I've got three or four Blues that are still going strong after many years. But I've also had a couple fail. I think it's a bit like Behringer; one of those manufacturers where they're generally quite high quality unless you get the one that isn't. They're a crap shoot. So yeah, your choice is either just have some redundant backups or pay more bucks for a bullet-proof drive.
SSD is becoming much more competitive price wise with the mechanical counterparts anyway...

 

I have SSDs, HDDs, Blu-rays, DVDs, CDs, and USB sticks!!! It depends on the money you have to spend. Thanks for the NVME tip. I think motherboards should be completely redesigned, with more slots, more USB, and more USB-C! With such large amounts of data, as you said, you can't avoid buying external storage devices.

 

HD disk manufacturer company names or series like Red or Blue don't mean much assessing reliability, batches of the same series could more successful than others, pay attention to the Model serial numbers. I choose drives from the Blackblaze cloud storage hd failure stats:

2025 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2025/
2024 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2024/
2023 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/
2022 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/

 

Here's another tip. If you want more than 1-2 NVMes, there are PCIe cards that can hold up to 4 NVMe storage devices.

However, we're talking archival purposes here and I don't think speed is an issue for those. Reliability is. HDDs, in my experience, are more reliable for that, especially when put in a NAS and RAID with mirroring or at least parity drive and ZFS formatted. If one breaks, nothing is lost. You just replace it, wait for a little while until RAID is reconstructed, and business as usual. ZFS in itself is a brilliant file system for archival that repairs itself, so parity drive should absolutely suffice.

 

aand that's exactly what I'm using right now, Sonnet 4x4 NVME card, beauty of it is, it has its own bifurcation controller, so I can run it in x8 PCIe mode on my old PC (signature rig)

 

I would be cautiously optimistic in that regard, with huge capacities of HDDs nowadays, that reconstruction/resilvering may take days in which the process can easily be interrupted by that second HDD dying too, and RAID5/RAID6 (ZFS-RZ1/ZFS-RZ2) won't really help minimize that likehood - as always, RAID is NOT a backup

 

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-bx500-ssd,5377.html

Crucial’s BX500 is a cheap option that will outperform any HDD as a boot drive, but it comes with drawbacks. The BX500's low endurance and application performance rank far behind most current-gen SSDs in the market. Pricing is competitive, but there are much better options available for just a few dollars more, including Crucial’s own MX500, making this drive hard to recommend.

Pros

• +
  Strong sequential burst performance
  
  
• +
  Low cost
• +
  Supporting software

Cons

• -
  Lower than average application performance
  
• -
  Low endurance
  
• -
  Low sustained write performance

 

Yeah, I don't use raid's anymore, as just not the right solution for 'me'. I find having larger drives, and having them cloned and one offline or different location sufficient. Raid's were better when hdd's were smaller etc and some purposes for me, but I don't employ them myself anymore, as it's just easier and more secure to have the larger drives (and the other assets backed up to them), in sufficient supply,

-as I don't need them for speed (as have ssd's on usb3.2 or tb)
-and I find it easier just having the stuff backed up/cloned on other drives than relying on a unit where the point of fail could be the controller or enclosure etc
-and whatnot.

I can see why people still use them, but I don't consider them a substitute for backups myself, and their usefulness to me has declined steeply over the years.

I don't think I would throw 2 18-24TB drives in a raid kinda thing.... just better to have one there for daily backups or whatnot, the other on a shelf that gets addressed often enough, and have another 'elsewhere'...

 

Edit- da fuq? How did that wind up here and not in the other thread?

 

Last edited: Jun 3, 2025 at 12:28 AM

a little OT to the topic at hand, but ok... ;)

 

Yeah that was weird... I don't think I was answering to this thread...