What is the cheapest data storage media?

[kacper6768]

Which data storage media would be the cheapest (1 GB per penny) to make it as cheap as possible? Are external USB drives or pen drives the cheapest? How is it to buy several external USB drives or flash drives, each of them about 1 Terabyte or 1 external disk or flash drive with a capacity of several Terabytes. Is it, for example, to buy 1 external USB drive with a capacity of 10 Terabytes or 10 external drives of 1 Terabyte each. Are external USB drives or pen drives or any other media cheaper? In 2008, I thought that HD DVD or Blu-ray discs will become cheaper, but today's computers are slowly not building optical drives and Blu-ray or HD DVD discs are most often used for games on consoles, but I don't use consoles, I don't know what it's like with these plates. Are blank HD DVD or Blu-ray discs cheaper or more expensive Gigabytes per zloty compared to external USB drives or pendrives. The cheapest is to create free accounts in cloud services and when one free account is full, create a second one and so on, but then you are addicted to the Internet and the administrators of such a service can delete such an account. Why produce external USB SSDs when the most important thing is the price for the capacity, it is only unnecessarily more expensive and USB has high speed limits, it will not use the speed potential of these drives anyway. Servers similar in size to ordinary desktop computers are pointless, after all, the point is to record something and hide it in the closet, why pay for a box and install some server system (usually Linux) on it, as ordinary disks or pendrives take up much less space, but on YouTube I saw that some of them archive data in such servers. I have 1 Terabyte of camera vacation photos and 2 Terabytes of camera vacation videos over the past 10 years, but I could use a few Terabytes to spare. Now I keep my data on various free cloud services, of course, I created several dozen of these accounts so as not to pay for premium. Is it cheaper to get some data storage medias containing 4 or 5 Terabytes in total and wait a year or more until the data storage medias become even more expensive or is it not worth waiting and stock up on 10 Terabytes right away. When there is inflation now, but on the other hand technology is developing, will data storage medias be more expensive or cheaper in terms of capacity per price?
Before I decide to buy a data storage media, which cloud service currently has the most free capacity?

[Needfuldoer]

USB flash drives are not reliable.

 

If we're talking pure dollars-to-gigabytes here, it's hard to beat magnetic data tape. Yes the drives are expensive, but if you have enough volume you'll come out ahead.

 

For sensible amounts of data, traditional hard drives are tough to beat. Flash memory is still more expensive per gig than spinning rust.

[Blue4130]

Lto tape is the cheapest for the media. 18tb raw, 45tb compressed for $140.

 

BUT.... the drive cost will kill you.

[Kilrah]

For random access storage that doesn't need a drive that costs thousands, currently large HDDs in the 16-20TB range, for about $15/TB.

[kacper6768]

I have 2 computers, each has a 1TB HDD and an old laptop with a 250GB HDD and one 1TB USB HDD, all drives are full. I also have flash drives of several GB, but due to the low capacity, I do not include them.

[Dedayog]

3 minutes ago, kacper6768 said:

I have 2 computers, each has a 1TB HDD and an old laptop with a 250GB HDD and one 1TB USB HDD, all drives are full. I also have flash drives of several GB, but due to the low capacity, I do not include them.

So grab a 4TB or 8TB drive or two and set up a nice little NAS, if that is needed.

 

Honestly, HDD's have never been cheaper.  Or larger.  So if you really need that much data saved... open that wallet.  Or get to pruning.

 

Like in the non-digital world, if you're hoarding that much stuff.. you need a storage unit or a larger house.

 

I vote NAS or another Windows machine (like my PLEX machine) instead of a cloud.  Self hosting is cheaper in the long run.

[kokosnh]

Tape is the cheapest, LTO 8 12TB/30TB, but the tape drive is expensive.

 

and it’s useful only for backups.

[ewitte]

1 hour ago, Blue4130 said:

Lto tape is the cheapest for the media. 18tb raw, 45tb compressed for $140.

 

BUT.... the drive cost will kill you. 

Real world 18TB raw, 18.1TB compressed.   j/k I've seen more than that but usually no more than 20%.

[jaslion]

37 minutes ago, kacper6768 said:

I have 2 computers, each has a 1TB HDD and an old laptop with a 250GB HDD and one 1TB USB HDD, all drives are full. I also have flash drives of several GB, but due to the low capacity, I do not include them.

