External HDD/SSD Recommendations

New year, new resolutions, right??? Looking to revamp my home PC setup this year. Looking for recommendations for an external HDD/SDD for archival of photos sets. Speed is not critical, but I would like some relatively fast. Want something reliable that I can use for semi long term. I work in IT, so I know nothing lasts forever, but I would like to be able to reliably use it 5-8 years with no worries of data loss. Home HDD? Portable HDD? SSD? Western Digital has always been my go to. Looked at some GTech drives on Amazon, but hey had iffy reviews. Like the form factor of the Samsung portable SSDs. This would connect to a 2018 Mac Mini, so I prefer a USB-C connection. What do you guys use? Any recommendations? Anything to stay clear off?

More drives are still USB 3.1 (so you may need an adapter). If you’re wanting to stick with WD, the have the Duo series: I see they have a series that’s thunderbolt. It also has two drives for RAID backup (though I also think modern platter or SSD drives are amazingly dependable). For photos, a platter drive is good enough (I get around 100MBps with my platter drives)

JeffreyVB wrote in post #18995585
New year, new resolutions, right??? Looking to revamp my home PC setup this year. Looking for recommendations for an external HDD/SDD for archival of photos sets. Speed is not critical, but I would like some relatively fast. Want something reliable that I can use for semi long term. I work in IT, so I know nothing lasts forever, but I would like to be able to reliably use it 5-8 years with no worries of data loss. Home HDD? Portable HDD? SSD? Western Digital has always been my go to. Looked at some GTech drives on Amazon, but hey had iffy reviews. Like the form factor of the Samsung portable SSDs. This would connect to a 2018 Mac Mini, so I prefer a USB-C connection. What do you guys use? Any recommendations? Anything to stay clear off?

I love the Samsung T5 drives and use several in a "custom" backup arrangement. I have always purchased the refurbished 1 TB's from Best Buy. I was able to get one as low as $106. CrystalDisk info reported it had been used for about 6 hours. Having a neighbor that works for BB I asked about the "refurbished" category and was advised that the BB Geek Squad uses these drives for backing up other PC's that are returned for repair/modification/up​grades, etc Once the Geek Squad is done with the repair, the T5 drive is returned to original state and sold as refurbished. FYI, when I went to the Samsung website and registered my drive it returned information indicating I had the normal 3-year warranty. The 2nd and 3rd drives, were $125, about what they are now. Both of those drives reported less than 10 hours of use. Everything looks "new" except the packaging.

See https://www.bestbuy.co​m …k/6252145.p?sku​Id=6252145

The T7 drives have been announced but I haven't seem them yet as refurbished and I would suspect the supply of T5's would be used up before BB started using the T7 drives for their Geek Squad.

Both the T5 and T7 are discussed at https://9to5mac.com …ng-t7-touch-review-video/ or https://appleinsider.c​om …-upon-the-t5-in-every-way.

I've had nine G Technology drives for about fifteen years and had one die. I buy them in pairs so when the one died, I simply replaced it and copied from the matching backup. At $75 for a 1TB drive I feel like I'm covered.

My next choice at this will be a 4-drive box, probably this Mediasonic enclosure.

I've got four drives in a NAS box, and I've got two more drives in a smaller, older Mediasonic box. There are reasons to use NAS and reasons to use a drive box.

I prefer a drive box to individual drive enclosures because the drive boxes usually can give you some limited RAID options and are usually smart enough to respond to the power status of the computer. In my experience, drive boxes are more reliable than individual drive enclosures, not to mention more compact than several enclosures.

I'm most likely going to buy four 8tb Western Digital external drives, shuck the drives out of them (saving more than $50 per drive), and put the drives into the Mediasonic enclosure.

Consider a USB-connected (preferably USB 3.1 or later, for speed) RAID enclosure, set up for RAID 1 (data redundancy between pairs of drives) with two HD or SSD inside.

JeffreyVB wrote in post #18995585
New year, new resolutions, right??? Looking to revamp my home PC setup this year. Looking for recommendations for an external HDD/SDD for archival of photos sets. Speed is not critical, but I would like some relatively fast. Want something reliable that I can use for semi long term. I work in IT, so I know nothing lasts forever, but I would like to be able to reliably use it 5-8 years with no worries of data loss. Home HDD? Portable HDD? SSD? Western Digital has always been my go to. Looked at some GTech drives on Amazon, but hey had iffy reviews. Like the form factor of the Samsung portable SSDs. This would connect to a 2018 Mac Mini, so I prefer a USB-C connection. What do you guys use? Any recommendations? Anything to stay clear off?

I don't think anything will meet your requirements. 5-8 years with no data loss is virtually impossible. A disk could fail whether SSD or HDD, an enclosure could fail (they're built on the cheap), a virus could wipe the data, ransomware could encrypt everything, you could be robbed, etc.

The closest I think you'll get for archives is using AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive Tier, at $1/TB/month with versioning enabled. It's effectively immutable, it's stored in three different data centers, it's regularly checked for corruption and repaired from other copies if required. 5TB would cost you $60 per year, so costs more than a hard disk, but is a LOT more reliable.

Alternately if you just want good quality, buy an HGST drive, buy a decent quality dock, and run good incremental backup software. Of course, given this is archive not just backup and data may not exist anywhere else you should get two drives, a decent case, and keep one disk offsite. In that case you could do what I do, store medium res photos / videos on S3 as a second line backup.

tim wrote in post #18996190
I don't think anything will meet your requirements. 5-8 years with no data loss is virtually impossible. A disk could fail whether SSD or HDD, an enclosure could fail (they're built on the cheap), a virus could wipe the data, ransomware could encrypt everything, you could be robbed, etc.

