www.makemkv.com

Alright, my fellow archivists. My shelf of UHD discs is getting out of hand, and my internal drive is almost full of MKVs. I need to buy ssd drives specifically for storing my full-quality backups.

I'm looking for a reliable external SSD with great sustained write speeds for large files (we're talking 80GB+ per movie). Should I prioritize USB 3.2 Gen 2, Thunderbolt 3/4? Is SATA okay or do I need NVMe for this? Also, any specific brands/models known for longevity when dealing with massive video files? Don't want my collection to corrupt! Thanks.

I store my collection on spinning hard drives. I think most people do. The cost per TB is better than SSDs and the speeds are more than fast enough for movies. 30TB drives are available and 22TB drives are probably in the sweet spot of the cost per TB curve. Storing movie rips on an SSD is overkill.

All hard drives carry risk of failure/corruption including spinning HDDs and both SATA and NVME SSDs. The only way to be certain the files are safe is to have a backup, either another hard drive, cloud storage or in this case you could rip all your discs again, making them the backup. There is slightly less risk of failure and better warranty associated with enterprise/NAS level HDDs, but they are also a lot more expensive.

Consider some conventional HD's managed by Unraid. You can have up to 2 parity drives, so any two hard drives would could fail without loss of data. Additionally, the drives the non-parity drives that didn't fail, would still retain the complete media stored on them without loss.

https://unraid.net/product

For the cost of a large enough SSD or two, you could build a cheap NAS, install TrueNAS on it for free, and store your films there. You could also use it to host a media server...