Well ages is a relative term, I meant ages compared to SSDs, I guess it doesn't take THAT long but it feels likes ages anyway compared to how fast SSDs appear on the desktop. I think the HDD is fine. I don't know how you guys deal with slow HDDs nowadays.

 

The trick to dealing with slow anything relative to computers is to never start using the newer faster thing. After that, you're screwed.

 

Thanks to everyone who helped me find a new external hard drive to store movies and plugins.
I chose the WD Elements™ Desktop Hard Drive, 8 TB HDD, 3.5 inch, external, black.

 

Say that my 2 dead WD red NAS (at the same time) lying on my desk ...

 

Sadly WD isn't any better in the mainstream. I recently lost a 6TB external and all stored data. Recovery place said the data was unrecoverable. This was strictly an offline external storage drive. They said the externals use the cheapest drives within. On further research, they themselves are looking into mass failures in recent years due to the SMR-based tech they used. As with all companies, they'll downplay the issues, since you can't let it hit your stocks and the poor abused shareholders.

https://www.techpowerup.com/342432/...-smr-hard-drive-failures-tied-to-design-flaws

 

Exactly.
I'm a computer tech for 25 years.
And trust me, i seen a LOT of "downhill" from both Seagate and WD.

I even remember when seagate bought Maxtor, and they messed a whole line of HDD with a bad firmware.
It was a russian roulette : every time the HDD was starting up, it could crash for good. No data loss anyway. Only stuck in boot loop.
And i needed to buy a serial-USB interface and reprogram my HDD ... like factory

But i have nothing against seagate : they all mess up something one day.

 

-Starting from the end, BluRay disks will last for many years as mentioned in this thread, but they need to be stored properly, in enclosures and non humid rooms. Also word of caution because i do have a lot of xp on this, if you want peace of mind when writing those disks, always verify the write process each and everytime even if it takes longer.
-SSDs as also mentioned here, will not last longer than HDDs. As a rule of thumb, SSDs have a finite lifespan and you can know exactly what it is, as their endurance is always written on their spec sheet. If you bought an external ssd like a usb one (Samsung, Sandisk, etc), it will serve fine even when you use it for backup once a week or even once a month. But beware, it needs to be powered on frequently or else you are running the risk of losing data or in the worst case scenario "bricking" the ssd completely, meaning it may be only good for scrap if you leave it in the shelve for a year or two.
- Shout out to @Legotron for his recommendation, thanks a lot, i am humbled mate. I will soon have a new supply of SSDs, my large drives will be brand new sealed, some smaller ones used. I did a little more work this time around and now instead of proposing adapters for U.2 drives, i will be bundling the U.2 drives with appropriate, 100% compatible and working adapters for connecting them to an m.2 slot right away. There will also be a choice for those with good mobos that support bifurcation well enough, for u.2 to pci-e slot adapters. This way i will be saving you the hassle of investigating what type of adapter to use and guesswork if it will work or not, anyone buying one or more of those puppies will have them up and running right away.
Something a little off subject,
I recently did a very cool build with an Asus ProArt X870E Creator and a 9950X3D. The latter chews through VSTis like it's nothing lol.
But the reason i am referring to this, is the mobo, because it has 3 pci-e slots and can run X8, X8 (disabling the second gen 5 m.2 slot when enabled) and X4, the last one from the chipset. The build had an RTX 5060ti which runs X8 anyway, an active pci-e adapter that holds two Intel U.2 7.68tb pci-e gen 3 drives hooked on the 2nd pci-e slot and an Intel Optane 4800X at the last pci-e slot. The only caveat is the last pci-e slot runs from the chipset and adds about 1-2 microseconds of latency to the Optane which is the designated boot drive but the drive itself is so fast, that in terms of random 4k and latency, it did outperform by far the brand new top of the line gen5 Crucial 710 that i hooked on the first m.2 slot.
So, as the market is right now, this Asus mobo (and i know some peeps hate Asus hehe) is the absolute best mobo in terms of connectivity and peripherals on board, as it is also the only board that comes with a 10gbit lan at about 500 euros, unlike the Extreme models from Gigabyte and Asus and MSI's Godlike @ 1200 euros lol. Plus it has all the platform's standards like USB4 and WiFI7, and i can happily report USB4 does work with Thunderbolt audio interfaces right out of the box with every single motherboard i tested even with B850 mobos that have it.
Y'all be well, keep in touch for yet another thread of ssd sales in the Computer Hardware part of the forum.
Cheers
PS: Fun story... Me and the client who's also happens to be a friend, made a bet for which drive should be the boot drive. It was either the gen5 Crucial 710 or the (quite older) gen3 Optane. If the Crucial won, i would keep the Optane for another build. If i won he would buy the Optane from me too. So, to cut it short, while the Crucial 710's sequential performance is somewhat unmatched by anything and the drive is even better than Samsung's 9100 flagship, the Optane was quite faster in everything else so i won. And got a nice payday too hehe. Best regards to you all.

 

Last edited: Nov 21, 2025 at 2:25 PM

I don't know why Western Digital is suggested a lot here,
I had perfect experiences with Seagate in the past. My old Seagate drive from 2005
still works after 20 years while I got a lot of writing/reading errors on my 2 Western Digital
drives after a few years + the brand with the most broken external HDDs in my circle of
friends & contacts was Western Digital (external WD Black).

Sandisk (WD's now separated flash business) recently also made negative publicity
because their circuit boards were from such a poor quality that a lot of users lost all of their data
which even lead to several law cases. It's the "SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD's" that you shouldn't buy.




