Seagate 20TB 7200RPM Drive

[BenGarrison]

For $500 does anyone think this is worth it? 20TB is a lot of storage but I feel like SSD prices have come down so much that getting multiple SSD drives might be costly, but offer better performance. Thoughts?

[rlyons]

Performance is not even a starter. If you need IOPS, you go SSD. Cost be damned. But there are two facts: You can't beat the density/$ of spinning rust and never underestimate the data transfer speed of a truck full of tapes.

[JCDavid]

Depends on what you're trying to accomplish. We used SSDs in my department to (i) boost old PCs to extend their lifespans (ii) doing so as part of a program to phase out Windows 7 as it neared its EoL. Cloud storage helped any issues with lack of "space": desktops synced with OneDrive or iCloud. That's also a good thing in the event of loss of theft or even employees hoarding knowledge. I'm all for transparency and sharing, unless there's some sensitive stuff involved. Not a good buy due to slow I/O.

[daemoch]

Move a PB+ across the country and you'll toss the SSD out the first airlock for a good HDD or Tape.  Or if a mission critical SSD goes bad and you have to do a physical recovery, then suddenly HDD is clearly superior.  Long term storage?  Like 10+ years?  HDD or Tape.  It all depends on what the priorities are.  SSD will basically always get you better performance though, no contest.

If it was me though, I'd rather get a few smaller drives (of any drives) vs one big one unless physical space is the priority.  You can recoup some of the speed if you set a bunch up in a small array with enough ram to use as cache.  Still not SSD levels, but faster than one drive and potentially with some redundancy, or at least not 100% data loss on failure.  Depending on the method used, you can keep rotating out the "small" or "slow" drive as you need upgrades.

A place I worked, us techs used a 5 bay NAS to 'burn in' drives that we basically used to store BS stuff on mostly for fun (windows OS images, movies, steam games, etc), but then rolled out the oldest drive to customers covered under our warranty.  That way we knew it wasn't gonna be DOA when we got onsite, knew it was broken in, and we could keep expanding our local storage in our shop with whatever hardware deals we found.

[daemoch]

https://www.lto.org/roadmap/
An LTO-9 45TB tape is about $150 on a quick google.
If its something you don't need IMMEDIATE access to all the time, LTO is still king.  Best way to store photos, backups/images, movies/games (some caveats there), etc, even if you just load one tape and basically never unload it.  Low write, high read use.  Still, ideally always make 2, just like anything else.