I recently tried to read a small number of 30+ year-old floppy disks containing code I wrote for the Atari ST and they're all unreadable. The disk surface is noticably degraded.
A mix of buying cheap disks, using non-standard formats to prioritise space over reliability, and waiting too long to duplicate the data.
Lesson learned.
I've got three drives in my NAS that are about 12yo
I've had one drive die on me and that was in a PC that was inside my house when it experienced a severe fire.
It lasted long enough for me to pull the data to another disk but on the next reboot it died.
These days I have a parity protected nas, a backup nas and and an off-site storage solution with my more essential data. Also cloud for photos.
Hi. I'm in Australia and Amazon have both the 6TB WD Blue Desktop and WD NAS drives available, but the latter is 100 bucks more than the former (280 vs 190). They're both 5400rpm and have 256MB cache.
I run UnRAID at home, with the computer on 99% of the time. The drives are set to spin down after 15 minutes and I reckon at least a couple of my 8 drives spin up a handful of times a day.
What am I getting for that extra 100 bucks? What would I be missing out on if I bought the cheaper ones? I'd be thinking of buying 2 as one of them would be my new parity drive.
Thanks for any advice.