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Alternatively: "Hard-drives let you permanently keep your stuff, for life"
by tradersam 9y ago
Alternatively: "Hard-drives let you permanently keep your stuff, for life"
- melq 9y agoHard drives are an especially bad choice for lifetime reasons, and SSDs don't solve the problem either :P
- tradersam 9y agoI don't agree — that's why things like redundancy are commonplace. :D
- dsr_ 9y agoThat's not a hard drive. That's a system built on top of hard drives. And so is perkeep.
- tradersam 9y agoThat's incorrect. RAID is a system build on top of hard drives for redundancy. Redundancy (for this use of the word) is simply duplication across multiple hard-drives, which doesn't require a system at all.
- davidbanham 9y agoJust saying to yourself "I save all my stuff on two drives" is a system. It's just kind of a crappy one that's really prone to failure.
- jacquesm 9y agoReally, this is a very simplistic view of long term storage. A RAID is not magically more reliable than a single drive, it needs a bunch of infrastructure and it needs to be duplicated to some other location far away enough to ensure that a single catastrophe such as a fire does not destroy your entire raid. You are missing the wood for the trees: hard drives and raid devices are storage mechanisms that fall far short of the boundary conditions set to keep something permanently, at worst you will store your data for a couple of hour like that and in ideal conditions maybe for a couple of years, but on a scale of decades or centuries they are useless as a complete solution, though they could be part of such a solution.
- mulmen 9y agoI wonder how terrifying it would be to get a notification every time a single underlying storage device on something like Dropbox or S3 failed. We all know there is some kind of redundant system but how often does your data get moved around because of failures?
- jacquesm 9y agoAt that scale it's probably like a slow rain. You could be made to feel better if the alert only came when it concerned your data. But even then, and going by the NAS sitting under my desk you could be months without any activity and then suddenly two drives fail in two weeks. It's a nice little random data generator.
- mulmen 9y agoAh yeah I was unclear there, I meant notifications of the devices under your own data. e: Also, is it so surprising that your drives failed around the same time? It’s likely they were purchased together!
- rhizome 9y agoPast a certain point it would be just a part of the job. As long as you have hot spares, you'd just go around replacing failed drives every day or whenever.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mulmen 9y ago“You're weak on logic, that's the trouble with you. You're like the guy in the story who was caught in a sudden shower and Who ran to a grove of trees and got under one. He wasn't worried, you see, because he figured when one tree got wet through, he would just get under another one." http://multivax.com/last_question.html http://multivax.com/last_question.html
- anderspitman 9y agoHuh, I don't think I've seen a reference to that story in years, but just emailed it to a coworker a couple hours ago.
- mulmen 9y agoOne of my all time favorites. Though it took me a while to remember the source of the quote. I thought it had been used in the context of global warming so google didn’t turn up much. Then I remembered it’s actually from a story about universal cooling.
- colorincorrect 9y agoredundancy is not helpful if your system consistently fails after some regular interval
- userbinator 9y agoTape is usually the preferred magnetic media for long-term storage.
- milcron 9y agoCheck out M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- bo1024 9y ago> While the exact properties of M-DISC are a trade secret If long-term accessibility is the goal, not off to a good start...
- Veratyr 9y agoIt's not clear how much better than they are than regular media since there haven't been many tests. There are two that I'm aware of, one by the French Archives (who've done this a few times it so happens) and one by the US DoD. The French found that M-DISC didn't perform much better than regular DVDs and that a weird kind of glass DVD beat everything else hands down. The Americans found no errors at all in their tests of M-DISC while all other disks encountered them. I suspect the important differences were: - The Americans' tested the discs after light exposure, the French did not. It may be that the light caused the regular DVDs to fail but not the M-DISC. - The French tests were far longer (1000h) than the Americans' (24h). It may be that M-DISC can't survive the adverse conditions past a certain point that the Americans didn't reach. Also as far as I'm aware, there are no tests of the Blu-Ray variant of M-DISC. Personally, given the cost of M-DISC, I'd buy a few cheap terrible Blu-Rays instead and just make sure they're not exposed to too much light. French test: https://documents.lne.fr/publications/guides-documents-techniques/syylex-glass-dvd-accelerated-aging-report.pdf https://documents.lne.fr/publications/guides-documents-techn... American: http://www.esystor.com/images/China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf http://www.esystor.com/images/China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf