Low cost archiving solutions?

[zassou]

I have been taking graphical/video editing freelancing for a while, and have a few TB of raw material, want to move some of that to an offline storage.

My requirements:

• as cheap as poosible, I don't mind ghettoness
• easy to use, as little configuration as possible
• somewhat reliable
• decent R/W speed, ie should be faster than USB stick

I have some ideas:

1. USB 3.0 "toaster" style hard drive dongle
   Pros:
   It's the easiest solution, hard drives are reliable enough for me even for 24x7 operations.
   "Toasters" are dirt cheap and compatible for anything that has a SATA port, even optical drive.
   Very easy to swap.
   Decent R/W speed
   Cons:
   Hard drives are expensive to invest. (altho very cheap for GB/$)
   USB connection might fail
2. Blu-ray writer
   Pros:
   BD drives are as cheap as DVD drives now.
   BD-R discs are dirt cheap
   Cons:
   I don't like optical drives.
   Noisy
   Discs might get scratches, thus make it less reliable
   Suspect to disc rot, esp in humid condition
   GB/$ not as good as hard drive
   Low per disc capacity, only 25GB max, require disc swap/parting large file
3. NAS
   Pros:
   everything
   Cons:
   I'm not Linus.

[Jade]

Shucked on sale WD 8TB My Books.

[zassou]

4 minutes ago, Jade said:

Shucked on sale WD 8TB My Books.

They are way too expensive

[Jade]

Just now, zacao said:

They are way too expensive

$130 for 8TB whitelabel reds? Seems like an effective way to solve a storage problem to me.

[zassou]

2 minutes ago, Jade said:

$130 for 8TB whitelabel reds? Seems like an effective way to solve a storage problem to me.

Do they available in US only? I guess they'll be very expensive after import tax.

[Jade]

1 minute ago, zacao said:

Do they available in US only? I guess they'll be very expensive after import tax.

Dunno, I'm in the US. Not sure how the availability is outside of it. Though, not being in the US is quite important for people to provide sufficient solutions.

[zassou]

Right now there are 3TB HGST drives that are quite cheap, about 54 USD. But I need more than that, atleast 12TB.