Backblaze has the best data on hard drive reliability. You'll need to buy your own USB caddy to put the drive in.
~~Even if you're not shucking, shucks.top has the current best prices for WD drives.~~
Edit: see @gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works's reply below, apparently shucks.top is gone.
Actually, read the notice at the top - looks like Amazon didn’t like it and shut down the api token. It suggests going to diskprices.com.
oh.. 😐 thank you for the heads up
Redundancy is your best option regardless- that said, when those western digital easy-stores go on sale, I like to grab them for offline storage. Something like rsync every couple of months and you have a decent second copy of your data to keep on a shelf. The $/Gig was hard to beat, I haven’t gotten any in a year or two, but there were sales to get the drives with enclosures for like $130 for 8TB. At the time, that was far less than I was paying for internal NAS drives. Since it’s not a daily driver, you don’t need super high runtime or performance.
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread