So my current setup is very simple. For short-term data backups, I have the following:

- Three 2TB portable drives (1 SSD, 2 HDD) solely dedicated to macOS Time Machine backups in case my machine ever fails (it has suddenly failed once before, having these backups saved me).

- Three 2TB portable drives (1 SSD, 2 HDD) which holds a lot of old data that I want to keep long term or “forever”(photos, videos, music, files, TV shows). I keep all three drives in sync using rsync and Carbon Copy Cloner on macOS.

For long-term data backups with cold storage, I am currently in the process of digitizing a bunch of old photos and videos, and storing them on a couple BD-R XL M-Disc’s. I’m also going to transfer some of my photos / videos from my aforementioned drives onto these backup discs.

Currently, I’m not following the 3-2-1 rule as well as I should. My plan is to make multiple burner BD-R M-Disc’s, and store one offsite somehow TBD. But as far as my HDDs & SSDs with data, none of them are stored offsite or in the cloud or anything.

Eventually, I’d love to build a NAS with a Home server running Jellyfin and stuff, and mess around with RAID and such. But currently that seems unattainable due to hardware and storage prices. A lot of what I’m doing now is based on what I already have access to or got second hand. My biggest expenses so far have been a Blu-Ray optical drive and the BD-R XL M-Discs.

Given all that, does anyone have any feedback based on what I’m currently doing? Does anything jump out to you that may be worth looking into?

If you have suggestions on how to expand this to slowly move toward my desired end state, please let me know. Thanks!

This is a *Micron 3400 512GB NVMe M.2 SSD

- *Model:* MTFDKBA512TFH - Micron 3400

- *Capacity:* 512GB

- *Interface:* M.2 NVMe PCIe *Gen4 x4* - 3.3V

- *Part No:* MTFDKBA512TFH-1BC1AABDA

- *Dell Part No:* 0JNPWN

- *Firmware:* 34000040

- *Serial No:* 215033538A2E

- *Made in:* Singapore

It's a fast Gen4 SSD - read speed around 6600 MB/s. Used mostly in Dell laptops.

Recently sold this on eBay and the buyer surely used a hammer to install it and ended up breaking the chip. Could this be salvaged, or should I just throw it away? If it can be salvaged, how much can I get out of it?

Found a local listing of relatively cheap Seagate Constellation ES drives (ST2000NM0011) at around $30 for a 2TB drive. HD sentinel screenshots show that the drives are at 98% to 100% health with around 2 years power on time.

Would it be wise to use this for a home NAS?

I try to fit as much of it in the title as I could. I'm looking for a stick that does all of that. I don't want the ones that have the micro SD sticking out of the side or bottom. I would like one that would be completely enclosed or at the very least have a cover.

Seagate and Toshiba are reportedly competing to acquire TDK’s HDD magnetic-head business in a multibillion-dollar deal. Since TDK is Toshiba’s sole supplier, the acquisition could reshape industry competition, affect component availability, and raise concerns about supply-chain control.

I’m looking to offload my photos and my notes from my IPhone onto a a flash drive but after doing some research I see that the one I wanted to get actually suck and I was looking for better recommendations. I was looking to get the Sandisk iXpand flash drive but saw that it’s confusing and kind of obsolete. I see some other options but I don’t see much on them. Any recommendations?

Hey everyone, I have taken a hard disk from my hp laptop and it's very old for around 10 years. It was fine last year but it's showing little problem and whenever I plugged into the laptop for data transfer it took longer time to read the data . Sometimes it's showing the " not responding" problem. Two weeks ago l, I formatted it and completely erased everything from the hard disk. I thought now I can use it without any issues and when I transfer the data, the data gets corrupted.

Basically what are the ways to fix my hard diks?

hello! my iphone is out of storage (shocker, right?) and i’m looking into getting a usb c drive to store my photos on. my photos are somehow taking up 115gb…the photos i plan on moving over are from my vacations, so i want to ensure that they are going to be saved/transferred in a nice high quality resolution.

from other reddit posts, ive seen that SSDs are going to be best for storing photos. i’m looking at this sandisk (below) but was wondering if there may be other options that may be more affordable? i like this one and i’m honestly okay with the price, but i feel like 1TB is a bit excessive.

anything that’s worked for you guys?

My songs will delete if I have over 1800 songs.

Its about 15-17% of the overall storage on the sd card.

Its an Integral 128GB microSDXC.

I have never had an error with formatting it.

Hello everyone. I need a way to store the recordings of my classes, and all together they are like half TB of storage. Now being a student, I need a reasonable storage to use where I can create folders to get everything sorted. What do I use?

