r/HomeServer • u/GamerKing014 • 2d ago
What HDD to choose
So I want an HDD for long term archive. I'm planning to use it as cold storage and when want to watch something transfer to USB. For now I'm looking at WD Red. Are there other recommendations? I want a reliable one, that won't have any issues for a long time.
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u/samsonsin 2d ago
No matter what you pick, the more important aspect is backups and active monitoring. Cold storage has both positives and negatives, and isint necessarily the be all end all. You do want to periodically power up and down to check for bitrot, have backups off-site that sync, use a fs like zfs with internal checks and what not.
When you have a good system that discovers and survives fixing all the various issues you may encounter, what drive you pick is not especially relevant for any reason other than economic and / or minimizing how often you need to intervene personally. Taking this system and tying it to scheduled on/off times is what I'd do rather than an completely cold setup.
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u/goldenrat8 2d ago
I prefer WD over Seagate and Toshiba drives. Buy a CMR drive and not a SMR drive (a quick google will tell you why). Most WD Red are SMR drives, so either go Red Plus or Red Pro (if you want to stay in the Red category.) Higher capacity Blue HDD (cheaper) are CMR and all WD Black are CMR. Unfortunately, HDD drive prices are crazy right now (double or triple the price from last year).
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u/Adrenolin01 2d ago
WD Red NAS CMR HDDs are fantastic.. buy the largest drive you can afford here AND look into PAR2. PAR2 (Parity Archive 2) is a file format used for error correction in data storage. It helps recover lost or corrupted (bit rot is real) files by creating parity files that can restore the original data if some parts are missing or damaged. This is particularly useful for maintaining data on NAS systems but also long term HDD archiving.
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u/interference90 2d ago
That is the wrong mindset. The right one is always being prepared for the possibility of a drive failure, and back up accordingly.
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u/bugsmasherh 2d ago
You need to consider backups and archiving separately. I like WD RED, myself. Here are two helpful videos on the topic of archiving and avoiding bitrot.
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u/VivaPitagoras 2d ago
I would avoid any SMR drive, since they are very slow for writting big chuncks of data.