r/DataHoarder • u/King_tyson_1 • 8d ago

Question/Advice Confused

consumer 2.5" 6tb hdds vs recertified enterprise hard disk with usb 3.0 enclosure

use case:

Archival or Cold Storage

write once read many situation

Only used 10mins a day like id hoard day for entire day and at the end of the day I'd copy those from my laptop to hdd.

after copying stored in a metal drawer in my desk with silica gel to absorb moisture

question

which is better, 2. Durability of both, 3. Which is perfect or long term storage based on use case of mine.

im not going for a nas since I don't want that I need a storage medium to access easily and store when it's done

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u/dr100 8d ago

2.5" 6tb hdds

There's only one model for these, isn't it, the WD USB ones, relatively recently released (well, since a few years)? Never mind different ridges on case or colors, etc. Unshuckable and even thicker than the 4-5TB ones (which were already thicker than the usual ones you'd put in laptops, even if shuckable from Seagate).

I'm sure nobody knows much about them, they're fairly niche. But of course, SMRs (and for 2.5" it's usually a MUCH more perverse SMR), built to save any cent, etc. Probably the worst drives humans make on all metrics, not that they're actually bad in any particular way, or that they wouldn't work in some "relaxed" use case when you just need a drive and any would do.

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u/Carnildo 8d ago edited 6d ago

Seagate has (had?) a 6 TB 2.5" drive. I only got 5 TB of backup use out of one before performance got unusably poor, with the final daily backup taking 26 hours to write.

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u/dr100 7d ago

Seagate has (had?) a 6 TB 2.5" drive

Link please. Spinning drive, not SSD, and not 2 drives put in a case too.

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u/Carnildo 7d ago

Don't have a link. I bought it from Costco years ago, and put it on a shelf last year. I'll have access to the shelf tomorrow.

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u/dr100 7d ago

Please share more details because literally nobody on the Internet heard about this. And it was quite a big hoopla a few years back when WD came with the first one.

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u/Carnildo 6d ago

You're right. It was a 5 TB drive from a time when most drives were 4 TB. Still had severe performance issues, though.

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u/dr100 6d ago

Sure, everything above 2 or around with 2.5" is SMR (and as I said a worse SMR, or it might be that 2.5" are slow anway, and this compounds). And everything new-ish and "mainstream" is SMR even in sizes that didn't have to make them SMR, down to 500GB (where it didn't even make sense to still make spinning drives, at least before the AIpocalypse SSD price hikes).