I use plain old spinning hard drives in external enclosures. I use SyncBack (a free program) to do an incremental sync (only copying files that have been added since the last copy) from one drive to another every night. I also backup everything to a cloud backup. If you have a fire, burglary, etc. having all your backups in your house isn’t going to do you any good, no matter how many you have.
Reliable Digital Music Storage
I am a little broke just now I just purchased a new power amplifier.
As so often when ever I make a hardware investment
I read online reviews which mention music selections and simultaneously I end
up added 50-100 CDs to my collection. It all adds up.
I mirror my music archive on (3) NSAs, (2) PCs and (2) USB hard drives. Plus I have the original CDs which I pray I never have to rip and organize again. I use the program “Beyond Compare” to reliably mirror all the archives. That gives me (8) archives in case anything dies. Today mechanical things died.
Today one of my WD passport external hard drives started acting up. It is “kind of” working, I can’t trust it any more. I read that all external USB hard drives have an expected life of less than ten years which in terms of long term reliability for my needs sucks. I like the price of mechanical hard drives; $64 for 2TB. It can require several hours to copy 1.2Tb of files to an external hard drive. Anytime the Oppo is on the external USB hard drive is spinning, be it working or otherwise, the hour meter of death is running.
In theory for the cost of a SSD external 2TB USB drive ($250- $350) I can buy five or six mechanical hard drives; just replace them every 2-3 years. Why bother, why take the risk? I can see replacing my external physical hard drives with external SSD just for the reliability issues. SSD is much faster R/W for bursts however no better than a mechanical hard drive for sustained R/W so I would not expect any actual performance improvement.
I was on Amazon hunting a 2TB external SSD USb drive and the G technology came highly recommended for $319, the SanDisk is only $300 but is targeted to the mobile market so it is only USB C with an adapter, I don’t trust adapters, they are one more thing to reduce reliability. Samsung has a T5 model for $319 which may be more reliable than the WD I have now but it isn’t particularly dust, shock or water proof.
I ended up with the WD My Passport Go SSD for $330 it is dust, shock and water proof, I like the way the USB cable attaches. And Amazon has them in stock unlike the SanDisk. When I can afford a second 2TB external SSB I’ll get another, I may try something else.