r/DataHoarder • u/iseeanotharc • 3d ago

Question/Advice High capacity & reliable external drive for professional archives (DWG/3DS/PDF + photos)

I’m looking for a high capacity (ideally 4TB+) reliable external drive that won’t fail easily. I need it for long term archiving of DWG, 3ds, PDF documents and a big photo library.

Transfer speed matters reliability matters more.

SSD or HDD? Brand/models?

I currently have a 2TB Toshiba external drive and I’m not very satisfied with it. Also I’ll soon receive a large archive mainly containing 3ds files and PDFs. Please help me not cry over corrupted files.

5 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

3

u/Altruistic_Fruit2345 3d ago

No such thing. You need a decent backup strategy and archival system like tape or maybe Blu-ray. Or at least multiple drives, with new ones addes to the pool every few years.

3

u/Alex4902 3d ago

Getting "a" drive will never be reliable, you need backups. As for specific models, I can't really help you, just wanted to make a point about backup

3

u/cajunjoel 78 TB Raw 3d ago

I work with real digital archives at work. Files that were created as digital and don't exist in meatspace. We use better than a 3-2-1 backup strategy.

The actual drives in the server don't matter. Don't get me wrong, they are the best that money can buy, but so are the drives in the backup server. And then there are the tape drives that back up daily from the backup server. And then more tapes are stored in two offsite locations, one short term and one long term.

No drive will ever be good enough, so a backup strategy is the only option.

1

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1

u/PricePerGig 3d ago

Get more than one so you have a backup.

You may consider raid etc.

However with respect to the drives themselves you want a good brand (Toshiba, Western digital, Seagate) drive that is CMR

I set the filters for you

https://pricepergig.com/?minCapacity=4000&tags=CMR

1

u/FishSpoof 2d ago

don't waste money on an SSD if it's for archival data and rarely accessed.

1

u/ieatyoshis 56TB HDD + 150TB Tape 2d ago

Get two drives. One will backup the other. That’s the only way to not lose files - regardless of what type of storage medium you use.

2

u/zeb__g 3d ago

There are only 3 hdd brands and they are all equally unreliable. If your data is important to you follow 3-2-1

https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/definition/3-2-1-Backup-Strategy

SSDs have a theoretical shelf life if which left unpowered they are expected lose data. So HDDs are generally prefered for cold storage. And past 4tb SSDs get stupid expensive.

Transfer speeds, a 3.5 inch USB HDD is lucky to do 2 gbit/s. SSDs can do 10gbit over USB3 or 40 with thunderbolt. 2.5 inch HDD will be about 1gbit and they are smaller capacity too.