Fair enough!
My company used to run online backup services for design companies and we stored petabyte levels of data. We started off by buying the supposedly best “RAID” HHDs but after failure problems and chatting to a provider of hardware for large scientific clusters we made some changes. The setup ended up with better overall performance at a lower price using generic HDDs and designing for failure with ZFS for bit rot protection and RAID 6 (RAIDZ2). This arrangement had an invaluable snapshot capability which I learnt later saved a few companies from the ravages of CryptoLocker. I guess I was also very influenced by a picture of a Google compute node perhaps in the mid 2000s, which simply showed some generic components balanced on a metal tray velcroed into a rack. The setup was designed for dealing with failure practically. (James Somers covers this strategy a bit in his wonderful 2018 story for the New Yorker The Friendship That Made Google Huge.)
For personal/family use I’m interested in being able to rebuild a computer quickly if it fails. The speed of NVME helps here a lot. I’ve standardised on the speed, convenience and generally higher quality of nvme drives several years ago and haven’t looked back (except to migrate data, painfully slowly, off some old archival 2.5" and 3.5" hard disks). But perhaps I just found remarks online about “spinning rust” too much too handle…
I’ve used a few 100 TBs worth of NVME drives in the last 6 or 7 years from enterprise grade to cheap-n-cheerful. I’ve had few issues with any of them – fewer than I’ve had with HDDs – but of course any hard drive could fail at any time. As a result I prefer to have data in 3 places, based on a combination of network backup and regular DAS backups. That means I can carry a backup drive for me and my family that is very high speed, extremely convenient, and not much larger than a cigarette lighter. However this does mean my solution is potentially a lot more expensive, depending on how you choose to count it.
I did a bit of research on Fanxiang before buying a few sticks. These drives use TCL NAND and have pretty good reviews on gaming sites. Good enough, I think, to work with my informal RAID approach. Mac filesystems don’t have bitrot protection (to my knowledge), so my underlying filesystem is btrfs on cryptfs, for network backups at least.
I agree capacity is an issue. I have made valiant attempts to try to eliminate the amount of unnecessary data we generate and keep; largely to no avail, since image and video file resolutions keep going up, and design file formats seem to keep exploding.
Depending on the impact of tarrifs, it seems possible that a reasonable quality 8TB nvme drive will cost less than $400 in 18 months if the current rate of decrease in prices of 2TB drives is anything to go by.
In any event, there are lots of criteria to evaluate. In 2021 Backblaze concluded that “Once we controlled for age and drive days, the two drive types were similar and the difference was certainly not enough by itself to justify the extra cost of purchasing a SSD versus a HDD. At this point, you are better off deciding based on other factors: cost, speed required, electricity, form factor requirements, and so on.”. That seems reasonable, although SSD tech has improved quite a lot since 2021 and prices dropped significantly, although HDD drive capacities have also grown enormously in the mean time. (I see there is another Backblaze article on SSDs updated in April 2024 that might be worth reviewing.)
For me, the days of dealing with inconvenient SATA HDD drives are over. For a relative generating sometimes TBs of new data a week, HDD in chunky, portable RAID5 enclosures is their best way to go.
