Quote:
Originally Posted by PsYcNeT
2 120 or 128GB SSD drives would be my recommendation. Same storage types as USB sticks (Solid-State Memory), but more reliable in the long term. Floating gate transistors mean that it's resistant to all but the most ridiculous (read: MRI) magnetic fields, and you can even drop them!
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I was just writing something similar, but with a different twist - floating gate transistors means they are literally, physically, susceptible to leakage - this is in fact why SSD's wear out - the electro-physical barrier that keeps the electrons trapped in the floating gate literally loses its ability to hold on to the trapped electrons. I don't think anyone really knows how long the gate can hold a charge on a idle cell at this point, and the read/write usage of an SSD actually protects against this to a degree (it's reasonable to assume every cell will get touched at some point and the charge refreshed, especially in MLC designs)
You can't beat magnetic media for long term storage - the individual magnetic 1's and 0's are tiny, but incredibly high coercivity (magnetic "charge"). Controllers are also incredibly sophisticated in their ability to read less than perfect magnetic charges and do the signal analysis required to separate the data from the noise. In fact, data density is so high now that all reads involve sophisticated signal processing to retrieve the actual data - you never get a clear 1 or 0 off the raw platter.
So I'd say buy the least dense magnetic drive that will hold the data in question - don't use a 2 TB drive to hold 100 GB of data. Lower capacity drives have larger sectors, which means larger magnetic fields, and less susceptibility to magnetic bit flips from high energy particles (yes, this is a real thing - high energy interstellar particles can cause highly dense magnetic media to bit flip. This is why we layer other logical techniques on top like checksumming, etc)
And keep two copies, in two separate locations.