I suppose this depends on what we're talking about storing.

For media and general file storage, I use a couple NAS servers with internal HDDs in a RAID configuration. In the event of a drive failure, I can simply swap it out and replace with another.

SSDs I use on my PCs for OS and software installations, but not data storage.

One thing I've read is that SSDs will go bad in a couple of years without being refreshed. And that plugging them in doesn't refresh. But that couldn't be true could it? If that were really true, they would be used an OS drive as the computer would be unusable in two years. That doesn't add up. I've had the same office computer with an SSD for going on five years at least.

I have my main "server" loaded with spinning rust in a RAID config. this is my "master list" I guess
Then I'll also have backups of the data relevant to a particular PC on a partioton or hard drive on that same pc
e.g. my Win98 PC will have all my 9x games, drivers, etc where as my daily driver will have a backup of photos, docs' etc but not the old games.

I'm a bit cautions as all my hard drives have been pulled from old work computers so have a already done a good few years service before I get them.
Still failure rate is pretty small and still haven't moved across to SSD yet.

Ironically, last week I was moving some data off a solid state drive onto another drive, and it got to the point where it slowed WAY down, like less than 1 MB/s. I could read the files individually no problem, but the bulk transfer slowed down on those same set of files.
I reformatted the drive and re-wrote it all no problem (which I was going to do anyway.)
Not sure what to make of it.
This is why I have the same stuff on like 5+ drives and also on DVD. Backup to the extreme.

Re. SSDs

I needed a big temporary scratch disk a while back so RAID 0'd two old 2 TB SSDs together thinking this would be a fast and simple solution.

It was terrible. Writes were painfully slow. Unusable. I wound up using two HDDs instead.

I assume this is normal for old SSDs that have seen some use?

Best storage for... what purpose?

There are still decent hard drives for NAS-type setups.

But... the real issue is for backups/archiving. I have spent thousands of dollars on external hard drives to back up my NAS and most of them have failed within 6 months of the warranty end. Some suspect that there's binning going on, i.e. the less promising drives are being shoved in external enclosures and, oops, my 3 times per week backups are too intense a load. Removable media is dead. As you said, optical is not cost competitive anymore. External hard drives cost less per TB than normal bluray, BDXL is even worse. Tape is cool, but LTO is only available in an enterprise sphere at enterprise pricing. What's left... microSD?

Oh, why can't we have a modern iteration of a Jaz drive-type thing? I assume with modern magnetic media, you could shove a lot of gigs in that form factor...

(Also, when you talk external HDDs, are you talking 2.5" or 3.5"? I think the SMR plague has utterly infected 2.5" land for a long while now, but the higher-capacity 3.5s tend to be based on non-SMR NAS-class drives, I thought...)

I was primarily talking the 2.5 externals like passport. I think you are right, those are all SMR now. I was doing some looking around, and it seems like the won't tell you which it is, or even tell you how big the cache is.
Some of those Toshiba ones I have are maybe 10 years old. But they spend most of their time sitting in a drawer.

External USB drives are not a good choice for long term storage.

A few years ago, I had an external 3TB drive fail for no particular reason, within its warranty period. Thankfully, the data on it wasn't critical or anything, but that certainly made me think. I'm currently considering a home NAS with some redundancy as my storage solution.

I use spinning Rust and a Backblaze subscription. I have a NAS with 13.9 TB (1.63 TB free) and duplicate the data on a 14.5 TB HDD in my main machine. I manually backup everything from the internal drive to the NAS drive as I add items to it and then those same items are pulled by Backblaze from the internal drive to their servers. In the event that a local drive fails I'll copy from the other source. In the event of something a total local failure such as a fire, I will pull from Backblaze, in the event of WWIII I think I'll have bigger things to worry about.

As you can see though I'm getting to the point where 16TB HDDs are getting to be too small. I think it will still last awhile the only thing I really back up at this point are my GOG purchases and any games that are free from other services, my personal photographs and music. and backup images for all my retro machines. Hopefully by then we will have 32TB spinning rust drives for a few hundred US dollars.

ncmark wrote on 2024-08-31, 14:21:

I was primarily talking the 2.5 externals like passport. I think you are right, those are all SMR now. I was doing some looking around, and it seems like the won't tell you which it is, or even tell you how big the cache is.
Some of those Toshiba ones I have are maybe 10 years old. But they spend most of their time sitting in a drawer.

I think you have to assume it's all SMR and has been for years. I am trying to remember when it was (probably 2018-9ish), but I was setting up a 'server' in a Dell box with a 2x2.5" bracket and I thought 'oh, it might be neat to put a big huge 2.5 hard drive in there along with the boot SSD' and I went shopping for 2.5" hard drives and absolutely everything was SMR. Last non-SMR drive, I think, was a Toshiba model that was unobtainium by that point. I think my conclusion was that everything 2TB or bigger had always been SMR, and SMR infected the smaller sizes over time (i.e. because instead of doing 2x500GB CMR platters, they replace that with a 1-platter version of the 2TB SMR drive). And that's internal drives, at least some of which might be bought as boot drives for laptops...

