Best Long Term Storage Drive

The long term retention abilities of flash storage isn t quite as well known as it is for hard drives since flash storage hasn t been around as long.

Best long term storage drive.

To 350mbps faster than usb 3 0 but most nand based storage is only good for about a decade or so. The newest form of data storage is not always the best. Long term cloud storage. Although the cloud can be very handy to store your data most services require a subscription and pricing is based on how much data you store.

Sandisk ultra cz48 sandisk ultra cz48 16gb usb 3 0 flash drive transfer speeds up to 100mb s sdcz48 016g uam46 black 6 45 at amazon. Touting them for long term backup. Hgst deskstar is the top brand to trust. Western digital my book duo.

Some last beyond that but the odds increase significantly after year 3 of using a magnetic drive that it will fail. Top external solid state drives. As of the creation of this article here are the top 3 consumer brands. If you want a more robust long term external drive western digital s mybook duo is a great choice.

Plan to replace your long term storage hard drive s about every 3 years. Picked by macworld s editors. A five year warranty on the drive will also help ensure it lasts a long time. However i ve had usb flash drives continue to work perfectly after 10 years so the potential is definitely there.

Ideally they should be refreshed every four or five years. What s the best media for long term storage. Figure 10 years as a best case. The pricing can become very expensive and in my opinion would not be worth it for long term storage.

Read on to find the best hard drives of 2020. Today s best tech deals. Usb thumbdrives and sd memory cards are not suitable for long term archival storage because the charge decays over long periods. Best professional storage external drive.

Best no frills budget flash drive. This massive enclosure.