i want to buy a few hard drives for backups.

What is the most reliable option for longetivity? i was looking at the wd ae, which they claim is fit for this purpose, but knowing nothing about hard drives, I wouldnt know if it was a marketing claim…

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Is there a go-to budget tape system that’s worth looking at? In the past it seemed like getting anything with reasonable density like 10TB+ per tape was so expensive I could buy like 200TB of HDDs for the same price as the drive alone.

    • dragonfly4933@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      Don’t buy into tape. It is costly and is inferior to hard drives by most metrics for smaller scale operations. You can easily get 8TB hard drives for less than $20/TB. While tape is cheaper than that, the drive to actually use it is expensive, plus you get all the disadvantages of the tape itself.

      Fun fact: you can probably buy a whole server, external sas card and disk shelf for less than the cost of a somewhat modern tape drive.

      If you are wanting to store less than 100TB of data, it would probably be cheaper to use drives, then in 3-5 years buy another set of disks and still be ahead compared to tape.