Looking for a reliable external hard drive for archiving, from 4 TB to 12 TB.

Do you have any tips? Which ones do you use for long-term backup (at least 20 years)?
Please include price and link!

Thanks a lot!

 

For long term backups you need at least TWO HDDs (holding the same data). I personally use 3 copies.

 

stay away from anything SEAGATE manufacturers hard drives. I would recommend Western Digital

i had a hard drive that recently crashed it was from 2008... can you believe that it lasted THAT long.. seagate drives happen to function for about 2 or 3 years i have experience. western digital all the way

 

doesn't matter, either HDD fails within few days, or lasts long enough you'll have more problems finding a computer to connect to 20 years from now,
as an example, how many computers have IDE nowadays?
aand I hope you're following 3-2-1 backup strategy, else you'll have data corruption even if you leave disk couple years in shelf,

 

Get any high capacity external seagate or western digital. It'll work... or it won't... Equally as important... get a cloud service. Anything that gets written to one gets written to the other. The HDD is there for your local 'damnit, I need this file.' The cloud backup is there for when catastrophe hits.

If you did not also get an offsite backup, you have no backup. It's super cheap, you can get the data plans that are specifically laid out for 'oh fuck.' eg, they aren't for back and forth data transfer really, just upload and when/if shit hits the fan and your local is dead they'll mail you a drive with your data.

*Unless it's just cookie recipes, then two HDD is probably fine. Regardless just get whatever is cheap and name brand, at 14TB and above you're looking at $15ish per TB for an external.

 

Last edited: Nov 18, 2025 at 8:09 PM

I already have a backup of my C:/ drive. Then I have two Samsung 4TB Portable SSD T7 Shield USB 3.2 Gen 2 Black drives for €700.

I have a lot of Blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs. I wanted to back up the two SSDs to the HDD again. I once had three external 3TB Seagate drives that all died, and I removed the casing and used them as internal hard drives in another PC.

 

Thanks, that's a nice gesture, but it completely misses the point. I'm looking for a reliable external hard drive. Does one exist?

 

There is no magic HDD. If you want guaranteed reliability then you need more than 1 drive. If you need mass storage without constant recall then SSD doesn't make sense from a cost point. Ergo, the 14-20TB WD and Seagate drives. It's one thing if you were buying at scale, say 1000 drives per order with a very specific task... then you can drill down a bit better into specific optimal choices. For home backup, it mostly comes down to.. is it a dud or not off the bat and are you keeping multiple copies. The reliability is in you making at least one copy.

 

I have Western Digital My Passport external drive.
Stable and reliable for years.

My Passport Ultra version too.

And if you want reliability, you need at least a RAID 1 NAS.
You can buy a second hand Synology NAS and buy 2 separate HDD for it.

 

Why don't you just ask the AI?

Just kidding xD

I think any popular HDD will do the job. Some live over 10 years, others will die after 2 years. You can't really predict the future. But I would prefer Western Digital over Seagate, but that's just me.

And if you wanna be really safe get two HHDs and store them in different rooms.

 

I keep backups from my projects back until 2014. So it's more than a decade already. Western digital. From all the disks I had , only one WD failed and it was because of a fall from my desk while spinning. Stay away from seagate as her highness @Kate Middleton mentioned. For daily usage I have 2 porche design western digitals and still running since 2016 if I remember correctly. For backups which I recall a couple of times per year I use Mybook western digital. But if my archive was much more important I would go with a NAS.

 

The magic trick to having a hard drive still work after twenty years in a time capsule is all about climate. You are not putting wear and tear on the moving parts because they are not going to move until you finally need the data. The bigger problem is the parts that are just sitting there, exposed to air, where humidity, temperature changes, and corrosion can slowly cause damage. Get a vacuum sealer, and it can do double duty with that extra weed you are growing. Yes, I am joking about the hard disk part.

 

There's no HDD that will guaranteed live for 20 years, that's a really tall order. Just stick to the hard data instead of "get this because mine is still alive" or "don't get this because mine died early".

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2025/

Edit: just to be the devil's advocate, my Seagate external 500gb from over 10 years ago still works great even with a SMART alert that was there since I first bought it. Oh, and did I say it was bought second-hand?

 

My 2 7200rpm 6TB seagate barracuda's have been employed for storing all backup images for my entire site now for 10+ years. Never an issue. However this is all they get used for - they are dedicated to the one purpose.. No doubling as sample or external audio drives. They are only ever powered up when they're mounted in the drive dock to read/write data to them - hence the wear and tear is minimal. All backup images are verified and crc'ed before and after being placed onto the master / safety drives to ensure that the data being copied there is the data that is stored there. The only way to fly, IMO...

 

Last edited: Nov 18, 2025 at 11:21 PM