[geeks] Disks: recommendations?

[Mouse]

I've been doing cold backups to disks for a while, now, and I'm looking
at increasing my backup size.

This leads me to wonder what disks I want.  I found a work machine that
could use today's Web and tried to do a little research.  (Work machine
for reasons I can babble about if anyone cares, but discussing that now
would turn this into something of a rant.)  Based on what little I can
find - my Web skillz are strictly half-assed - what I want does not
seem to be something disk makers tend to have a line for.

I back up everything live - every write mirrored over the net - to a
backup drive in one of my machines.  That drive is itself similarly
backed up to another drive.  *That* drive is swapped out, once a month.
The drive pulled every January 1st is kept forever; the rest are
recycled after a year.  I try to have 13 or so of them in the cycle, so
I don't end up using the same 11 drives over and over while writing new
ones once and shelving them.

At the moment, my live backup disk is a "1T" (really about 931G) drive
and the drives I've been copying that (and a few other things) to for
cold storage have mostly been "2T" WD Reds.

I want to move to a "2T" drive for the live backups and something
bigger, like 3 or 4 disk-manufacturer-shrunken T, for the offsite cold
backups.  So, my use case is, write for a month, shelve for about a
year, repeat; eventually, shelve as a permanent backup.  (Of course, as
I hope we all know, no backup is truly permanent; at some point I'll
need to reread the old backups and write them to new media.)

This means I want long-term powered-down reliability, mostly writing
when powered up, with performance close to the last consideration.  But
the long-warranty drives I can find tend to give high-end performance
as well.  And I've found nearly a factor-of-two price difference across
different makers and different models for the 3-4 T range, which leads
me to wonder.

Have I missed something?  Is there someone who makes a drive tuned for
this?  In any case, does anyone have any thoughts they'd care to share,
recommendations positive or negative, or the like?

So far, I've avoided SSDs.  Spinning rust is good enough that the
benefits of solid-state do not outweigh the price, especially given the
wearout behaviour of SSDs.  But if someone really does think SSDs are a
right answer for my use case, I'd be interested in hearing the
reasoning behind it.

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