I am relatively new here but I have been a lurker for a long time. I finally made an account to give back to the (new) community members what I learned over time. This is a privacy question but more of a tech question I reckon so please help me out nonetheless.
I have a question about how best to store and use my large media collection I have acquired that’s on multiple external SSDs - on the Kingston XS 2000 series to be exact.
I have:
1x 1 TB
2x 4TB
Total: 9 TB of fast I/O flash storage with all my media (all unseen movies, 7-8 years worth).
My question/goals:
I have 3 mini PCs (with Fedora Workstation, Silverblue, and Windows 11) and on one of which I would like to permanently have these external SSDs connected to be used offline or via Jellyfin for the 1000 movies I have. And I would like to have this set up be long term - 10 years from today. Alternatively I can buy a nice Thunderbolt 5 dock from CalDigit or the new Anker one for my MacBook Air 15 M2 to connect the drives to permanently.
I don’t intend to have a lot of read and write on these drives as they are almost full anyway and will want to purchase additional drives if I need more storage for new media over the next 10 years.
My main question is about the operational reliability and stability of these drives with any of the OSs mentioned – for long term use. I’d like to know and understand and get some kind of assurance that the drives I have will function as I want long term if I don’t have a lot of read and write to it and that it will last 10+ years. In the end, this will serve as an archive of media for me that I will not want to let go even after media consumption.
I hope this clears what and how I am looking for with a little bit of why.
Please advice on what I can do or should do to ensure of this as I want.
Note: NAS is out of the question as it would cost a lot more to get what I want and I am not tech savvy enough to ensure of it for that long and Synology drives are not cheap. At that price points for the storage I would want, I’d be better off buying physical media of each movie which is out of the question. Those who torrent understand the restriction that offers and why I want to do it my way.
Please help a fellow FOSS lover out. What OS and set up should I have? How do I do what I want to do? Please feel to ask any follow up questions should you have any.
Flash is not good for offline long-term storage.
You’ll have to look at what the manufacturer states for your drives but AFAIK it’s not good for more that 5 years max. You would have to occasionally, say, every 2-3 years copy the data to a different drive (and back if you only have one).
If speed doesn’t matter much a HDD would be a safer and cheaper solution.
So if I want to ensure long term 10+ years storage with operational stability and reliability, what should I do? What can I do? What other options can I avail? Are SATA SSDs better? I don’t trust HDDs.
(consider cost is not an issue but getting a NAS is)
Unless money is tight, I think you should build a dedicated home server (functionally similar to a NAS but basically a personal server that can do other things besides storage stuff) for longetivity. You don’t need the latest CPU for these purposes, an older secondhand ryzen CPU can work great for Jellyfin without having a large TDP. It can even function for purposes beyond watching movies.
As for an OS, there isn’t anything wrong with a regular Fedora installation. You could use OpenMediaVault for a seamless experience but it runs Debian and comes with the security drawbacks with frozen packages. Honestly, I think you should use this as an opportunity to learn about self-hosting and build something fun!
By NAS, do you mean a pre-built one? Why don’t you trust HDD? You can’t really get longevity with an SSD even if it’s a SATA one. You could use a NVME SSD as the boot drive though.
The interface makes no difference.
The NAND flash “forgets” the electrons stored in its cells over time. It’s just the way it is - it’s also not broken or anything like that, you just have to write the data back to the drive again and then it’s fine for another few years.
The same is true for HDDs (for different physical reasons) but they hold the data longer (10y+).
Mechanics don’t matter when the drive is stored in a cabinet somewhere.
They are much more delicate when they are in use or when you drop them, obviously.
If you want to run the drives non-stop for 10 years you’ll have to think about a valid backup strategy anyway cos there is no guarantee that the drives (both SSD and HDD) will last for that long.
Like others have said, a HDD is a much better option than SSD. It’s also cheaper. A HDD can fail like an SSD, and will, especially if this is a drive you will have on all the time. The most important thing you can do no matter what drives you are using though is Backup the drives. I’ve got a Docking Station plugged into my PC that holds a couple of HDDs in which I backup my OS on. The docking station allows me to flip a switch in the back of it to turn my HDD on, make the backup I need, and then turn it off. So, the HDD itself is only on once a week in my case. I’m pretty sure it’s going to last longer than 10 years. Hope this helps
Even the M-Discs are just theoretically 1000 years. I expect it to be actually a small fraction of a millennium. Even then reaching 200 or even 100 years would be impressive enough. Your M-DISC will survive to 500 years but no one has the tech to read it because it is proprietary and people forgot about it.
Archiving data is a moving target. Its not a write once kind of thing and forget.
I don’t understand why everybody here seems to agree that mechanical disks are more durable than SSD, my research and experience say otherwise.
While both disk types are not really suitable for long term storage SSD outperform HDD by a confortable margin, usually 7-10 years vs 3-6 depending on usage.
Those three sources are all using the same data, one source would’ve been enough. Anyways we are talking about cold storage for which HDDs are generally considered better than SSDs.
Actually, what I really wanted to learn and understand and find a way for is to be able to use drives long term - meaning, they are not always reading or writing but they are always connected to a computer ready to read and write at anytime as and when I stream from it.
From what I am reading on this thread and what I have found online, there’s no perfect solution but the best one can do is get a NAS with many drives (depending on storage requirements) with RAID 5 and live with that. Synology is the only reputable name in the game for the support and reliability their products offer.
But I am still open to more ideas and suggestions. I’m still trying to avoid getting a NAS. It’ll be a whole new production for me and like I said, I am not tech savvy enough to set it up in the best way possible which means its risky to make any purchase and fuck it up with the set up and risk damaging something.
