RELIABLE external hard drive for storing iMovies

[RedTomato]

Hello,

I am terrified of losing my precious family iMovies that I make. I have two Seagate external hard drives. I heard they are not most reliable, so I ordered G-technology's G-drive (4TB).
I also was considering Samsung's SSD external hard drive (expensive, only 500GB), what I read is that SSD's are more reliable.

What is your recommendation? Where do you keep your precious videos and movies?

Thanks!
Edita

An interesting question in 2016. How many TB do you have? Is the amount fixed or slowly growing? How much future growth do you see per year?

As a home user, I will assume you have no more than a few TB. As well as the suggestions from the posters above, I would look at paying for a long term online storage. Amazon Glacier is a good suggestion, and Amazon is unlikely to go away in a few years.

How much would 10 years of Amazon Glacier cost? 20 years? 30 years? How much of it can you pay upfront? Do you need to store everything, or maybe just your final edits / favourites?

Consider paying for a second online long term storage service as a backup for the first one.. Also remember formats. Will the formats you save in still be openable in 20 years time? i.e. don't save an iMovie specific format and expect it to be accessible in 10 years time. Apple loves throwing away old formats.

If you have several TB, SSDs are not worth it for now. Maybe in 2 or 3 years time, a multi-TB SSD will be dirt cheap, so plan to shift to SSD for the upgrade after this one.

Ports. I still have some IDE HDDs in the attic. I must chuck them out. Firewire is dead and my firewire enclosures in the attic are also collecting dust. SATA internal drives are just starting to decline now. None of the roughly 20 computers at my house / workplace have SATA internal drives. I don't know how this will affect the use of SATA in external drives, or what the replacement for SATA in external drives will be.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Wow look at the variety of answers to this question. OP here's my version:

• Don't make this a single backup drive solution. Duplicate to more than one drive. Drives are cheap- use more than 1 for archiving precious video like these.
• Store at least one of those drives elsewhere like a bank safe deposit box. Swap 'em out to back up new movies and keep rotating them as you get new footage to archive.
• Edit them to perfection, render then in final form and then give the home movie library to multiple members of your family. Not only will they LOVE this (near free) gift, you'll have best-edited versions stored in multiple locations should you ever lose your copies and your bank is destroyed in the same day.

The above should cover about all bases for the cost of as little as 2 hard drives and an annual safe deposit box rental. If you have a secure locker or place at work that could be the off-site equivalent of a safe deposit box, you might opt to use that to save the safe deposit box fee.

HDD vs. SSD won't matter if you backup to more then one drive of either type and keep at least one of those drives stored away from where you live. And if you execute the third bullet and have a reasonably good-sized family, all worries about completely losing these films is marginalized down to near nill.

 

[mpainesyd]

I have a working drive and also keep a backup copy on a RAID-1 Mirror set of WD Red drives. These drives are near bullet proof, but even they will fail eventually. With a mirror, hopefully they both won't fail at the same time, so you replace the failed unit and let the RAID software/hardware recover. After recovery you may want to replace the other as a preventative measure. I also keep mp4 copies of my videos on line (compressed for practical purposes). I rent my own server, but there are outfits like Vimeo, YouTube, etc that are designed to store large amounts of video. These online outfits have redundancy and backups on their own.

I used to have a Lacie RAID-1 pair. One failed and I could not access anything on the second drive, or get it to recover with a replacement drive. My issue might be unique to an old Lacie RAID system but don't assume it is bullet-proof or that a single drive failure is not a disaster.
I now keep a couple of ordinary hard disks as off-site backups, in addition to one that is always attached. They are all used with Time Machine which ususally works out the best drive to use for the next backup.

 

[ColdCase]

Yeah, thats an issue with many hardware RAIDs. I should have mentioned that I use the software RAID built into the OS and I can even move one of the drives in a set to another computer and read it just fine. Some of the rotating drive scenarios above take advantage of this feature.

 

[RedTomato]

Yeah, thats an issue with many hardware RAIDs. I should have mentioned that I use the software RAID built into the OS and I can even move one of the drives in a set to another computer and read it just fine. Some of the rotating drive scenarios above take advantage of this feature.

I don't really trust RAIDs any more.

Back when I was a green sysadmin, I ran a business server which the consultant assured me was set up with the latest RAID tech. Opening the box revealed three physical drives, and the Windows Server OS told me there were two logical drives: an OS drive C: and a data drive D:. It certainly looked like logically, the D: drive was on a RAID mirror, which was exactly what the boss told me the consultant had done.

40 staff plus payroll depended on that server so I was very careful not to fiddle with it. There were also two backup external drives which I rotated religiously. I started noticing errors being thrown on by the backup service. Consultant told me not to worry it was ok.

One day, the server crashes and doesn't restart. No worries, simply swap out the dead drive.

Ok. Which one? Oh. There's no indication. RAID tools won't load. Which drive is the OS? No indication either. I try swapping out the drives one at a time, hoping that either the RAID will start rebuilding, or the OS will boot into POST. No joy.

We find the external backups, both, are also messed up.

Turns out that the three disks were set up as a single striped RAID, a single virtual drive, which was then subdivided into two logical disks for the C: and D: drives. The very worst possible configuration. Even worse, the RAID tools for rebuilding etc were part of the Windows Server OS, and were specific to that RAID.

Without a working RAID, the OS couldn't be booted, and the rebuild tools couldn't be accessed. But the broken RAID couldn't be booted to get access to the tools.

