I'm seriously considering getting the good old LTO-6 as an archival medium. Cold storage hard drive is pretty nerve wrecking. A few of hundreds won't spin up. Mostly older 1 Tbs. I was told to refresh the drive by doing a full sector read every 6 month to a year. But didn't do that. It was also mentioned that hdds are designed for continuous power usage, not storing it away for years. Refreshing the hdd fr. cold storage is quite expensive time and power consumption wise. There has got to be something easier to archive.

Anybody else has good experience w/ LTO-5 or LTO-6 as a long-term archival format vs hdd?

I'm considering a LTO5 drive myself. 1.5TB of storage is enough for any of the projects I'm currently working on.

We have tons of them at work for normal IT stuff.