Most affordable form of storage?

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thisissparta

Honorable
Jan 27, 2013
32
1
10,530
I want to store 1 TB of data, moving it from my hard drive to somewhere else.
I could buy a new external HDD, as some of you might suggest, buy I simply dont want to. I already have two of them which are full now.
So I am looking for a storage solution that would offer me the lowest price/GB.
I do not really care about redundancy or anything of that sort, so I would not like a RAID or anything.
What I want to do is, make a one time backup in just one kind of media, and then when I need it, I could use it anytime.
The reason I dont want a e-HDD is that this is not data I would want to edit, so I do not need rewriting capabilities. Just recording/reading is needed.
Could someone please suggest a cheap solution to me, that I could afford? (some people suggest tape drives, which cost $3000 for the drive I guess).
I can get an 8.5 GB Dual Layer DVD at 0.33 US Dollar where I live, but I would then need 121 of these, and it would be a painful experience burning them one by one and watching the short clock hand take 360 degree rotations.
Also, 1024 GB on these DL-DVD's costs around $39.93, could someone suggest something cheaper and less painful?
 
Solution
USAFRet
Tape
Optical
Paper
Magnetic

Tape is expensive, because you don't currently have a drive for it.
Optical is a hassle for 1TB of data.
Paper. I guess you could use punch cards. But then you need a reader for those.

Leaving magnetic. If that is the cheapest and the easiest, why not this option?

The concept you're thinking of is WORM (Write Once, Read Many). But that has been taken over by regular hard drives.
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USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Mar 16, 2013
171,723
18,097
184,590
Tape
Optical
Paper
Magnetic

Tape is expensive, because you don't currently have a drive for it.
Optical is a hassle for 1TB of data.
Paper. I guess you could use punch cards. But then you need a reader for those.

Leaving magnetic. If that is the cheapest and the easiest, why not this option?

The concept you're thinking of is WORM (Write Once, Read Many). But that has been taken over by regular hard drives.
 
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Solution
getochkn

getochkn

Polypheme
Jul 2, 2006
12,407
54
65,040
External drive is still your cheapest and best solution. There is no real write once/read many (WORM) media other than DVD's, but as you said, 121 DVD's isn't practical to swap out and find the DVD you need. Bluray may be an option as they can hold 25-50GB per bluray, would use less discs than DVD's, but more cost.
 
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popatim

popatim

Titan
Moderator
Dec 2, 2009
38,904
980
135,890
The problem is the only external device support you currenltly have is usb so
there is no cheaper solution than an hdd. 1.5tb is what? $100 ?

Next cheapest is bd dl disks are about a buck each but you would need a bd dl burner which is another ? 80-ish for a total of about 22 disks and a tad over $100 but the next 'offload' would only cost what disks cost. ~$22

lastly I hope you have backups of your offloaded files should they really be important. HDD's fail even when not being used. And optical disks need to be remade every so often depending on their quality and storage conditions. You can get some archival quality bd's that they claim are good for 100 years.


 
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