Also, something about the whole setup, OS plus data, being on the same RAID, had been interfering with the functioning of the Windows incredimental backup service on the external drives.

Eventually the server had to be sent to specialists for repair at great expense, hopefully paid by the consultant not the company, and I moved to a new job, a little bit older and wiser.

 

[joema2]

I don't really trust RAIDs any more...the three disks were set up as a single striped RAID, a single virtual drive, which was then subdivided into two logical disks for the C: and D: drives. The very worst possible configuration. Even worse, the RAID tools for rebuilding etc were part of the Windows Server OS, and were specific to that RAID...Without a working RAID, the OS couldn't be booted, and the rebuild tools couldn't be accessed. But the broken RAID couldn't be booted to get access to the tools...

This is not a valid experience of whether to trust RAID. Many people have tried to use RAID as a boot drive and encountered similar problems. What you describe is a configuration and management issue not an intrinsic problem with RAID.

However you are right to not blindly trust RAID to solve all problems. It will never solve a user error or virus deleting files, nor safeguard against filesystem or data corruption which happens at the application or OS layers. A SQL database or Lightroom catalog which gets corrupted will be equally corrupt no matter what RAID is used. Filesystem corruption will be damaging no matter what RAID type. When running severe stress tests using DiskTestR, I have had a few cases of HFS+ corruption which precluded booting. No type of RAID would have helped in those cases.

The only real solution to these is backup, preferably multiple types and including disconnected, offline drives.

 

[Rockadile]

This is not a valid experience of whether to trust RAID. Many people have tried to use RAID as a boot drive and encountered similar problems. What you describe is a configuration and management issue not an intrinsic problem with RAID.

However you are right to not blindly trust RAID to solve all problems. It will never solve a user error or virus deleting files, nor safeguard against filesystem or data corruption which happens at the application or OS layers. A SQL database or Lightroom catalog which gets corrupted will be equally corrupt no matter what RAID is used. Filesystem corruption will be damaging no matter what RAID type. When running severe stress tests using DiskTestR, I have had a few cases of HFS+ corruption which precluded booting. No type of RAID would have helped in those cases.

The only real solution to these is backup, preferably multiple types and including disconnected, offline drives.

I've been wanting to ask for programs that tested out hard drives and such, the newly bought and old ones. Seems like diglloydtools (DiskTestR) is what I'm looking for. Is this the best program? Only subscription payment? Any alternatives where I can buy the program outright?

Should I get a HDD dock so I can test, backup, and swap?

 

[RedTomato]

This is not a valid experience of whether to trust RAID. Many people have tried to use RAID as a boot drive and encountered similar problems. What you describe is a configuration and management issue not an intrinsic problem with RAID.

However you are right to not blindly trust RAID to solve all problems. It will never solve a user error or virus deleting files, nor safeguard against filesystem or data corruption which happens at the application or OS layers. A SQL database or Lightroom catalog which gets corrupted will be equally corrupt no matter what RAID is used. Filesystem corruption will be damaging no matter what RAID type. When running severe stress tests using DiskTestR, I have had a few cases of HFS+ corruption which precluded booting. No type of RAID would have helped in those cases.

The only real solution to these is backup, preferably multiple types and including disconnected, offline drives.

Completely agree with you on all points.

However I would say in my limited experience that I've seen more deficient implementations of RAID than competent ones. One of benefits of the move to cloud is less use of / reliance on RAID at the local level so these horror stories are less common now.

We've not yet seen a major cloud provider go bust. That will expose many companies who didn't think through their strategies.

 

[joema2]

...wanting to ask for programs that tested out hard drives and such, the newly bought and old ones. Seems like diglloydtools (DiskTestR) is what I'm looking for. Is this the best program? Only subscription payment? Any alternatives where I can buy the program outright?

Should I get a HDD dock so I can test, backup, and swap?

DiskTestR does not require a continuing subscription. It is $45. The "one month" access means you can download update copies for one month if they happen. Once downloaded you can use it forever.

I don't know if it's the best, but I use it. Several of my RAID arrays use SoftRAID which has its own integrity and validation tester built in, so I use that for the drives controlled by SoftRAID.

Re HDD dock, you only need that if you have bare SATA drives. I have one but most of my storage is on self-contained drives or RAID arrays. If you have spare drives for a RAID, it's probably a good idea to perform a burn-in test on them separately. That way if a RAID drive fails the replacement has already been tested. Depending in the drive size, speed and test rigor, this can take from 1-3 days.

 

[FireWire2]

Hello,

I am terrified of losing my precious family iMovies that I make. I have two Seagate external hard drives. I heard they are not most reliable, so I ordered G-technology's G-drive (4TB).
I also was considering Samsung's SSD external hard drive (expensive, only 500GB), what I read is that SSD's are more reliable.

What is your recommendation? Where do you keep your precious videos and movies?

Thanks!
Edita

Get this http://www.datoptic.com/ec/esata-usb3-0-hardware-raid-support-mac-windows-freebsd-linux.html
Load 5x NAS HDD, any brand into it, then create a RAID5, it takes seconds
Just use it as a single BIG hdd drive

But you Must do this
Every 4~5 months
Use DU run a check disk, check the volume then remove a HDD - any of five drives - it will beep, hold for 10~15 seconds, insert it back in, let it runs

If you do that, your data will last for a long time - my 12TB already in the 6th years of it service, replaced only one HDD so far