Bioacoustic data collection and storage often use either internal SATA drives or external hard-drives, and as mentioned in this post (Long-term storage of acoustic data), these are prone to failure. Are there any brands or drive types that are more or less prone to failure? Which have you found to be most reliable?
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3 Answers
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The best thing to do for storage in the lab or office (this is less useful if you want to store things in the field), if you plan on storing locally is to use a RAID ("Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks"). This uses software to share data across multiple drives, with some of the drives' capacity being used for redundancy. So you might have a six-drive array, and if one of them fails you can still recover all of your data and just swap in a new drive. There are a number of manufacturers who make pre-made boxes for these that you can plug into your network and set up with a pretty user-friendly interface. One thing you do lose is a little bit of total storage capacity, but large drives are quite inexpensive these days compared to redundancy. Exactly how much you'll lose depends on what RAID setup you're using (there are a number of kinds) but for example you could have a setup using 4x 10TB drives that could handle total failure of one drive and end up with 30TB of usable space.
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I always use Lacie Rugged hard drives
They're rain, shock and crush resistant so they're good for working copies/using in the field! Slightly pricier than some other external hard drives but have been worth it in my experience.
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1$\begingroup$ Yes, an SSD (solid state drive) is definitively much more robust than a disk, and usually with faster access. $\endgroup$– sm1Commented Jul 22, 2022 at 15:24
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I always use Seagate external hard drives and have not had any problems with them. They have SSD or HDD options as well, going from 250GB all the way up to 20TB. I use these as back-ups to the data that I store on the cloud for analysis or that I then archive on Arbimon, figshare, etc.
A lot of clouds or other archiving platforms have an option for you to mail hard drives to them for them to upload for you using their batch processing high-computing machines to save you time & money depending on if your organization or university's existing options are limited. But that goes into a whole other ethical dilemma of trusting said organization with it, though that would be an issue even if you're uploading the data yourself since it still ends up on the platform regardless.
answered Jul 22, 2022 at 13:14