SPCR

I'm trying to decide between a WD Gold HDD and a Samsung 850 Pro SSD for my external backup drives.

Price is a factor, but more importantly I'm concerned about data integrity and bit errors over time. Since the WD Gold has extra buffer cache and is designed for data centers, would it be a more reliable choice? Or would they both be about the same in terms of data integrity.

Also, if I RAID 0 the WD Gold (2 x 1TB), would it be in the same ball park for speed as the SSD?

whispercat wrote:Also, if I RAID 0 the WD Gold (2 x 1TB), would it be in the same ball park for speed as the SSD?

1tb hdds have 100mb/s transfer rates, two would have around 200 mb/s, an sata III ssd like 850 pro can do around 500 mb/s, but not only depends on the drives but the interface and the file size / types. If you want speed on an external drive, check Samsung 2TB T5 Portable Solid-State Drive

whispercat wrote:Price is a factor, but more importantly I'm concerned about data integrity and bit errors over time. Since the WD Gold has extra buffer cache and is designed for data centers, would it be a more reliable choice? Or would they both be about the same in terms of data integrity.

I would recommend to do two things, an external backup can be a server or an external drive, but also do it offsite like an online service.

Premade servers like Synology or Qnap, can schedule backup at certain hours, and also can be program to offload to an online backup service, this is what i would do.

Now people that are very concerned with data integrity usually build servers around ZFS/freenas, as it has different methods to prevent silent data corruption, personally my storage is not as important so i dont really mess with it, for me unraid/whs are enough, but you do have to accept compromises.

Research more into what you think would fit your budget and desires, there are a ton of options out there.

The WD spec sheet for the 1 TB says 184 mb/s: https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/web ... 800074.pdf

I don't know anything about NAS or servers. It should be possible to schedule backups to an ordinary external HDD enclosure using software, no?

My concern is mostly with how the data sits on the disc, and whether a mechanical drive is any worse at bit errors or corruption than NAND flash.

For cold storage I'd prefer mechanical HDD. Flash memory could have retention problem if sitting unpowered for a while. Personally I would only choose SSD for backup if you had issues with backup times as mechanical hard drives are going to be way slower than SSD, especially if there are a lot of data to back up every time and if it's all small random files.