs to be sized appropriately for the drive that is assigned to it. I have lot of small drives like 1TB and under that would be too tedious to use with my current solution but a solution that supports spanning across multiple drives would make good use of those small drives.

 

[mindless1]

I'd buy a used (recent model) SSD but never a HDD. Makes me paranoid, all the extra handling and who knows what storage and acceptable pass/fail QA testing.

At the same time I'm a bottom feeder for new HDDs. Things have changed a little since my last HDD buying spree but I was just buying the WD Elements externals and Seagate Expansion or Desktop Plus Hub models and so far they have been a good value. Some I kept as offline storage and some I shucked the external casing and ran as internals. Crazy how cloud storage market make an external cheaper than an internal with same capacity, sometimes even the same drive but it was cheaper to get the extra hardware of the external enclosure and PSU for it.

I did have a Seagate 3TB external fail a year or so ago, but that was partially my fault because I failed to realize it was already over 8 years old. Time FLIES!

Point being, everything wears out eventually, especially mechanical things. I delegate my older storage to less important things and the important things, redundant anyway...

I wish there was some company interested in making a more affordable tape backup solution, like one that can use similar to VHS tapes but not cost an arm and a leg for the drive... then again, VHS tapes aren't as cheap/easy to come by as they used to be.

Point being, magnetic tape drives have longer storage shelf life, but the consumer space seems to have been ignored for this application. Even if it only wrote at 20MB/s, I'd be okay with that if it was something like a $100 drive and $10 per 10TB cartridge that had a good 20+ year data retention. Shot in the dark on that fanstasy but I feel like that could be achievable if a company realized a market for it in the consumer space.

 

[tcsenter]

I lost 5 seagate drives in the time i lost 1 renewed HGST He08 drive.
Which is why i never ever ever will buy anything seagate, including nvme's.
And seagate lately is in a lot of trouble by the US for selling drives to companies in china which were on the sanction list.

Remember back when Seagate increased the warranty of it's consumer HDDs from 1 to 3 year warranty, or in some cases up to 5 years, back when the norm in the industry was one or two years, and did a big media campaign to announce it, with one of the execs boldy proclaiming (paraphrase) "We believe that this measure reflects Seagate's confidence in the quality of our product."

This sent a bit of a ripple through the industry, with everyone asking other manufacturers 'so why are your warranties only still 1 or 2 years'?

Then not much more than three years later, Seagate quietly returned to 1 year warranties without a similar media campaign. When asked by media, 'so does this move similarly reflect Seagate's confidence in the qualify of it's product' the Seagate spokesman did a nice dance 'oh no, it really isn't a reflection of that at all'.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Point being, magnetic tape drives have longer storage shelf life, but the consumer space seems to have been ignored for this application. Even if it only wrote at 20MB/s, I'd be okay with that if it was something like a $100 drive and $10 per 10TB cartridge that had a good 20+ year data retention. Shot in the dark on that fanstasy but I feel like that could be achievable if a company realized a market for it in the consumer space.

TBF, NAS is where it's at. However, tiering is where it's at too, and some NAS are fairly good at that, with M.2 PCI-E NVMe SSDs, and large-capacity 3.5" HDDs.

What if, said NAS units came with your hypothetical tape drive, built-in. It would be network-accessable via the NAS, as well (to directly backup host PCs over the network), be able to physically backup the NAS, OR leave a tape installed, and let it do snapshots TO TAPE every N hours.

It could be billed as the ultimate ransom-ware protection, continuous NAS backup, etc.

I kind of like that idea, rather than putting a DAS tape drive directly into a host PC.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Tape is probably the best for cold storage, NAS for live storage including backups. The thing with tape is because it's sequential it's best if you have a single large data set that you want to write to it in one shot, and then partials with only the changes can then be appended to same tape or other tapes. I personally use HDDs like tapes with rsync scripts but been kinda toying at looking into tapes too for longer term archival. Been meaning to fully revamp my backup solution in general actually. I want something kinda like a corporate Backupexec setup.

I sometimes look at tape drives on Ebay, they're not cheap, but if you go a few generations back they are still within reach. Per TB the tapes themselves are also cheaper than hard drives.