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 🥲

Three companies, kept track, but not after I left. It was always funny to me that they bought out Atlas and Maxtor. "Of course they did. Why not dominate the market on shitty drives? lol" I am surprised they hadn't bought Deskstar.

All over the map: Barracuda, SkyHawk, Ironwolf, Constellation, Cheetah, etc...

I'm gonna need like 6 of these

My WD Red Pros have almost all lasted me 7+ years but the best thing (and probably cheapest nowadays) is a proper 3-2-1 backup plan.

Word for the wise, those externals usually won't last 5+ years of constant use as an internal.

I've had a couple random drop from my array recently, but they were older so I didn't think twice about it. Does this permafry them or can you remove from the array and reinitiate for it to work?