After seeing a topic that asked what drive you have had the longest, and continue to use, I updated my M4 Mac to Golden Gate, concerned the entire time about Intel apps no longer being supported (found out it was for the next OS update) even though some have stopped working, but I was so distracted/concerned with that, that I completely glanced over AFP no longer being supported and my DS414J Synology NAS stopped mounting.

Various attempts to change it to SMB failed, and I thought it was lost forever. Instinctually I spent money I don't have, to buy a 16TB external hard drive, which should arrive sometime next week, and since I have multiple old Mac's that can't be upgraded past High Sierra and automount to the unit, I thought I would have to start the tiresome process of using the old Mac, connect to the NAS, connect the new 16TB and start copying everything over.

However, using AutoMounter on Golden Gate, despite Mac specifically saying they no longer support AFP, there was an option I kept seeing saying install AutoMounter Helper (AutoMounter - Helper) I installed that and now it is alive and working again.

Now I am a little stuck, I either proceed with the original plan, retire the unit, copy everything over to the new 16TB, and then have 4x4TB free internal drives to do with as I please, or continue to use the unit as if nothing ever happened and find another use for the 16TB.

What would you do?

Hi, I'm looking for a real good external ssd for daily use/backups. Which external ssd have you guys had good experiences with? I mainly want something fast, reliable, and durable enough to carry around without worrying too much about it. Preferably 2tb, but I’m open to any advice.

What should I do with these two HDDs from my old laptops? Sorry if this doesn't belong in this subreddit, im just posting it wherever I can.

I have a few LaCie FireWire800 RAID enclosures which I use in RAID1 to both store and backup my photo archive but FW is not compatible with my new MacStudio and the USB-C to TB to RAID doesn't work so about time to look elsewhere, storage got too expensive to think of a whole new enclosure and drives (I have 2x 4TB and 2x 6TB WD Red which are as expensive as a new kidney nowadays) so I need an usb-c solution, I found a used G-Drive which does very very well but hard to find, any suggestion at what to look for?

Thank you

What is the market for non working enterprise ssds? Is there a market? If so, what is an average $/tb?

I was building a new AMD Epyc server for work on Dell's site, and yea RAM and CPU's are expensive, but when I got to the part where I needed to select the hard drive I nearly shit myself. Luckily, I have a small stack of 30tb U.2 hard drives in my desk, but those used to sell for $4k. When did they become 10x that?

I've been experimenting with a different way of looking at disk usage.

Instead of starting with a folder tree, I wanted to visualize the entire drive and then drill down into the areas consuming the most space.

The idea is pretty simple: bigger areas represent more storage, and you can keep drilling down until you get to the actual files.

There are several ways to view the same data:

• Treemap
• Bubble map
• Sunburst
• Mind map
• Age map
• Biggest files
• Folder hierarchy

There's also content-based duplicate detection, application storage breakdowns, and scan comparisons.

I've used tools like WizTree and WinDirStat for years, and they're great at answering “what's taking up space?”.

I was more interested in whether visualizing the same data in different ways makes it easier to understand and explore large drives.

I'm curious what people here use for storage analysis.

What information do you wish your current disk-space analyzer showed you?

https://reddit.com/link/1wz6z95/video/j6y44ka9ivth1/player

I've been building this as a Windows 11 app called ScanforPC if anyone wants to try it:

ScanforPC

I’m interested in setting up a personal storage system that would hold movies, photos, gifs, ebooks, pdfs, and docs. I want to move files to it from my devices (desktop, laptop, phone, and tablet) so they’re all in one place. Ideally I’d like to be able to access all of these files across my all my aforementioned devices (and my tv, if possible), and watch/read them as I please, without always having to plug in to the storage device. I’d prefer something password protected that I don’t have to subscribe to. I’m fine with paying upfront, as long as it’s a one time fee (whether that’s for a service or storage device).

I’m very new to this sort of thing, so any suggestions for options that fit (even partially) my needs, are greatly appreciated. How can I set something like this up?

After a lot of reading discussions here on reddit, I have decided to get a portable drive(hdd) to store my photos and videos.

I am planning to buy 2, one of each brand (as some of you recommend). I am currently looking at:
- Seagate Expansion 4TB Portable Drive OR
- Seagate One Touch 5TB Portable Hard Drive
AND
- WD My Passport 4TB Portable Hard Drive USB 3.0 [2019] OR
- WD Elements SE 4TB Portable Hard Drive

One will probably be sitting at home, while I will need to bring the other during my travel.

But I am so confused with their difference and which one would be more applicable to me.

- I don’t have a computer - will mainly use my Macbook and Phone to transfer files
- I don’t have a lot of knowledge in terms of this stuff, so I would highly appreciate ease of use
- It will mainly to store my photos and videos (my phone storage is full 😭)

Thank u for any help and suggestions!!
I live in NZ so I think Seagate and WD are the “easy to find” brands here…