What "hoarder hardware" are your go-to's?

[CableCat]

Shout out to all data hoarders! What types of hard drives and other equipment do you use? I'm curious what brands people find to be the most reliable for long-term storage of large amounts of data! Any tips you'd like to share? Please feel welcome to share! 

[Memory]

What brands are left there? I think all of them had their "failures". So do they really make a difference?

Those hard disks impress me, that still run perfectly after like 20 odd years of being in action. It's still the original 16 GB HDD in my first Windows 98 machine. Indestructible!

I'm not convinced with the reliablity of SSDs yet. In two years, I could give you a final judgement about that topic. At my workplace, the newer computers get equipped with an SSD, but the first one failed already after a couple of months. In the meantime, some HDDs died as well, but those 500 GB blocks were 10 years old, so a certain wear has to be expected.
Some other opinions would be interesting to hear on the topic of SSD reliability.

Horst Voelz, IT-scientist, concluded the best storage would be to put data on SD cards and store them in the fridge. I guess I'll stick to proven IDE hard disks for my data... they can get up to like 250 GB, that's plenty of space for backups.

[Melooon]

I'm not convinced with the reliablity of SSDs

Its been 50/50 for me! Iv seen one main SSD fail and one main HDD fail (Although when SSDs fail, they totally fail, whereas when HDDs fail, its often slow and you have time to recover some of the data). That said I have seen a lot of HDDs fail after they were removed from computers and left sitting for years; but Iv also seen 1TB HDs from the bargin bin in Lidl last for over 10 years. I think like most mechanical things, if you treat a HD with respect, and power it up every few months, it can last a very long time

For my own storage I use G-Drives, which as far as I know are enterprise Western Digital drives in fancy cases; they are mostly discontinued now, but you can still find them in some stores and on ebay. They are a bit overkill, but I just really enjoy them as objects; the cases are beautiful and its really easy to replace the HDs in them, so I'll prob have them for a long time!

I also run a program called DriveDX - it gives you real time stats about the drives and their health! Im not sure how useful that really is, but stats are nerdy fun (Apparently my main storage drive has been running for 22,200 hours and has been restarted 41 times and the coldest it ever got was 9c!)

For really long term large storage; Amazon Glacier Storage is really good - its intended for long term archiving and it only costs a few cents for hundreds of GBs. You essentially upload files here and abandon them; they give you a unique request key and if you send them that key years later they will retrieve the files and send them back to you after a few days. No one really knows how it works, but its probably some sort of magnetic tape storage! (There are also non Amazon alternatives out there, but Iv not tried them!) - I have about 100GB of Nightcore I backed up in 2015 on there  As well as what I call doomsday backups I make every few months (for use in the event my house burned down or flooded).

[BlazingCobaltX]

My current setup for family files is 2 HDDs and 1 SSD. The SSD is used near daily, otherwise I would prefer to stick with HDDs only. No bad experience, but HDDs feel more reliable in some way.

For my personal backup I only have 1 HDD. For this one I am still considering my options of online cold storage vs another storage off-site. Online storage has some safeguards but trying to update or edit maps/files (which I do regularly) seems incredibly hard on there.

A question for those with multiple backups: How do you update each of them simultaneously, so you don't accidentally end up with vastly different files on each? So far I just drag things around in the file explorer, with the risk of forgetting some maps that were updated.

[myleszey]

My family relied on a 500 GB LaCie external HDD for years before it gave up on us... Now since the family is split up a bit more and we pass around a 2TB Seagate HDD in addition to several smaller SSD storage devices for backups. The Seagate has some worryingly old cables though, and the transfer rate is inconsistent. This is all in addition to the dozens of 16 to 64 GB flash drives that get accumulated over time.

Personally I love the convenience of SD cards but have run into the issue that most SD card readers I've owned, internal or external, tend to be finicky and stop working much faster than any integrated USB ports do.

[grovyle]

I bought a Toshiba 1TB HDD external drive a few years ago. At the time it calmed my anxiety about all my stuff being lost forever if my computer stopped working, but now I'm scared that the HDD itself will stop working and I'll lose everything lol. Just how in cartoon boats they tape a hole and another one makes water pop out. To be fair, the HDD has been perfect so far, the transfer rate is great and I've had literally 0 issues with it. But I've downloaded so many Switch games that it's almost full!!! I've got like 70GB left!! So I might have to either change my archiving habits (ie deleting every game I complete, which would hurt but honestly isn't the end of the world bc I barely replay things) or buy another one.