As the discussion has included several mentions of drive failures, this seems somewhat relevant so I thought I'd share it. Backblaze (the Internet hosted backups company) does a quarterly drive statistics report which contains some interesting failure metrics. The latest one is here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q3-2019/ On Thu, Jan 2, 2020 at 5:40 PM Kenneth Seefried via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
- Do some research on bit-error rate on those large drives before you commit your data to one of them. Not pretty. - I have a stack of USB "backup drives" in the 500GB-10TB ranges that in relatively short periods of storage (2-3 years) cased to function. The Western Digital units seem to be particularly bad, but that's subjective.
Redundancy, storage diversity and data integrity seems to be a big part being successful here.