 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here as I've mentioned on a few videos, backup and data storage is one of the subjects that I'm really interested in, particularly from a video production standpoint because I have a very sort of long term outlook on my video producing efforts. So I've talked on a couple of videos about various backup and storage configurations for video. I've mentioned that what I do personally is I have an NES running on my network as Synology NES and I periodically dump some stuff, some stuff, not all of it, onto cold storage, which in other words is not kept running on the NES. In other words, it's your classic what's called data in a closet. It's just sitting on a shelf or wherever. It's not connected to a device. Now the problem with cold storage versus live storage like an NES that has RAID running is that the data is susceptible to bit rot. In other words, if you just leave data sitting on a magnetic storage medium like hard drive over time, if it's not powered on, the data is going to inevitably degrade and storage systems like NESs have technology for fixing and alerting about bad sectors and stuff like that so that you can avoid this fate. Nevertheless, I was wondering for quite some time, well, are there hard drive is kind of for the most cost-effective archiving storing medium because there are technologies such as LTO and even optical drives that are suitable for archiving. But for your average person who doesn't want to go out and buy themselves an LTO rider, which is a very expensive piece of gear, are there hard drives specifically for this purpose? So the best source of information for anyone else into this kind of stuff, storage and backup and all that is this subreddit called data hoarder. Really, really good subreddit for people who think along these lines about protecting their data and I found a thread. I just searched Reddit for actually search Google for best hard drive for archiving and I found this thread here. Best hard disk to archive, bracket store in a closet. So this is exactly what I'm talking about. Now, this thread is a few years old, actually five years old. But it's probably a reckon applicable today. Anyway, the OP or the poster asks, well, what's the best storage? Are there any type of specifically a type of hard drive that is better than others for archival storage? The classic sitting in a closet case. So this poster recommends magnetical optical media, which I had not come across before. Pretty interesting, but again, requires a special rider. This poster, Adam Poke 111, I love reading our Reddit user names because they're so random. He says, Sea Gates archive drives would be good for this. Very big storage density and reasonable prices, too. But there's a reason they use SMR, shingled magnetic recording, which means as it's writing data to the disc, it actually partially overlaps the data currently on the tracks. These are the kind of people you'll find on Reddit. They just like know so much about specialized topics. This means right speeds are rather slow, but read speeds are essentially no different. So this would be perfect for archival, where you don't really intend to read the desk, but you just want to write stuff. So so but for archive, these are perfect as you're not going to be constantly accessing them. So this this comment here, thank you to Adam Poke. Poke 111 got me aware of the fact that there exists such things as archival hard drives and he links out to a few of these products on Amazon UK. I guess he's based in the UK, but I just wanted to show how to find these things. So I just typed into Amazon archive HDD. And you'll find here, for instance, you'll find a few of these a data center archive. So there is across different manufacturers, Sea Gates, WD. This one is renewed. So let's go for a new product. This one looks OK to me. It's $229 and it's Sea Gates archive HDD. That's an eight terabyte volume for 229. So my last video, I did a video about the ultra large capacity hard drives currently in the market, which reach up to 20 terabytes and whether they're actually cheaper on a per terabyte basis than the one terabyte. So the answer is yes, they are. So this is definitely more expensive, but this one is specialized for you can see the first line here says for archive use only. So I do not know that these things exist. I'm very glad that I do now because for what I'm planning to use for long term on the shelf video storage, this is like the perfect tool for the job. And it talks about the various technologies, reliable data retrieval for cold data storage. So this is a specific type of hard drive that's actually intended for cold state storage versus being used on an NES. And I imagine they are can be used on an NES, but you're better off using ones that have normal right speeds if you're if you because you already have that protection from rate. But if you want to do cold storage, there are there is such a thing as archive HDD for those who prefer to order from from new egg. I just thought I'd run the search term archive HDD in here too. And again, it's not a huge product category. I guess these things are less in use nowadays, but you can see options for from, you know, the kind of major names in storage like Seagate and from this is Seagate again. So it looks like Seagate is the main company doing these. But you have here, for instance, Seagate archive HDD, six gigabit per second max read or read speeds, three point five inch form factor. So it's a typical hard drive, except for the internal mechanics on it. That is designed to store data cold. And thus the read speeds will be fine, but the right speeds will be slower. And this particular one comes in comes up to eight terabyte capacity. And I'm guessing if you played around with the search terms that you could probably find bigger capacity ones. But in any event, eight terabytes is quite a lot of storage. And, you know, you could fill up a whole case full of these. And I don't know exactly how long if there's any guarantees as to how long these guys can sit cold without bit rot. But I guess if you're looking to protect bit rot and store data cold, it would make abundant sense to use the hard drive that is actually intended for that purpose rather than a random HDD that, you know, is designed could be designed for sitting in an actual computer. So I'm really glad to find out about these. I'm probably going to buy by a couple and I'm over in the US this summer to store cold, my long term video. And for cold storage, I use it for like stock footage and B roll and raw shoots and stuff like that. So these things exist. You can find them on the usual tech retailers and thank you to Redis and thank you to Data Order for alerting me to their existence.