Long term data storage on SATA HD

[blert]

A question for those in the know:
With the cost of SATA drives being so cheap these days I'm backing all of my movies, DVDs, music, etc., onto a bunch of them (not in a RAID format, only single drives!)

Now if I were to remove them from my system, store them properly and all that happy crap and then say...2 years from now I want to hook them up to a DIFFERENT computer and get the files from there will that work?

Let's say the system will have the same OS as when files were created, the SATA drivers are loaded and seeing as the original drives with the information on them have already been formatted (NTFS), it should just be a matter of plug 'n play, right?

If not, how would someone go about this..... I have a big pile of 250G-320G drives that I would like to do this with if it will work...

[sniperchicken]

No reason it shouldn't work. Try to keep them in a dry location etc.

[sn3ak3rp1mp]

If you want long term shelf life with maximum readability, I would format them Fat32 instead of NTFS. For example, Linux can read / write Fat32, while it can only mount NTFS as read only.

I know you said same operating system later, but this would just be hedging your bets a little more. Better safe than sorry. Maybe M$ will be completely dead in 5 years, you never know :D

[oplin]

Sounds like a great idea to me. Fat32 would be more accessible to other OS's but if you're staying with just Microsoft's os's you'd be alright with NTFS. I was planning on getting some extra trays for my hot swap array and making one of the spots a pass through drive and then making a little bat file to automatically set the drive as pass through so i can use it like a tape drive. Been thinking about setting something like that up at work but the cost of storing the tapes every month is a bit much compared to tapes as of now.

[protias]

Personally, I would have an actual backup of DVDs or tapes. (I believe) Tapes are better for long term storage, but there are some DVDs that will survive for several years (but storing them in a good area helps a lot).

[Bones]

If you want long term shelf life with maximum readability, I would format them Fat32 instead of NTFS. For example, Linux can read / write Fat32, while it can only mount NTFS as read only.

I know you said same operating system later, but this would just be hedging your bets a little more. Better safe than sorry. Maybe M$ will be completely dead in 5 years, you never know :D

This is completely not true. Full NTFS write support has been available for going on a year now through the captive ntfs driver, and more recently with FUSE+ntfs-3g. FAT32 has file and filesystem limitations that might be inconvenient for backing up lots of data; better to go with something else. Also, with NTFS, multiple copies of the filesystem metadata give it more resilience than FAT32. Personally, though, I would go with ext3 or something.

[drizzt81]

If you want long term shelf life with maximum readability, I would format them Fat32 instead of NTFS. For example, Linux can read / write Fat32, while it can only mount NTFS as read only.

I know you said same operating system later, but this would just be hedging your bets a little more. Better safe than sorry. Maybe M$ will be completely dead in 5 years, you never know :D
It was pointed out (http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1135225) that Linux can read/ write NTFS just fine.

[MaDSpartus]

the drive would prolly be more likely to suffer single bit data errors over the long term than a mechanical failure. It might be a good idea to segment the files and create parity files, but you said movies and stuff so bit failure prolly wont cause major issues.