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best external HD that hold around 10tb or more

hydroazuanacaine

hydroazuanacaine

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May 17, 2007
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looking to spend less than $200. ideally closer to $100. can wait for deals. i'm on mac. dependability is key.

thanks!
 
Yeah, uh, I think you're gonna have a bit of trouble there. Reliability, speed, low cost: pick two of three. A more typical size for an external HD these days is 2-4 terabytes. 10TB is almost at the state you'd want to look tnto network attached storage of some sort (i.e. multiple HDDs in a cheapo server with RAID/ZFS/whatever)... quick look on Amazon says a typical cost is $300+ for a 10Gb hdd. Remember you get what you pay for: if you cheap out on a 10 Tb HDD, have fun when it fails and you are missing 10 Tb of data.

Even then a quality 2TB hdd is gonna run $100-200 depending on vendor. Unless you want second hand stuff you arre unlikely to grt 10GB of reliable, fast storage for $200.
 
2tb? they even make them that size anymore? i got a thumb drive that holds more than that. for real. i got these little micro cards that hold a tb. i'm trying to spend a little less so it will fit on my desk instead of my pinky nail.

2tb is nothing. i need 10 - 20tb.
 
That's flash storage, not traditional spinning-iron hard disks. Yes I am pedantic, but arguably they have different uses. Even then, the biggest USB flash keys I can see are around 4-8 Tb, and they are fraky expensive. Also, the damn liars do not mean "terabyte" when they talk Tb = in reality they are counting Tb as 1 x 1012 bytes, not 240 bytes as a nerd would assume. The difference means 1 Tb on the box will give you around 900 gigabytes of actual space as reported by the OS.

I'd buy a pair of WD or Seagateexternal 8Tb hdds and RAID them together or just have two drives with different stuff on em. Amazon looks like it'll sell a single drive for $100 give or take, so you'd be able to do it without breaking the bank.

If you want a cheap solution, buy a few dozen thumbdrives on sale, a half dozen USB hubs, and stuff it all in a shoebox, then set up RAID on your computer to merge/stripe all the thumbdrives together into one logical disk. Inelegant, but proven to work. Some maniac even did this with USB floppy disks for some reason.
Or buy several cheap and reliable hard drives of smaller capacity and do a similar thing. Consider if you have to have all the storage on one device.

There is a top limit to information density that can be achieved with our current storage technologies. If you think about it, it's mind boggling we are even able to cram a whole terabyte of information on a thumbnail-sized chip. Transistors can only get so small before the noise figure means information storage goes out the window. Same for magetic recordings: the magnetic domains can only get so small before random thermal noise will erase the information.
 
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Fuckin hell, 20TB. What in the world could possibly fill all that space? Quantum Break -- clocks around 180GB's. So I really don't know what could you do with it other than having a company of your own, then yeah I suggest buying but if you are a power user I suggest buying a 2TB version. And you got the wrong section, btw. There's Sports & Gaming for these kind of issues or LAVA.
 
I would imagine if you are doing 4K video editing, especially if you are working with uncompressed footage off a DV camera or something, it's easy to fill a 2TB hard disk quite easily.
 
4k video editing and drum roll scans of film eat terabytes up so fucking fast. and i do both. i have single image files (with layers) that are over 10gb. you can't even save those as a tiff.

sekio said:
I'd buy a pair of WD or Seagateexternal 8Tb hdds and RAID them together or just have two drives with different stuff on em. Amazon looks like it'll sell a single drive for $100 give or take, so you'd be able to do it without breaking the bank.
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i'll look into this. thanks.
 
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its kind of a wierd question, does the OP want it as reliable backup or useable fast access storage? because that choice leads you in completely different directions.

The disks that are reliable over a lond period are lower data density and slower as rule. Magnetic storage is easier to recover than NAND type SSD stuff, and magnetics give warning signs before they die.

fast access means high storage density and much higher chance of complete failure. SSDs in my experience go bad very quickly if they going to die and there is no chance of recovery.

If you have ever played with ultra high frame rate video like the old phantom the storage space becomes obscene very quickly.
if you are doing video I guess you don't care about long term storage on device?
 
no, i care about long term storage. don't wanna lose my babies. though some video projects i delete once published. depends.

i have a 1tb ssd on my laptop, so i can move everything off and that's at least enough to work on one project or one segment of a project at a time. but as i continue to move things off, i'm filling up all these few year old 4tb somethingbook drives i have at rapid pace. i don't have any files 4tb or bigger of course. i'm saying 4tb doesn't last me long enough to be of consideration when buying.
 
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If you are willing, you can trade CPU cycles (time, energy) for space by using various lossless compression. if you are using video then e.g. HuffYUV, Lagarith, FFV1 are all very fast and applicable for editing use and can easily result in files that are between 10 and 40% of the original uncompressed ones with no loss of quality. FLAC is useful for audio, etc.

Hard drives are the gold standard for large amounts of media archival. When they are not spinnig/powered they basically don't age. They also are pretty close to the density of magnetic tape but with the bonus of random access.
 
^if that's a riddle, i'm stumped.

i do not edit off the hard drive. i move everything but my project and the apps i need like premiere and photoshop onto the external. then i use my 1tb internal ssd to do the work. when i'm done and send the video or photo where it needs to go, i put it on an external to make room for the next.
 
The closest I could find to what you described is a 20TB HD NAS, but they run closer to $900.00 than $200.00.

Western Digital 20TB My Cloud EX2 Ultra Network Attached Storage - product number WDBVBZ0200JCH-NESN
 
If you get a solution, let us all know. I'm all in for cheaper storage solutions. ;)
 
yo.

which does better getting knocked off the desk. because boy, do i knock hard drives off my desk: seagate expansion or western digital elements?

i'm not paying extra for for the ports on the seagate backup plus or the encryption on the western digital my book.

suppose i could wrap either in bubble wrap. which i will do. but there is still the impact.

and what's a hard drive warranty? if if breaks, we determine through arbitration how many fingers the data was worth and a representative from the manufacturer provides those fingers? who selects the representative and which fingers?

thanks
 
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hydroazuanacaine said:
which does better getting knocked off the desk. because boy, do i knock hard drives off my desk: seagate expansion or western digital elements?
Click to expand...

I dunno Hydro, I mount all my gear in either 19" racks or tower enclosures. I have one 19" 8 space rack at the side of my bed, I use it as a nightstand. My wife is a saint to live this way. :cool:

But at least I don't knock my sensitive equipment over :)
 
i don't knock laptops, cameras, or scanners overs. all of those lay flat and low. external hard drives, those things were designed to get knocked over. tall with two cords sticking out? come on.

i guess if one of them has pads to lay flat that would be a big factor in my decision, though it looks like neither does.
 
There's always duct tape, LOL :rolleyes: You could probably manage to tape them vertically, too.
 
na, i need them to move. sometimes i work in at my coffee table, sometimes at my desk. also, with the tall and cords sticking out, i imagine even a someone who did not abuse opiates, benzos, and dissos would have issues. speaking of which ...

i actually have a note on my fridge that says "do no inject pcp analogs." let me tell you how much good that note does. i pay a therapist $180 a week to come up with those kinds of ideas.
 
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