Passport Drives Anything which is 100% reliable?

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Vikas

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Every single one on Amazon regardless of brand has about 10% bad reviews and they all involve data loss! All I want is to be able to preserve the videos and photos. It is quite a pain to convert older analog videos in to digital format and I can not afford to lose them. I am looking for 2TB drive, so purchasing cloud storage is NOT an option. I suppose I could buy two different brands and back the data to both the drives and also have it spinning on the local computer to have the redundancy. May be that is the only reasonable solution. The drive would be used only occasionally to add to it once it is loaded with the archived stuff. That should minimize the chances of failure.

I do not believe that solid state drives would minimize my risk as I am really looking for very long term storage aka lifetime! At least hard drives do not die sitting on the shelf. The solid state drives have not been around long enough to know if they would rot or not. I could be totally irrational about that though!
 
You need to look at an RAID ARRAY of hard drives. I sold data backup systems like these to major companies in the Western U.S. They "stripe" your date across more than one drive-much safer data storage.

You can search RAID on Amazon to see what I am referring too.
 
In 20 or 30 years the buss structure of the computers that will exist probably will not mate with any hard drive you could buy today. Think about it, if you had a hard drive from a computer that is 20 or 30 years old, would you be able to connect it to any computer made today? No way.

So, you might want to consider what computer you could purchase today that will have a chance of still powering up 20 or 30 years from now.

Also, I would consider storing your info on DVDs, there is a slight chance that something will still be able to read them in the distant future.
 
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Gab a copy of spinrite and follow gibson instruction .he program in assembler rofl .anyway spinrite is insane . If Steve doesn't mention something .most of the time it can do it .there is no warranty and still its likely the best warrantless product I ever saw. If you aren't sure ask Steve he s very helpful he does a podcast called security now . If he doesn't have the answer someone that is in communication with him does. I hope this belp
 
Hard drives fail in a bathtub curve; a certain percentage fail almost immediately, then they are trouble-free for thousands of hours of operation, then they start to fail from mechanical wear. In the case of external drives, most failures are because rubes handle them the same way you would handle a USB drive. You can't throw them in a backpack, leave them in the trunk of a car, et cetera. They have precise moving parts. Of course, you should have other copies of your data in other formats and off-site. The easiest way to do that is to sign up for one of the many inexpensive cloud backup services.
 
Originally Posted By: JimPghPA
Think about it, if you had a hard drive from a computer that is 20 or 30 years old, would you be able to connect it to any computer made today? No way.


Well PATA came out in 1986 so, yes, you could connect a 30-year-old hard drive to a new computer without too much trouble. You would need an external USB enclosure or a $3 adapter. That's pretty much immaterial because no one is going to operate the same drive for 20 years for capacity reasons alone. A 20-year-old hard drive would be about 10GB and we have 10TB drives now.
 
Originally Posted By: CKN
You need to look at an RAID ARRAY of hard drives. I sold data backup systems like these to major companies in the Western U.S. They "stripe" your date across more than one drive-much safer data storage.

You can search RAID on Amazon to see what I am referring too.

Very important corrections -- you probably know these but your post implies otherwise as it's written:

1. There are many RAID modes, and not all of them involving striping.
2. Just striping alone (i.e. RAID-0) makes your data LESS safe than if you just had one hard drive -- and the more drives you have in a RAID-0 array, the less safe your data is.

If you want to increase "fault tolerance", i.e. the ability to have one or more of the hard drives fail without causing data loss, you want striping with parity and/or mirroring. There are a ton of different RAID modes, which offer different combinations of striping with parity, striping without parity, and mirroring. E.g., RAID-1 is mirroring, RAID-5 is striping with parity, RAID-10 combines striping without parity and mirroring, etc.
 
Originally Posted By: JimPghPA
In 20 or 30 years the buss structure of the computers that will exist probably will not mate with any hard drive you could buy today. Think about it, if you had a hard drive from a computer that is 20 or 30 years old, would you be able to connect it to any computer made today? No way.

So, you might want to consider what computer you could purchase today that will have a chance of still powering up 20 or 30 years from now.

Also, I would consider storing your info on DVDs, there is a slight chance that something will still be able to read them in the distant future.


Sure you can. You can still get ATA adapters. I had a USB Zip drive back in 1998, thats nearly 20 years ago...

Id worry less about being able to read and more about the chemical age if of stuff, including DVDs, this drives to multiple copies of stuff in multiple places.
 
Originally Posted By: d00df00d
Originally Posted By: CKN
You need to look at an RAID ARRAY of hard drives. I sold data backup systems like these to major companies in the Western U.S. They "stripe" your date across more than one drive-much safer data storage.

You can search RAID on Amazon to see what I am referring too.

Very important corrections -- you probably know these but your post implies otherwise as it's written:

1. There are many RAID modes, and not all of them involving striping.
2. Just striping alone (i.e. RAID-0) makes your data LESS safe than if you just had one hard drive -- and the more drives you have in a RAID-0 array, the less safe your data is.

