I mean a backup of a RAID pool is likely just another RAID pool (ideally off-site) – maybe a tape library if you've got considerable cash.

Point is that mfg refurbs are basically fine, just be responsible, if your backup pool runs infrequently then that's a good candidate for more white label drives.

I have 50t of data total : archival, old project, backups, backups of my physical medias, etc

but then wd and their fake red nas drives with smr tech?

what else we have?

Elaborate please?

In my case, 10+years ago I had 6 * 3tb Seagate disks in a software raid 5. Two of them failed and it took me days to force it back into the raid and get some of the data off. Now I use WD and raid 6.

I read 3 or 4 years ago that it was just the 3tb reds I used had a high failure rate but I'm still only buying WDs

Can someone recommend me a hard drive that won't fail immediately? Internal, not SSD, from which cheap ones will die even sooner, and I need it for archival reasons, not speed or fancy new tech, otherwise I have two SSDs.

Hard drives aren't great for archival in general, but any modern drive should work. Grab multiple brands and make at least two copies. Look for sales. Externals regularly go below $15/tb these days.

Wait.. fake? I just bought some of those.

Mine have been going strong for five years. Ironwolf Pros.

Fair point. But still pretty bad. Literally two days after the warranty expired my Seagate drive was broken. This was my first and only Seagate drive. Never again.

Meanwhile my old Western Digital drive is still kicking way beyond it's warranty. Almost 10 years now.

Sorry but without a banana for scale it's hard to tell how big it really is

they were selling wd red (pro?) drives with smr tech, which is known to be disastrous for disk arrays because both traditional raid and zfs tends to throw them out. the reason for that is when you are filling it up, especially when you do it quickly, it won't be able to process your writes after some time, and write operations will take a very long time, because the disk needs to rearrange its data before writing more. but raid solutions just see that the drive is not responding to the write command for a long time, and they think that's because the drive is bad.

it was a few years ago, but it was a shitfest because they didn't disclose it, and people were expecting that nas drives will work fine in their nas.

36 Typical Bananas

That quite large then.

I wonder how many pictures of nude bananas you could fit inside??

Both Cyberpunk and BG3 work flawlessly on the external USB hard drive that I use. The loading times suffer a bit, but not to an unplayable degree, not even close

Thanks, yeah that makes sense.

Some models are quite a bit worse than average while some are on par with competition

If you're relying on one hard drive not failing to preserve your data you are doing it wrong from the jump. I've got about a dozen hard drives in play from seagate and WD at any given time (mostly seagate because they're cheaper and I don't need speed either) and haven't had a failure yet. Backblaze used to publish stats about the hard drives they use, not sure if they still do but that would give you some data to go off. Seagate did put out some duds a while back but other models are fine.

This is an enterprise drive, so it's useful for any usecase where a business needs to store a lot of lightly used data, like historical records that might be accessed infrequently for reporting and therefore shouldn't get be transfered to cold storage.

For a real world example, the business I'm currently contracting at is legally required to retain safety documentation for every machine in every plant they work in. Since the company does contract work in other people's plants that's hundreds of PDFs (many of which are 50+ page scans of paper forms) per plant and hundreds of plants. It all adds up very quickly. We also have a daily log processes where our field workers will log with photographs all of their work every single workday for the customer. Some of these logs contain hundreds of photographs depending on the customer's requirements. These logs are generated every day at every plant so again it adds up to a lot of data being created each month

Oh definitely, game sizes are getting extreme and I prefer smaller indie games now 🥲