So you want to put some data away in storage?

 

Get a hard drive of like 8tb capacity and put it in a computer.

[OhYou_]

used hard drives are the cheapest all things considered. They easily break sub $10 per TB now.
Some of the cheapest ones I think are still the 14TBs like the HC530 or exos x14.
 

you can literally buy 12 and a cheap HBA for a but under $1800us. 
with 3 drives parity you have about 117TB usable space. 

I have 6 HC530 in a surveillance server and they have been great, this reminds me I should get two more to fill it. 

[jaslion]

17 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

used hard drives are the cheapest all things considered. They easily break sub $10 per TB now.
Some of the cheapest ones I think are still the 14TBs like the HC530 or exos x14.
 

you can literally buy 12 and a cheap HBA for a but under $1800us. 
with 3 drives parity you have about 117TB usable space. 

I have 6 HC530 in a surveillance server and they have been great, this reminds me I should get two more to fill it. 

Big asterisk there.

 

If you do it get 2 and make one mirror another just in case. As well used hard drives are used drives after all

[OhYou_]

1 minute ago, jaslion said:

Big asterisk there.

 

If you do it get 2 and make one mirror another just in case. As well used hard drives are used drives after all

Well yeah thats why my example was of a lot of drives. 
the cost effectiveness has a minimum TB of like 80. anything over 80TB writable space is worthwhile to pursue used drives in most cases since the $5ish savings per TB can go directly to buying more drives for parity. 

if you are looking for less than 80TB writable, you are better off with an all eggs in one basket approach or a single parity array like 3+1 with 20TB drives for a bit under 56TB writable. 

[kacper6768]

Which online drive can I keep my data securely without the risk of blocking it on? I kept my photos on the online GoogleDrive drive, when I wanted to log in, there is an inscription that I broke some rules of procedure and redirects to the recovery site, but only the emails are recovered there, not it was behind the Google Drive drive. After all, posting your photos there is in accordance with the regulations. I have these photos on my hard drive but I'm worried that if the drive breaks and then after replacing the drive I want to recover them and then I will have my data only on GoogleDrive then I would lose my data. I have filled out the appeal form against the decision to ban my account on the GoogleDrive website.

 

[kokosnh]

Upublicznianie emaila to niezbyt dobry pomysł, zwłaszcza jak starasz się o odzyskanie dostępu do googledrive przez niego... 

 

Making your email public is not a good idea, especially if you're trying to regain access to googledrive through it...

[kacper6768]

4 hours ago, HomicidalPingu said:

Overall unless you’re building a server I don’t see what you’re actually Storting that could take up 10TB of space 

I don't understand the meaning of server. Is the server a desktop-shaped box with multiple drives inside? Is the server making the contents of this computer-shaped box available over the internet, or is it just keeping that data to myself?
I would like to store photos and videos shot with Karema Roadrunner 505 Prestigio (compressed to H265 codec to take up less disk space) and iso images of Windows 3.11, 95, 98 SE, XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, 10 in case I want to install them and Microsoft removed them from its pages and the image of the system partition from Windows 10 to restore it in the event of a virus or system disk failure. It will all take 2 or 3 terabytes and I want the other 8 terabytes free so I don't have to worry about uploading my data in the future.
 

[Dedayog]

2 hours ago, kacper6768 said:

I don't understand the meaning of server. Is the server a desktop-shaped box with multiple drives inside? Is the server making the contents of this computer-shaped box available over the internet, or is it just keeping that data to myself?
I would like to store photos and videos shot with Karema Roadrunner 505 Prestigio (compressed to H265 codec to take up less disk space) and iso images of Windows 3.11, 95, 98 SE, XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, 10 in case I want to install them and Microsoft removed them from its pages and the image of the system partition from Windows 10 to restore it in the event of a virus or system disk failure. It will all take 2 or 3 terabytes and I want the other 8 terabytes free so I don't have to worry about uploading my data in the future.
 

This is easily done with a simple Windows machine with low specs and high capacity drives. I have 11TB in my little Ryzen 1600 machine.  

 

A server is a computer to store and provide access to data, in its simplest terms.