What I can recommend: All kinds of Samsung SSD's like the Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB (currently at 230€)


with an external housing like this one:


I'm using Samsung SSD's since years with no issues.
My backup drive for small files is an old Samsung 840 Pro from 2013 and it still works like a charm.

 

Last edited: Nov 21, 2025 at 4:01 PM

Thanks @r4e, for sharing your experience and valuable tips! My question is, do you think my two SDD's will last another 20 years?

I have two Samsung 4TB Portable SSD T7 Shield USB 3.2 Gen 2 Black drives for €700.

I'M LOOKING FOR AN HDD - I WANT TO BACK UP THE TWO SSDS AGAIN TO AN EXTERNAL HDD

 

Last edited: Nov 21, 2025 at 4:19 PM

What a disk. I still use it as my main SSD. Bought it around 2014. The smart data estimates still has 82% of its total duration. Unreal.
At this pace this bad modafucker is gonna last longer than me

 

Last edited: Nov 21, 2025 at 7:17 PM

Personally, I just use Cloud storage now. I use PCloud. Very stable, it mounts as your P: drive, I even use it in production. It has all my samples on there, all my songfiles. so wherever I go, I dont have to lug around 2TB HDD (or forget it), all my samples can be accessed from anywhere. These cloud storage places have many redundancies, so the chance of you losing anything is almost zero. MUCH less than if you tried to house your own RAID.

Many year ago I used RAID for redundancy, but the HDD's fail and it gets expensive replacing them. Took me a long time to trust cloud storage, but ive been using it for 5 years with no issues. Not one. You can stream from it, you can share from it, you can give someone a guest-password to a shared folder for easy collabs, and much more.

 

i would say that any hdd or ssd is not really reliable..electronics can fail anytime. therefore i ve backed up all my files and softwarez in triple.it can happen 1 will stop to work..it also can happen that 2 disks stop working around same time,but chances are very likely that will not happen.
In my case,i m sure i will have my backup always....unless the house burns down or an tornado sucks it up.
thinking bout the fire...i ve been thinking on getting myself an iron box,and put at least one of the backup disks inthere.

@PulseWave ..good luck in choosing a right one

 

I don't know and I wouldn't like to predict something for over 20 years into the future
where I don't have more than 10 years experience with.
But I kind of think that it might be possible that a samsung ssd as a backup drive could last that long
if you don't turn it on all the time.

For 8TB there's only 1 option I'd consider. The Samsung SSD 9100 PRO 8TB but that's currently at over 800€
while 2 EVO Plus 4TB are at 458€ so it wouldn't make sense.

The most secure backup option for decades is still BluRay & DVD. Over 20 years ago I burned the whole
East West Quantum Leap collection to DVD's (I was a kiddo at that time) and those DVD's still exist and do work like on
the day I put them into my old DVD writer. It took me a week to do so after school but it was worth it as I still can access
those libraries if needed.

BluRays are intended to last 80-100 years and the dual layer discs contain up to 50GB per disc.
You would need 20 blanks for a TB and a week of spare time but it would be a backup for a life time.

 

I don't like could storage because #1 - it takes internet to get to and internet is never reliable. #2 - I don't like the idea of sticking files out in a volatile insecure environment. I still have a SSD RAID setup on one of my win7 machines for use with that machine, but never used RAID for backup or archive type purposes. RAID was never designed for that. RAID was designed for the redundant safety of server machine drives that store static, semi static, and rapidly changing data structures in a large scale enterprise environment. Never stopped folks (including myself) from using it for critical home machine scenarios either. But not for archiving of any sort.

 

Something to consider if you go the NAS route... back when I was looking into buying one, there were some security concerns across quite a few brands (qnap/synology/asustor to name a few). Make sure you look into that, if you're interested in a NAS solution.

 

Last edited: Nov 22, 2025 at 11:25 AM

I bought a fireproof case containing all the important documents, including two SSDs; it's also waterproof.

HMF 2504580 Fireproof and Waterproof Document Box Assorted Sizes DIN A4 - A5 Black
https://www.amazon.de/HMF-Feuerfest...chutzkoffer,aps,78&sr=8-9&th=1&language=en_GB

 

Thanks for the informative answer; now I understand things a bit better and can improve my backup strategy.
So I'll continue burning my most important treasures to Blu-ray.

 

External HDDs should also be connected and run for a while once or twice a year.
So, you can make an entry in your calendar, for example, January 1st: "Connect all external hard drives."

We're discussing this, and experts say:

"Now the question arises: how long can an SSD store your data without a power supply? According to expert tests, SSDs can even store data for a year at 30 degrees Celsius. As mentioned earlier, an SSD typically stores data because electrons are inserted into the NAND gate, and the reason for data loss is simply the leakage of electrons.

It's impossible to predict the exact number of years the data will be stored on the SSD. Generally speaking, if an SSD doesn't receive power for several years, data loss can occur. According to studies, an SSD can retain your data for at least 2-5 years without a power supply. Some SSD manufacturers even claim that SSDs can store data for 15 to 20 years without a regular power supply."

Two years ago, I asked myself how I could permanently back up my data for 20 years, until I die.
I want to be able to share my data after I'm gone – pictures, movies, music, documentaries, and so on.

Since SSDs are very expensive, I read a lot about SD cards and then decided on two 4GB SSDs for about €700. I had some money to spare at the time. Because my pension will be very tight later on, I won't have any money left over to buy SSDs in 20 years, for example.