If you want to increase "fault tolerance", i.e. the ability to have one or more of the hard drives fail without causing data loss, you want striping with parity and/or mirroring. There are a ton of different RAID modes, which offer different combinations of striping with parity, striping without parity, and mirroring. E.g., RAID-1 is mirroring, RAID-5 is striping with parity, RAID-10 combines striping without parity and mirroring, etc.



Yes -your right. But I didn't want to get in to that complex of a definition. I sold refrigerator sized RAID systems-hot swap- able with the different levels of RAID/mirroring,etc. I sold a corporate back up system to REI Sporting Goods up in Seattle.

Our systems were designed so that there could be multiple hard drive failures-and the system could still be redundant and rewrite the date on the replaced hot swappable hard drives.
 
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Originally Posted By: yvon_la
Gab a copy of spinrite and follow gibson instruction .he program in assembler rofl .anyway spinrite is insane . If Steve doesn't mention something .most of the time it can do it .there is no warranty and still its likely the best warrantless product I ever saw. If you aren't sure ask Steve he s very helpful he does a podcast called security now . If he doesn't have the answer someone that is in communication with him does. I hope this belp


Spinrite ? I thought that program became obsolete 15 years ago: I seem to recall it had no real functionality with the advent of SATA drives.
 
There is no such thing as 100% reliable. HDs are a commodity now, so I don't think brand matters much. To lessen the chance of data loss, one can use two drives and disconnect them when not in use, so they don't spin up and down each time the computer is powered on/off or goes to sleep.
 
That is exactly how I use the passport drive. I copy the photos/video on to them after the trip. The drive is only connected during the transfer. As long as computers have USB port, I would be able to read them. I actually work for a mega enterprise storage company but their products costs ten millions of dollars. Even with hefty employee discount, that is NOT an option.

Nobody commented on my pulled-out-of-my-rear-end assertion that for long term needs spinning HD would be better than SSD? I was hoping somebody would convince me otherwise. But of course, the cost would still prohibit it from being considered.

Multiple passport drives seems to the only reasonable and realistic solution as far I can see.

I don't know how cloud solution is workable for TB of data and besides even $5 per month becomes quite a lot over 10 to 20 years. Besides, these fly by night providers most likely be not there for me to be able to restore the data from the cloud.
 
Whether one uses flash or magnetic storage is moot as long as your rotation schedule is within its aging parameters. If you're looking for a set-and-forget archival solution then BigD1's suggestion is the best with M Disc. I use BD-R HTL optical disks which is the next best thing. If you go the M Disc route you'll need a capable Bluray burner like the one(LG) I use below:

 
get 2 from different mfrs.
back up on both.
disconnect and store in safe or put 1 in safe deposit box.
always disconnect and secure them!
so the lightning strike,fire,thief,or the biggie RANSOMWARE doesnt get the backup too.
Originally Posted By: KrisZ
There is no such thing as 100% reliable. HDs are a commodity now, so I don't think brand matters much. To lessen the chance of data loss, one can use two drives and disconnect them when not in use, so they don't spin up and down each time the computer is powered on/off or goes to sleep.
 
You work for an enterprise storage company and you're here looking for 100% reliability?

You should know backup reliability increases with the number of data copies you have.

You should also know not even enterprise storage has 100% reliability. I mean, it's 99.99% but still.
 
way too many quick fixes.

there's a problem with hard disks called the 10**14 unrecoverable read errors.
using 512byte sectors it's 12TB or any combo like six 2TB. reading 12TB
will force a URE that recals, powercycle, iorsts, etc will not fix.

RAID 5 was replaced by RAID6 that allows single failure recoveries.

If you're looking at RAID systems - ask what size drive replacements
are supported and can you mix drives sizes and manufacturers and how long
does it take for a full-rebuild.

I prefer SSDs, everything else equal. their URE is 10**16 or 1.2PB. But
their MTBF is similar to hard disks - choice of poisons...

the cloud is best because behind the scenes they are moving data around
and protecting it.
 
i have a big distrust of "the cloud"
if you dont mind spying or have encrypted everything it might be ok for you.
but it should NEVER be your only copy!
the more places you store data the less likely you are to lose it.
but the cloud is the least trustworthy place.
 
Originally Posted By: Subdued
You work for an enterprise storage company and you're here looking for 100% reliability?

You should know backup reliability increases with the number of data copies you have.

You should also know not even enterprise storage has 100% reliability. I mean, it's 99.99% but still.



I use the multiple storage idea myself...because you just never know...
 
I am under the impression that SSDs make poor backup devices because, for lack of a better word, the data written to them degenerates over time.
This is especially a problem with TLC SSDs.
Magnetic hard disks do not have this problem, unless exposed to strong magnetic fields.
 
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