Question Best options for Archive hard drives

[Sohaib]

I am a video editor and i have bunch of 8TB and 4TB drives in my PC. I am looking to upgrade to at least 2x 16TB+ drives for archival purposes. That is, write to the drive and then occasionally reads from it but when i need to edit something then have to move like 100GB of raw unedited footage to my SSD (which is rare).
I already have 8-10 drive's in my system, some as old as 10+ years 4TB drives which i like to retire, some are silent drives but some are very noisy. I was looking at Seagate Exos drives but i read they really aren't good choice for PC's. Is it true?
Again, my number 1 priority is archiving 10s of TB worth of data and reliability is of the highest importance not extremely fast seek drives. It doesn't matter if it takes me 24 hours to write to the drive or 36 hours because hopefully its going to be 1 time process (if drive doesn't fail) and then it's going to be small writes occasionally. Like 50-100GB most per write session VERY RARELY.

Also another thing, i have been browsing drives and come to find refurbished drives, are those any good? I wouldn't want to risk my lifetime worth of data on those but then again, everything is already backed up. For example, i was looking at Seagate 16TB Exos drive on newegg for $140 (Refurbished). That seemed too good to be true. Any suggestions?

 

[USAFRet]

Refurbished drives?
Not a chance.

Seagate Exos?
Nothing wrong with those.

The main thing you need to consider is defense in depth. Multiple copies of your data.
The accepted concept is 3-2-1.
3 copies, on at least 2 different media, at least 1 offsite or otherwise inaccessible.

Also, have you considered a NAS for these? Instead of drives directly in your PC.