18 TB Hard Drives drop in price

 

During the past year or so, I have seeen the hard drive industry jump from 8 Terabyte (TB) hard drives to double that number at 18TB. You can now buy an 18TB drive for around $350 to about $400. There are additional 18TB drives for a lot more because the price hasn't stabilized yet. You can also buy a 1TB Flash Drive (SSD) for about $150 however, a 2TB SSD jumps up to almost the cost of an 18 TB hard drive. Just think about how much information you can lose if one of those 18 TB drives bites the dust. 

OK, so some people estimate that you could store almost 86 million pages of Word documents on a 1TB. So multiply that by 18 and you get over 1.5 trillion pages. I have been working on computers solidly for the past 40 years or so and I have accumulated just a bit over 3TBs of stored documents that include tens of thousands of digital images. But I don't store full-length movies or hours of music in that number. 

What about genealogists? Well, a 1TB hard drive costs about $50. Now, if you think about this, most people can get by with a 1 TB drive but if you multiply that by 18 you are paying the equivalent of $900 for the storage in an 18TB hard drive. So which size drive is the most economical? The 18TB drive is about $20 a Terabyte which is about the same price as a 10TB hard drive. An 8TB hard drive is slightly less at about $144 or $18 a Terabyte. What happens here is that $20 per Terabyte becomes the default figure but smaller capacity drives actually cost a bit more than larger storage drives. If price is your only consideration and you can't believe you will fill up a 1TB hard drive, then spring for $50 and buy one online or at the nearest store that sells hard drives but realistically, I would buy a minimum of a 4TB hard drive for four times the capacity for about $90. 

The moral of this story is simple. Failure to backup your years of genealogy on an external hard drive is inexcusable. If you have all your genealogy on the hard drive in your computer, go out today and or go online today and buy an external hard drive and start backing up your data. Oh, by the way, it takes me about 4 full days running day and night to back up one of my hard drives.