4 ms·
> Then my application can decide "this is an important photograph, so I'm going to shard it across 8 chips on two different controllers and use error-correction
by votepaunchy 7y ago
> Then my application can decide "this is an important photograph, so I'm going to shard it across 8 chips on two different controllers and use error-correction codes that can correct 100% of bit errors". But, that does not exist.
It’s still not sufficient to backup to a single drive since the device may be lost or destroyed. And once you are storing in the cloud you have all the benefits of distributed redundancy and multi-regional support.
- jrockway 7y agoWell, yes, you lose the data if you lose all the hardware that is storing your data. But that's strictly better than the current case, where RAID controller bugs, SSD firmware bugs, "bit rot", etc. take out your files for absolutely no good reason. The cloud is not made of magic. There are some things that work well, like immutable object stores that are okay with eventual consistency (S3 as an example), but these stores do not work well for things like databases, or logs, or editing video.
- myself248 7y agoYes and no. If Western Digital or Toshiba someday goes out of business, my disks don't suddenly stop spinning that instant. Cloud providers introduce another layer of vulnerability, at the level of business and politics.