I have an idea for a system that involves cold storage and active storage. The idea being that cold storage is purely archival, not being accessed regularly, then active storage is on a NAS. All backed up, one copy offsite etc.
My question is, would it be silly for any reason to have 2x cold storage archival drives (one backup) be 18tb seagate exos drives? I understand they're for larger scale data servers, Raid configs etc. but if I used them in this context would I be jeopardising anything? Leaving them as purely cold storage?
I mainly look to this from a cost perspective. My thoughts are that if the Seagate exos have a 5 year warranty, they'll theoretically last me at least 5 years, at which time I can double check integrity and risk running them longer, upgrade to the newest medium (if not HDDs), or purchase more of these drives if necessary. And I've run some numbers between other drives and their warranties, these seem the cheapest and most reliable.
For the record I've also looked into archival discs, like the M-Disc range, with hesitance. Even though discs are still fully supported today, I don't have faith that they'll necessarily be "the" medium in 100 years (like the box says) or even 50 years. Plus it's a huge project to move dozens of terabytes onto 100gb discs...