6 ms·

Not for backup and long term storage. Spinning rust is far more dependable than flash when sitting on a shelf, and much less sensitive to temperature. I know

Not for backup and long term storage. Spinning rust is far more dependable than flash when sitting on a shelf, and much less sensitive to temperature. I know where I'm archiving my data.

ggm 8y ago
How much longer do you believe this will be true? I too hold a RAID grid of 3.5" 4TB drives, which is stored offline, but every time I plug in, I think about how exposed I am to mechanical and electrical failure modes. The smaller form factor USB drives I get for ongoing TM backup appear to have an effective life as a sealed unit of around 2-3 years max.
- rasz 8y ago
  Until we switch away from NAND to something else (phase change etc. Every new NAND generation halves write durability.
valarauca1 8y ago
So you use tapes? Seriously tapes are way more dependable than disks. Less moving parts and less chance internal eletral mechanical break down. And check all the other boxes you mention.
- zaarn 8y ago
  Tapes cost a lot to get going. Most tapedrives cost about 1k$ and those are the cheap ones. And you still need a tape library, maybe with a swap robot if you want to get serious about it (or swap tapes via meat robot works too) There is some upramp where HDDs might be cheaper.
- FullyFunctional 8y ago
  Updated with more detail and maybe fewer typos: I certainly considered tape and used it in the past, but there are two huge upsides to hard disks: 1. Obviously access and transfer time is much better. 2. I can access hard disks from 30+ years ago. My oldest drives use SCSI and IDE, but even SATA has been around for ages. My tapes however can only be read of the particular branch of tape drives and there are an infinitude of standards/models around so I'd have to store the tape drive along with it. I'm not sure I'd be able to restore my father old backups as the tape drive was some weird PC thing. A few years ago I finally transferred my tapes to my FreeNAS box and breathed a sigh of relief as I don't know when I'd be able to run my DAT changer again. So, no thanks, I'll stay with hard drives (mind you, drives _will_ die as well so you still need redundancy). PS: I want to emphasize that I was talking about shelf life. For data sitting in a good NAS, like ZFS based FreeNAS, I have little worries as there's redundancy and weekly scrubbing (and I do have a backup of that as well). I do worry a great deal about any data that might sit on a USBKey or an SSD in the closet.

Not for backup and long term storage. Spinning rust is far more dependable than flash when sitting on a shelf, and much less sensitive to temperature. I know where I'm archiving my data.

ggm 8y ago

How much longer do you believe this will be true? I too hold a RAID grid of 3.5" 4TB drives, which is stored offline, but every time I plug in, I think about how exposed I am to mechanical and electrical failure modes. The smaller form factor USB drives I get for ongoing TM backup appear to have an effective life as a sealed unit of around 2-3 years max.

rasz 8y ago
Until we switch away from NAND to something else (phase change etc. Every new NAND generation halves write durability.

valarauca1 8y ago

So you use tapes? Seriously tapes are way more dependable than disks. Less moving parts and less chance internal eletral mechanical break down. And check all the other boxes you mention.

zaarn 8y ago
Tapes cost a lot to get going. Most tapedrives cost about 1k$ and those are the cheap ones. And you still need a tape library, maybe with a swap robot if you want to get serious about it (or swap tapes via meat robot works too) There is some upramp where HDDs might be cheaper.
FullyFunctional 8y ago
Updated with more detail and maybe fewer typos: I certainly considered tape and used it in the past, but there are two huge upsides to hard disks: 1. Obviously access and transfer time is much better. 2. I can access hard disks from 30+ years ago. My oldest drives use SCSI and IDE, but even SATA has been around for ages. My tapes however can only be read of the particular branch of tape drives and there are an infinitude of standards/models around so I'd have to store the tape drive along with it. I'm not sure I'd be able to restore my father old backups as the tape drive was some weird PC thing. A few years ago I finally transferred my tapes to my FreeNAS box and breathed a sigh of relief as I don't know when I'd be able to run my DAT changer again. So, no thanks, I'll stay with hard drives (mind you, drives _will_ die as well so you still need redundancy). PS: I want to emphasize that I was talking about shelf life. For data sitting in a good NAS, like ZFS based FreeNAS, I have little worries as there's redundancy and weekly scrubbing (and I do have a backup of that as well). I do worry a great deal about any data that might sit on a USBKey or an SSD in the closet.