As an aside, I think this is one reason why the last laptops with hard drives were soooooo slow. There used to be fast laptop hard drives in the early 2010s (my Dell L502x came with a 750 gig one that was grrrreat, I forget what model it was now), but they were all discontinued first and it became SMR boot drives.

I've been planning to upgrade my NAS for a while, but I don't think optical media are bad in some edge cases. Like using MDISC as a backup for family photos. Those supposed to last for a long time.

ncmark wrote on 2024-08-31, 13:44:

Ironically, last week I was moving some data off a solid state drive onto another drive, and it got to the point where it slowed WAY down, like less than 1 MB/s. I could read the files individually no problem, but the bulk transfer slowed down on those same set of files.
I reformatted the drive and re-wrote it all no problem (which I was going to do anyway.)

I had a flash drive do that, but it was a high-capacity and high-performance drive from a low-end brand. I've thought about going back to my old 8GB SanDisk (the 3MB/s wonder) for transferring files (mostly software installers) to my old computers (Windows 98 stuff with USB 1.0 or 1.1). I even still have a 512MB flash drive that works with no read errors or slowdowns, and I think some of that data was written over 15 years ago. I get the feeling that modern flash storage has a shorter data retention time, and there's low-performance stuff like SMR HDDs and cacheless QLC SSDs.

My backups have been going on a combination of a Western Digital 2.5" external hard drive and the hard drive I pulled from my desktop when I upgraded (both 4TB). I have noticed the WD drive slowing down as it fills up. I also have a Crucial X8 external SSD, but it's just for extremely large files (like my old VHS captures).

I use HDDs for long-term storage from whatever brand isn't popular right now (since I always seem to have the exact opposite experience as the rest of the world with every product I buy). For SSDs, I've been using Western Digital, but rebranding the NAND (Toshiba/Kioxia marked as SanDisk) concerns me. It reminds me of old DDR and DDR2 RAM that used reject chips and required higher than standard voltage to run at moderately slow JEDEC standard speed/timings.

If anyone is wondering, my dead pile consists almost entirely of Toshiba HDDs and Samsung retail model SSDs (OEM Samsung drives have been fine so far).

I held onto DVD for a long time until it became unmanageable

ncmark wrote on 2024-08-31, 15:13:

I held onto DVD for a long time until it became unmanageable

I still have hundreds of blank DVDs... which may yet come in handy for my retro machines...

I do as well 😉
I WISH I had got more while I still could

This is my personal way of storing data.

TLDR: My "daily drivers" are either NVMe or SATA based SSD and long term "shelf" and most other storage is done using good old platter drives, normally no more than 2TB at a time, except in my NAS.

That being said, I still use HDDs in my builds as "slow storage" or for data I'm going to be working with a lot where speed really isn't a concern, such as audio/video, text, images, and so on. I do this to extend the life of my solid state storage. I also store data semi long term on HDDs sitting on my shelf or desk, and always mirrored to at least one other drive if it's important to me. I fire these drives up about once every 6 months or so if they are not connected to my system, just to make sure they're still good. I still use HDDs for long term storage simply because if the drive does fail, they are cheap and easy to recover the data from.

I really don't use SD or flash storage as a viable long term backup for anything anymore, only for short-term use or a temporary backup. Though, to be honest, as long as you plug them in every so often, data can last for a very long time. I have flash drives and SD cards that have had the same data on them for almost 10 years and they still work. Of course, that data is only there becasue I just never removed it and, if it's important, is already stored elsewhere.

As far as optical storage, I still use CD/DVD, but not for backups, only to make images for older systems. However, I still have old pictures, software, and drivers saved on both formats from the 90's and into the 2000's that still work great to this day. That data is also on an HDD somewhere as well, but if the optical media is still readable and working, I see no point in discarding it. I look as it as just another backup copy.

Lastly, I do employ a mirrored NAS system for all of our most accessed data, and that system uses 2 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drives, way more than enough space for our needs.

In all reality, the only data I really backup long term (and offline) are financial documents, family memories, and my "retro stuff" (games, software, drivers, images, etc.). By "offline", I mean these drives are my shelf in a box , not connected to anything, making them about as secure as they can be.

In a way some of this is the point I was trying to make - I am not sure I would want to use any pre-made 2.5-inch USB HDDs now because of SMR. Not sure how much SSD can be trusted - would not have that AS ONLY backups.

One thing I have done as extra precaution. For every DVD data disk, I have all the files on that disk zipped and stored on external drives - drives of nothing but zipped folders. Those would only be used for recovery.
One thing that makes me nervous about external drives is that there are so many files you could accidentally delete some and never know it. I often put a textfile in a directory saying how many files should be there.
Of course, there is always this problem. If you delete a file accidentally on a "master" drive and copy it, the copies would also me missing those files.
That was the beauty of optical disks - once burned, files CANNOT be deleted

ncmark wrote on 2024-08-31, 18:45:

In a way some of this is the point I was trying to make - I am not sure I would want to use any pre-made 2.5-inch USB HDDs now because of SMR. Not sure how much SSD can be trusted - would not have that AS ONLY backups.

Is SMR actually unreliable though? I thought SMR was mostly bad for performance reasons on many write workloads...