HDD Recommendations

[u/Diligent_Topic608]

Hi everyone. I’m a photographer, and I’m looking to upgrade/change my storage for a half decade of photos. I’ve currently got a Seagate 5TB HDD but it seems to be very slightly misbehaving, despite only having it a couple years and seeing mild usage. I know nothing is truly permanent, but I’d love a drive that doesn’t worry the hell outta me every few weeks.

Budget is <$400 usd, preferably.

I’ve seen the WD 8TB being recommended, is that a decent one to pick up?

I know virtually nothing about this topic so any wisdom is greatly appreciated.

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[u/5537__8008]

Alarms should be going off here. You need your data in 3 places, not on one drive that’s failing. Preferably, one location with redundancy, an external drive or another computer, and an off site location. I mean you could very quickly become a photographer with no photos.

[u/Diligent_Topic608 → u/5537__8008]

For a location with redundancy, could that be an external hard drive with cloud backup?

[u/trustbrown → u/Diligent_Topic608]

I’d suggest:
Local
NAS
USB
Safe offsite physical copy

Cloud as a tertiary but never trust someone else’s server with your work data, unless you keep a copy.

[u/Upstairs-Front2015]

Seagate Expansion 24TB External Hard Drive HDD

more expensive but better price per TB. it's a big 3,5" disk, not a tini tiny 2,5" disk inside.

[u/Uniqueusername610 → u/Upstairs-Front2015]

Yea but unless you buy two of them keeping one as cold storage and one has the every day drive you could end up not having a great time.

[u/Upstairs-Front2015 → u/Uniqueusername610]

the big disk is great for sorting all your videos by year / month. the smaller disks can be used as a backup.
the new disk is also faster, around 200 MB/s

[u/DoktorMeowMeow → u/Upstairs-Front2015]

I have a handful of Seagate 6 & 8TB HDDs. My thought was, I’d rather have several smaller drives so I wouldn’t lose everything if one failed.

Was I wrong? I don’t know anything about disk sizes.

Most of my data is MKVs and MP4s.

[u/lastwraith → u/DoktorMeowMeow]

You could roll your own NAS with OMV. Mergerfs to fuse all drives (minus one) into one storage target and then snapraid for parity on the last drive, which protects against bit rot and the failure of any one drive in the array. 

[u/Sudden_Welcome_1026]

I always recommend enterprise disks as they are just built better. Seagate Exos, Todhiba MG series, WD Gold. They are helium filled and designed for brutal always on workloads in hot, cramped, data centers. As a result, their mechanics tend to just be better built than consumer hard drives. Of course, any drive can fail at any time, but it gives me a lot more confidence knowing that these drives are the equivalent of F350 super duty trucks designed to haul around bricks and horse trailers and Im putting a couple of soccer balls in the back. 

[u/beermoneymike]

See if you still have any warranty left.

[u/zeeblefritz]

Don't depend on just 1 disk.

[u/icecream1973]

HDD = slighty misbehaving, buy a new 1 ASAP(!) & transfer your data before its too late.

HDD storage: as much you can possibly buy for $400 is the answer, especially since the current prices still will go up & up (example for a 16 TB seagate external HDD price gone up again with 100 Euro in 4 months).

WD of Seagate, it doesnt matter, what is possible for your limited budget.......

Note: keep your HDD drive health in check by using Crystaldiskinfo (free software), keep your HDD off when not needed (cold storage is best for longevity of your HDD).

[u/Diligent_Topic608 → u/icecream1973]

Thank you very much. I did just discover CrystalDisk and it said everything was fine. Suspecting I may have just had a usb port shutoff or a download just give up.

Still wanting to grab another HDD but the situation seems less dire at this point.

[u/icecream1973 → u/Diligent_Topic608]

In a couple of months you will be sad you did not buy extra HDD space as the prices will increase again & again......

[u/SirLauncelot]

I have a HD, ZFS NAS, BluRay x2 in two locations, and Amazon cold storage. Last just screwed me over and I lost it. They separated Amazon Shopping from AWS, but somehow kept a 15 year old phone number not even associated with the shopping acc7anymord. Then I couldn’t login to change billing. So many replicas help.