Long Term Storage

Looking for feedback on drives for long-term storage...full res output files and raw camera footage. I've tried the cheap route, with WD raids and had a drive failure...still want to stay on a budget of under $500 for 2TB of mirrored storage. Any experience with the GSafe? Swappable drives look good, but I heard there are issues with overheating. Anyone used NewerTech's 2+2tb Raid? Or OWC's? This would be primarily for storage, since I use Graids and Gdrives for editing.

Any comments and experiences would be appreciated.

Thanks!

If you don't want to use drives, LTO is the only other tried and true option, but it's not cheap. I don't know a lot about LTO, but I know others here do.

Personally, I'd still go with drives--multiple copies on multiple drives, even use different manufacturers if you'd like. Just pick up a firewire drive dock: [eshop.macsales.com] @ $80/ea, and then 4 2tb drives @ $80/each [www.newegg.com] and copy away. Keep 2 of the drives on site, and then send the other 2 to different friends that are geographically separate from you to protect against Mother Nature (catastrophic flood, quake, etc). You could even go with 3 x 2tb drives to save $80 (just keep one on-site in that case), depending on how much your data is worth to you.

I personally don't have favorites when it comes to hard drive manufacturers. All drives fail, it's just a matter of when. And drive enclosures--even the "good" ones--fail as well. I've had multiple enclosures from OWC and WiebeTech fail in the past couple of years. Since you don't really need access to this data on an ongoing basis, why waste the cash on an expensive hunk of metal. If you must have external enclosures, just pick up the cheapest usb 2.0 metal enclosures to use purely as containers, not drive interfaces (don't even hook up the power/data cables). Transfer your data using the drive dock, and then put them in the cheapo enclosures.

Good luck, hope you find a solution that you're happy with.