4 ms·

I think it was last year, after ordering a 2TB SSD, that I realized I've probably already bought the last mechanical hard drive of my life. I could go for one m

I think it was last year, after ordering a 2TB SSD, that I realized I've probably already bought the last mechanical hard drive of my life. I could go for one more round of 10TB's or something to max out my Drobo, but by the time those seem small, I do expect SSDs to have overtaken them. "No way, Grandpa, magnets were never FREE!" "Well, not free exactly, but we'd harvest them out of our discarded hard drives! Those were a sort of data storage machine, you've probably seen pictures." "But when you removed the magnets, didn't that mean forfeiting the rare-earth-element deposit?"

rasz 8y ago
Not if you care about stored data. We already had Samsung drives starting to forget contents after few months with a firmware patch forcing periodic rewrite. SSD (using flash technology) will never replace HDD, unless you dont care about retention. Something else past SSD (phase change etc) might eventually reach that goal.
- sacheendra 8y ago
  For those use cases where retention is a priority, they maybe better served by bluray discs or tapes. HDDs are being squeezed on both sides. By SSDs for daily use. By discs and tapes for long term storage.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    How much does a USB3 tape drive + tape cost? Blu-ray disc is 50GB. 10TB hard disks cost about $180 on sale, which would take 200 Blu-ray discs.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      I do some video editing sometimes. I tried to archive one of my projects to Blu-Ray (all of the clips, video files, etc. etc.). Storing 300GB in 6 different BluRays means 6-points of failure. And more importantly, BluRays have a 20MB/s read/write speed. Modern Hard Drives read/write at roughly 200MB/s. A 5TB Hard Drive is just far more convenient, faster, and reliable than stacks-and-stacks of BluRays. A BluRay is great for the "50GB of important data" (Tax returns, resume, other important documents). Having one 50GB "highly reliable" source of storage is great. You can clone that one disk, leave some at your parent's house / some other house you trust, have 3x disks for redundancy at home, etc. etc. Its the easiest way to achieve high-reliability. Oh, and leave a copy in your 5TB Hard Drives too, for convenience sake. But BluRays are cheap for copies and long-term reliability. But they're otherwise awful to work with in my experience.
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        BR has 100 and 128 GB sizes now, which I use, but doesn't change your calculations much.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      LTO-7 tapes in the 6/15TB range are between $60 and $80. LTO-8 tapes in the 12/30TB range are about $199 though seem largely on back-order. Double-capacity (24/60TB) LTO-9 tapes are planned.
      - dragontamer 8y ago
        But tape drives are $2000+. Which means you need to store over 30TB to 50TB of information before tape drives are more cost effective. I've always wanted to make a tape-drive computer, but each time I run the costs... its just completely unfathomable that I'd ever store the amount of info needed for it to be cost-effective. If I were to build a big storage device for my house today, it'd be Nas4Free system with 6TB Hard drives (avoid shingled drives, PMR for cost-effectiveness, Helium is unnecessary if you stay below 8TB). 6x 6TB Hard Drives with RAIDZ2(similar to RAID6) for a total capacity of 24TB of storage / 2x parity drives for resiliency. That's only $160 per 6TB hard drive (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822149629 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E1682214...), so that's probably going to be cheaper than any tape-drive based system you can build out.
        arcticbull 8y ago
        Sorry, I wasn't recommending tapes, I was just providing the $/GB as requested by the parent as a point of reference because I had no idea what it was until I looked it up. I figured it'd be interesting to others too.
        cm2187 8y ago
        Plus you need to physically manage the tapes, it is hard work. The alternative being to provision a bunch of hard drives in a NAS and from there it is all software/automated (up to a certain capacity).
        imtringued 8y ago
        Tape drives aren't exactly fast either.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mistrial9 8y ago
    blu-ray dual layer user here -- ~1 hour to burn, needs many to archive some ordinary "Big Enough" data.. yes, use them, and, plurality is the key to longevity.. use multiple, different backups with redundancy

rasz 8y ago

Not if you care about stored data. We already had Samsung drives starting to forget contents after few months with a firmware patch forcing periodic rewrite. SSD (using flash technology) will never replace HDD, unless you dont care about retention. Something else past SSD (phase change etc) might eventually reach that goal.

sacheendra 8y ago
For those use cases where retention is a priority, they maybe better served by bluray discs or tapes. HDDs are being squeezed on both sides. By SSDs for daily use. By discs and tapes for long term storage.
- walterbell 8y ago
  How much does a USB3 tape drive + tape cost? Blu-ray disc is 50GB. 10TB hard disks cost about $180 on sale, which would take 200 Blu-ray discs.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    I do some video editing sometimes. I tried to archive one of my projects to Blu-Ray (all of the clips, video files, etc. etc.). Storing 300GB in 6 different BluRays means 6-points of failure. And more importantly, BluRays have a 20MB/s read/write speed. Modern Hard Drives read/write at roughly 200MB/s. A 5TB Hard Drive is just far more convenient, faster, and reliable than stacks-and-stacks of BluRays. A BluRay is great for the "50GB of important data" (Tax returns, resume, other important documents). Having one 50GB "highly reliable" source of storage is great. You can clone that one disk, leave some at your parent's house / some other house you trust, have 3x disks for redundancy at home, etc. etc. Its the easiest way to achieve high-reliability. Oh, and leave a copy in your 5TB Hard Drives too, for convenience sake. But BluRays are cheap for copies and long-term reliability. But they're otherwise awful to work with in my experience.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      BR has 100 and 128 GB sizes now, which I use, but doesn't change your calculations much.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    LTO-7 tapes in the 6/15TB range are between $60 and $80. LTO-8 tapes in the 12/30TB range are about $199 though seem largely on back-order. Double-capacity (24/60TB) LTO-9 tapes are planned.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      But tape drives are $2000+. Which means you need to store over 30TB to 50TB of information before tape drives are more cost effective. I've always wanted to make a tape-drive computer, but each time I run the costs... its just completely unfathomable that I'd ever store the amount of info needed for it to be cost-effective. If I were to build a big storage device for my house today, it'd be Nas4Free system with 6TB Hard drives (avoid shingled drives, PMR for cost-effectiveness, Helium is unnecessary if you stay below 8TB). 6x 6TB Hard Drives with RAIDZ2(similar to RAID6) for a total capacity of 24TB of storage / 2x parity drives for resiliency. That's only $160 per 6TB hard drive (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822149629 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E1682214...), so that's probably going to be cheaper than any tape-drive based system you can build out.
      - arcticbull 8y ago
        Sorry, I wasn't recommending tapes, I was just providing the $/GB as requested by the parent as a point of reference because I had no idea what it was until I looked it up. I figured it'd be interesting to others too.
      - cm2187 8y ago
        Plus you need to physically manage the tapes, it is hard work. The alternative being to provision a bunch of hard drives in a NAS and from there it is all software/automated (up to a certain capacity).
        imtringued 8y ago
        Tape drives aren't exactly fast either.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mistrial9 8y ago
  blu-ray dual layer user here -- ~1 hour to burn, needs many to archive some ordinary "Big Enough" data.. yes, use them, and, plurality is the key to longevity.. use multiple, different backups with redundancy