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Whatever you choose, make sure you have backups. Plural, ideally with at least one set offsite, physical or cloud.
Do you have any advice that's a bit more specific? For my case which is primarily writes and few reads and no constant power source.
Buy on price and/or warranty. With the warranty being the only guarantee of being made whole in product during that period.
For your use, an SMR drive is feasible since their original intention is exactly what you're proposing, write few, read many. But there are actually very few consumer SMR drives on the market and they're not necessarily cheaper than non-SMR drives.
https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY
https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/ap-en/company/news/news-topics/2020/04/storage-20200428-1.html
In addition, all 2.5" premade externals >500GB are SMR.
Mantras:
No such thing as good, better, best drives for consumer use. Too many variables.
Any hard drive/storage device can fail at any time, for any reason, at any time without notice.
In my opinion, the best way would be to create CDs/DVDs. They have a life expectancy of 100+ years. Even some new SSDs have an estimated life expectancy of ~10 years. I think the physical media adds a nice touch to this type of endeavor. It's super easy to do!
M-DISC's design is intended to provide archival media longevity. M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.
If you want long-term reliability, you don't want spinning rust.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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