Need High Capacity External Drive - Recommendations?

[Julie Butler]

Hello,

I have 12 TBs of doc footage I need to back up. Does anyone have any recommendations for an enterprise grade drive? Do higher capacity drives have a higher fail rates?

Thank you your assistance!

Kind Regards,
Julie

 

[Brian F Kobylarz]

If the footage is of value to you, I would strongly recommend backing it up on LTO.
For archival / backup purposes, this is an industry standard.

 

[Michael Tiemann]

The art of backup is that it is a process, not an event. Ideally a backup system has no single point of failure. I.e., no single drive failure, no single vulnerability to theft or fire (UMG take note!), and backups should be checked periodically to verify the assumption that all copies are in working order.

If that sounds like a lot to manage, there are 3rd parties that will do it for you. If you love system design and following process, can't do much better than multiple copies on stable media (RAID and/or LTO) stored and verified in multiple locations.

 

[Julie Butler]

Thank you, Brian and Michael.

I am actually planning to backup the footage to LTO as well, but we need a copy on an external drive as well incase we need to quickly access the footage for other projects. Right now it is all currently on a RAID.

Thank you!

 

[Michael Tiemann]

If you are just looking to build 12TB of storage that has a reasonable chance of working when you plug it in, and you have other places from which you can restore to it, then a pair of 8TB HGST drives striped as RAID 0 in a two-bay enclosure would be high-performance path to 12TB and not very crash-prone: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2019/

But you MUST have a proper backup. RAID alone is not a proper backup (https://serverfault.com/questions/2888/why-is-raid-not-a-backup).

 

[Blair Thornton]

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16822178941

 

[Chad Lancaster]

https://www.45drives.com/products/hard-drives/

 

[Marc Wielage]

I have 12 TBs of doc footage I need to back up. Does anyone have any recommendations for an enterprise grade drive? Do higher capacity drives have a higher fail rates?

For just backup, I would buy a couple of G-Tech drives, and keep one set in a bank vault:

https://shop.westerndigital.com/pro...-technology-g-drive-thunderbolt-3-hdd#0G10427

That way, you have one set at the office, one set in the vault, and one set in whatever location you think is most secure (like hidden at home or in another office). If you want to reduce costs, you could go with multiple sets of 8TB drives, which have a pretty decent cost/performance ratio.

I think LTO is probably best for long-term storage, but a multiple-format backup strategy is wise.