Anyone got any recommendations or warnings about specific hdd / ssd / storage brands or models at the moment? Thinking about buying another drive instead of being smart and cleaning up my files. I’ve been pretty happy with Samsung but I’ve heard they had a clunker of a drive with high failure rates lately. HDD, SSD and I think I have an extra spare M2 nvme slot on my motherboard, so all recommendations are welcome. Price isn’t a huge concern, but I don’t feel the need to drop a thousand dollars on a single 22TB drive, anything 5TB and above will do fine for now.
If data reliability is high on your list, but speed is not, use a NAS running RAID 1 (mirrored drives), so one drive can fail without compromising the data.
I used to do RAID 5 on an 8 drive array, but had a failure of the NAS motherboard. And wouldn’t you know it, they didn’t make that model anymore. No easy way to get the data back out of the RAID. I finally paid to recover the data, but learned my lesson. It’s MUCH cheaper to buy duplicate drives than it is to recover data later. If the RAID motherboard failed tomorrow, I would pop the working drive in my computer and it would just work.
Using drive mirroring pretty much eliminates the concern over premature drive failure. If it’s in warranty, pop out the bad drive and send it in for repair/replacement. The NAS will still work. Buy another drive or wait with sweaty palms until the faulty drive is fixed. Rebuild the array.
I’ve always considered doing a raid array but the cheapness of remote servers these days makes it feel like overkill combined with being expensive and centralized. I just have an external enclosure and a mess of duplicate files across smaller outdated drives at the moment. It’s not ideal, but that’s ADHD for you.