Not at all impossible, just not guaranteed. I have not suffered a data loss in the last six years...but I've still been backed up in multiple ways.

tim wrote in post #18996190
I don't think anything will meet your requirements. 5-8 years with no data loss is virtually impossible. A disk could fail whether SSD or HDD, an enclosure could fail (they're built on the cheap), a virus could wipe the data, ransomware could encrypt everything, you could be robbed, etc.

The closest I think you'll get for archives is using AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive Tier, at $1/TB/month with versioning enabled. It's effectively immutable, it's stored in three different data centers, it's regularly checked for corruption and repaired from other copies if required. 5TB would cost you $60 per year, so costs more than a hard disk, but is a LOT more reliable.

Alternately if you just want good quality, buy an HGST drive, buy a decent quality dock, and run good incremental backup software. Of course, given this is archive not just backup and data may not exist anywhere else you should get two drives, a decent case, and keep one disk offsite. In that case you could do what I do, store medium res photos / videos on S3 as a second line backup.

Until this month I was using a laptop as my main PC. It's 640GB drive has not failed in it's 7 years of use. That may be an above average performance, but still common. An older laptop I have I installed a new SSD drive 6 years ago without a problem. Two Western Digital external 3.5 inch enclosures I have had also for 7 years, 1 of them has had some very minor data loss. Several 2.5 inch WD portable drive enclosures that are well over 5 years old have not had any noticeable data loss, although there may be, I just have not discovered it.
So from my experience, 5 years without data loss is more likely than not, using average drives, not best quality, with less than optimal cooling.
I'm not suggesting relying on 5 years without data loss is wise. I am saying though that rather than 'virtually impossible', it's highly likely.
I have multiple backups but have yet to need to use them.

I almost bought a WD My Duo enclosure until I discovered a deal breaker. I wanted to use as Raid 1, ie mirrored so I would have a backup.
However if a drive is removed, it cannot be read unless in a compatible WD enclosure.

So if you find you are unable to access data, fault finding involves buying another MyDuo just to have a device that can read the drives.
During Warranty WD will supply the enclosure, outside warranty you are on your own. You also have to try to find an enclosure manufactured around the same time as there is no guarantee earlier or later enclosures will be compatible.

If I have Raid 1, for any issues, I want to be able to remove a drive and access it immediately, not wait for warranty claim to be approved and enclosure shipped to me or have to buy another My Duo hoping it will be compatible with my drives.

In using PCs with harddrives since the first HD became available for the IBM PC in the mid-1980s, I have had 3 harddrive failures, ever...

1. a used 5" Conner Peripherals harddrive to supplement the HD in an IBM AT in the late 1980s
   
2. a brand new 3.5" harddrive provided in a brand new HP Presario desktop, about 15 years ago in the first year of use
   
3. a 2.5" harddrive in a used IBM Thinkpad laptop used by my stepdaughter while a college student, about 15 years ago.
   

Wilt wrote in post #18996293
I also had a WD external USB drive have a failure of the interface, and removal of the HD itself and transfer to a dock was 100% successful in regaining access to all the data on it.

Single drive WD enclosures no problem. My Duo enclosures - problem.

Yes, it's true that hard drives rarely fail, if used for a reasonable amount of time, but the requirement was "I would like to be able to reliably use it 5-8 years with no worries of data loss". No worries is not possible, because data loss is always possible. Anyone who buys any brand of hard drive and considers it reliable needs to reconsider their position.

That's why I suggested a reasonably reliable brand, plus an enterprise grade storage system for either the original files or lower resolution versions. I trust S3, which is something like 99.9999999% durable, far more than any individual hard drive.

My perspective is that I design enterprise systems for government and financial institutions that cover computer, storage, and backups.

In my own history of 3 harddrive failures in 30 years of always-on harddrives, that is a failure about every 7-8 years (statistically, I should have another harddrive fail in the next few years!). The way you can improve upon statistics, it would seem, is to power-on the harddrive and plug it in to add/read data but otherwise turn it off...after all, MTBF assumes operation 24/7... the less power-on operational time, the more calendar time passes without incident, right?!

The way to have 'no loss of data' is to have redundancy of data (more than one copy of each file), with off-site storage of an additional copy of the data at an archival file copy...so you have data recovery even if your house burns to the ground or a flood saturates everything and turns the harddrives to boat anchors in the water. And you can reduce your worries about data loss with additional copies of the data stored on different units, especially if they are stored in widely dispersed locations.

tim wrote in post #18996339
Yes, it's true that hard drives rarely fail, if used for a reasonable amount of time, but the requirement was "I would like to be able to reliably use it 5-8 years with no worries of data loss". No worries is not possible, because data loss is always possible. Anyone who buys any brand of hard drive and considers it reliable needs to reconsider their position.

That's why I suggested a reasonably reliable brand, plus an enterprise grade storage system for either the original files or lower resolution versions. I trust S3, which is something like 99.9999999% durable, far more than any individual hard drive.

My perspective is that I design enterprise systems for government and financial institutions that cover computer, storage, and backups.

Yes, I see that your response was, in fact, entirely appropriate for the OPs quote. With no backups, there should always be worry.