Post AQbN0pcF9KWQWhCEzo by Bright@freespeechextremist.com
 (DIR) More posts by Bright@freespeechextremist.com
 (DIR) Post #AQbEMBkJANKheh4sFs by kfogel@kfogel.org
       2022-12-14T04:07:23.105754Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       So, I've got this U-NAS box and I'm about to put a buncha drives in it and get all RAIDed up (to the tune of a few terabytes of functional storage, probably).Reliability and longevity are the main things here.  Speed doesn't matter much, as this is going to be a storage server, not a machine for day-to-day work.What do my more knowledgeable tech friends out there recommend?  I don't even know basic things like whether or not I should be considering SSD for this.
       
 (DIR) Post #AQbEMCFVIOHpDRfmsa by jxself@social.bobcall.me
       2022-12-14T14:02:34Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @kfogel Don't forget about tape. My backups live on both HDD and LTO.
       
 (DIR) Post #AQbN0pcF9KWQWhCEzo by Bright@freespeechextremist.com
       2022-12-14T15:39:35.451990Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @kfogel Blackblaze often posts some reports about their HDDs on their blog: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.htmlIn short: Hitachi/HGST is the best, but the problem is that the brand was bought by Western Digital and later by Toshiba. So, I can only find used HDDs from Hitachi brand.Western Digital still hold the "Ultrastar" product lineup for enterprise data storage, but it's expensive, hard to find and Blackblaze has this article about enterprise HDDs: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/
       
 (DIR) Post #AQbNZL3qk8YptjYzUe by Bright@freespeechextremist.com
       2022-12-14T15:45:49.632109Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @kfogel of course this will not work for your case, but what I am doing right now is buying some cheap SSDs from Aliexpress.The best size is 1TB, because in my country, an Seagate is about $64 and an Goldenfir or Kingspec is about $41.Now, $20 doesn't seem too much in dollars, but in my country, that makes an big difference.
       
 (DIR) Post #AQflVZqgzmni8RzKMK by gpshead@infosec.exchange
       2022-12-14T11:20:33Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @kfogel "a few terabytes" means just buy an SSD. Don't bother with RAID at all. Or buy three hard drives and consider something modern like zfs or btrfs instead of RAID.Buy an extra disk or ssd and use that for regular backups.RAID is not a backup.New to SSDs? Avoid any manufacturers lowest end. Those have very little to no "SLC" write cache and thus can be subject to pauses or stall for tens of seconds at a time under heavy write loads (most notable while you're migrating data over to them, or copying NN gigabyte disk images or video files around).
       
 (DIR) Post #AQflVantRg9j63gbdQ by kfogel@kfogel.org
       2022-12-16T18:32:51.515851Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Thanks to everyone who replied.  My conclusion after reading all the feedback is that I shouldn't do this!  I don't need a specialized data storage box with multiple drives in it (I didn't buy it -- it was a gift / hand-me-down).  I just need to get some drives, attach them to machines I already have in different locations, and do redundant multi-location backups in that simple, resilient way.The problem with the U-NAS is that it would be special.  It would be a unique, unduplicatable node, when really I should just expand my current backup strategy to use more basically fungible nodes and distribute them more widely.  The specific hardware recommendations in this thread, plus the pointers to the BackBlaze reports, will be very helpful in choosing drives.