Big Fast Cost Effective Redundant Drive?

Time for me to get serious about drives. My system currently uses an SSD system drive, three 1TB Western Digital Black SATA 3 internal drives designated "Capture 1, Capture 2, and Render", and besides being out of space, I need faster, and a working backup. I currently offload everything via USB to externals, and occasionally use small externals to work from (simple stuff like AVCHD, XAVC-S)

Connectivity options: eSATA, USB 3.0, Firewire

Looking for best bang-for-the-buck option with a high terabyte to $$$ ratio, redundant, dependable. Thought about Network drives, or should I stick with simple RAID 5 or 10? Heard horror stories about DROBO.

Please educate me, or at least talk about what works for you and why. The why is really important.

Thanks!

Also - I was thinking the network drive idea would be cool so I could work simultaneously on two computers avoiding a lot of copying.

I have a couple 2 and 3 TB internals and SSD that I do the editing and processing with. I store and upload from 3 and 4 TB externals. Costco gets 4TB hard drives for about $119. My last European trip I completely filled a 4TB with footage. 4K is definitely a storage monster. I have one I-7 PC computer I process with and another one that is now my upload and FTP machine.

I've always been using those cheap mass USB 3 external drives for storage, but this 4K RAW stuff (even the ProRes) can cost me a TB in less than a good day of shooting. I need speed to be able to transfer large amounts of data quickly. Was thinking of using software RAID controller to combine my three internal 1TB drives (or ditch those use them as offload storage and replace them with 3 matched internal 4TB WD Blacks) then possibly add two 8-12TB RAID 10 arrays externally. Lately I spend so much time copying files and transferring to other drives to make room for new stuff I'm doing more maintenance than work, and it's getting silly. Sure hope to start selling some of this new stuff to make sense of it all, else I'll go back to AVCHD, XAVC-S, and (erk!) HDV for a more realistic ROI. Sad but true.

A lot of broadcasters use LTO tape for archive. The drive is expensive but the media is cheap.

2.5TB native for $34 on Amazon.com LTO6

Drive is about $2,000

I currently use a dual USB3.0 cradle and internal hard drives which then go into protective cases (main and backup)

I've also thought about buying a LTO drive. Now you can get them with USB3 and Thunderbolt but they're to pricey (and there is no rocket science either in them).
Take a look here:
http://www.mlogic.com/products/mtape

But Im sure new mass storage technology is coming like the most awaited archival disc.

If you're talking about backing up or archiving I use 4tb external usb3 drives. Everything backs up fast and they are cheap.
When I'm editing I render everything to my internal HD and then move that to a Drobo 5n on my network. From that to the external HD's
Also I make a redundant backup and keep that off site. Never keep all your backups in the same building.

At work we got off of LTO backups years ago since they are unreliable. If you have a multi tape backup and the first one (or any tape in that backup) is unreadable, you basically have nothing.
Also what we found out is if you try to restore a tape from a different machine its also unusable.

You never think of that unless you have a catastrophic failure as we did during Hurricane Katrina. since the original LTO machine was underwater and we had our backup tapes we bought a new drive. But nothing would read.

Luckily we started to also backup everything to external hard drives a few months before and had our entire network restored and up in a matter of hours.
So in my mind if anyone is still using tape, its only because they haven't had to do a full restore from a different drive.

Oh if you are still interested in LTO, I would have offered you mine but it went in the dumpster along with the shredded tapes that almost lost my job.

I agree totally with the comments on tape, I’ve found it unreliable as well. I backup to 1 TB external G-drives, two of them. One stays near the machine and the other goes to storage. I’m amassing quite a collection. I don’t backup anything except the final renders. All the source material is deleted as soon as the renders are complete and uploaded/backed up. If I tried to keep all that stuff I’d be swimming in it.

Good to know I'm not the only one with desire to toss the original. I have been keeping ALL original files except for obvious goofs and outtakes....but when I am shooting every day and amassing footage, I can't go through it all, and I certainly can't render it all out, so it needs to be stored somewhere that I won't forget until I can go through it. This has translated to many briefcases and such full of various raw drives, "MyBook" type USB drives, and other external enclosures piling up, and once they get to that stage I might as well forget them for a while, so I need to keep everything that is currently working (including stuff from two summers ago!!!) on hand, and that's why I need BIG and FAST so I can transfer them readily to my working drives and go through them.

TAPE is not an option. One or two backups gone awry in the recording studio, and I've had it. None of that. Analog tape is one thing, digital storage tape, especially compressed/encrypted=BAD NEWS. Redundant hard drives, uncompressed, only.

Last night I was deleting folders full of original footage after going through them and rendering every possible useful clip. Absolutely do not have the will or means to manage all this data.

I feel funny explaining to people that I shoot and sell stock video so I can buy more gear to make more stock video with and hard drives to store stock video on. I'm also a slave to batteries ... but that's another story.

I have a Drobo (this is my 2nd) and have not had any issues with them. The one I currently use is a 5 bay model with just over 9Tb of space. When I travel, I copy the SD cards to My Passport drives (2 copies) and then to the Drobo when I get back. The Passport drives are cheap so I tend to just leave stuff on them as a backup.

Late last year I signed up to https://www.backblaze.com/?gclid=CPOQvI_U08MCFQySaQodvroA2Q which offers unlimited backup storage for $50USD per year. My Drobo is backed up there. Took a LONG time to do the initial backup but it happens in the background. I don't recommend this unless you have unlimited Internet bandwidth.

With regards to LTO tape, they are still the best long term storage option out there but for large companies, not users like us. We use them at the studio where I work and have thousands stored in Iron Mountain.