[geeks] Disks: recommendations?

[Lionel Peterson]

This might help:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q2-2020/

Drive failure rates across larger hard drives in backup/cloud operation.

Ken

> On Oct 29, 2020, at 18:35, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
>
> o;?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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