Hey gais, pretty much the title. So far I was buying HDDs every few years always having a backup, had some drives fail tho. Today I was visiting a local data centre and they are using these cool but expensive high TBW enterprise TLC SSDs, (Samsung, Micron, Kioxia).
I know shiz about data preservation, if I buy one of those, do you think they are going to last longer without failing? If I lets say give them a power up once a while?
But it’s probably still way cheaper to just swap bad sector HDDs.
Right now, two cheap 20 TB HDDs in a mirror. Use ZFS for the mirror and you’ll have ultimate data immortality. As long as both drives persist.
(RAID isn’t a backup.)
Two 20 GB drives in RAID-1 with a 3rd 20 GB drive as off-site backup will give you a pretty good level of data security.
It’s not 3-2-1, but it’s a lot better than just a single 20 GB drive. :)
That moment when you realise they said “TV” and you’re thinking in GB. You became old today.
TBW is a measure of performance/resiliency for drives being written to very frequently.
You use the word “backup” which implies infrequent writing. “Redundancy” is what we call duplication of data that is copied very frequently. Very different application. So how frequent are you making these copies?
In the 20TB range, a few offline HDD are by FAR the most economical backup solution, even in triplicate. As far as reliability, the MTBF of an offline HDD stored properly is vastly greater than the upgrade cycle. Even less of a concern with triplicated backups.
Instead of high quality expensive drives, consider more of the medium quality drives with more copies. And HDDs are much cheaper than SSDs at high capacities.
Those data centers need drives that are accessed 24/7 by many users simultaneously. They have perfect operating conditions such as temperature, don’t care as much about noise, etc. That’s not your case.
Consumers need consumer NAS drives, not enterprise drives.
The most economic and efficient way of storing around 20 TB of data is to buy an HDD and store it on that. Your best options are probably either a Seagate Exos X20 or a Western Digital Elements. Enterprise SSDs are possible options,but far more expensive than an HDD. You especially do not want to buy an Enterprise SSD, keep it offline and power it on occasionally.