3 ms·

Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off. I realize disk is the new tape, I didn't realize

by fmajid 7y ago

Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off. I realize disk is the new tape, I didn't realize the hard drive makers would take it so literally... As far as I am concerned, SMR are unfit for any purpose other than hyperscale archival storage. If you work for AWS Glacier, good for you, but those drives should never ever be sold to consumers.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago
> Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off. A marginally-related comment: Curiously, HDDs are not totally immune to this problem in the long run. Many types of EEPROMs (basically used by everything that has a CPU/MCU inside) only have an officially data retention duration of 10 years, beyond the date, there's no guarantee by the manufacturers that the firmware won't be lost. Yet surprisingly, most consumer electronics work fine after one or two decades, indeed it's because the EEPROM manufacturers are being conservative, not to mention that most electronics are stored room temperature. There is wild variations of rated lifetime in different microcontrollers, a most common rating is 10 years, but some are 40 years or even 100 years at 25 °C. It indicates that it's related to the semiconductor process, and it also implies EEPROMs have a lot of potential but it's expensive and/or there are too many uncertainties to make any guarantee. How long will today's technology last in the wild is still largely untested in practice. Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good. Conclusion: In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium.
- interestica 7y ago
  > Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good. The future remake of Indiana Jones seems way less fun.
- ValentineC 7y ago
  > In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium. What do you think of optical media like BD-R? I've heard that the inorganic substrate they use these days is decent for archival.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    M Disc claims to sell DVD-R and BD-R discs that are good for a thousand years. Many modern disc burners support burning to M Discs already. They're a little pricey though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
  - numpad0 7y ago
    I’ve heard that too. Fairly normal ones right? 25GB/disc sounds cumbersome to handle though.
imtringued 7y ago
SSDs configured as RAID in a NAS is the exact opposite of an archival medium. People are concerned about the usecase of "I don't need the data immediately but it shouldn't take several minutes" and SMR completely fails at that.
wegs 7y ago
I have a few types of data: * Most data is reasonably small, and super-critical. I might have legal documents, personal emails, source code, etc. My business might have basic employee information, or sales transactions. Most of that, efficiently-stored, would fit in a box of 1.44MB floppies. * I have medium-sized data like photos (product, family, etc). * I have big data, like videos. A workplace might have surveillance videos, while I might have copies of movies I like, and ISOs of software I bought. The above is a bit of a obfuscated to not reveal personal information (I took analogies to the types of data I and my business have). In many cases, it doesn't make sense to have multiple storage locations and to manage all that yourself (management gets too expensive). It's cheaper to keep your big stuff on expensive media than to take time or to hire a software engineer. At some point, I also start to either discard things explicitly (erase a file), or implicitly (photos/videos with lossy compression). A question is when that happens. The answer, I think, just moved from "at 8TB, on a WD drive" to "at 1TB, on an SSD."

by fmajid 7y ago

segfaultbuserr 7y ago

> Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off. A marginally-related comment: Curiously, HDDs are not totally immune to this problem in the long run. Many types of EEPROMs (basically used by everything that has a CPU/MCU inside) only have an officially data retention duration of 10 years, beyond the date, there's no guarantee by the manufacturers that the firmware won't be lost. Yet surprisingly, most consumer electronics work fine after one or two decades, indeed it's because the EEPROM manufacturers are being conservative, not to mention that most electronics are stored room temperature. There is wild variations of rated lifetime in different microcontrollers, a most common rating is 10 years, but some are 40 years or even 100 years at 25 °C. It indicates that it's related to the semiconductor process, and it also implies EEPROMs have a lot of potential but it's expensive and/or there are too many uncertainties to make any guarantee. How long will today's technology last in the wild is still largely untested in practice. Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good. Conclusion: In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium.

interestica 7y ago
> Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good. The future remake of Indiana Jones seems way less fun.
ValentineC 7y ago
> In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium. What do you think of optical media like BD-R? I've heard that the inorganic substrate they use these days is decent for archival.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  M Disc claims to sell DVD-R and BD-R discs that are good for a thousand years. Many modern disc burners support burning to M Discs already. They're a little pricey though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- numpad0 7y ago
  I’ve heard that too. Fairly normal ones right? 25GB/disc sounds cumbersome to handle though.

imtringued 7y ago

SSDs configured as RAID in a NAS is the exact opposite of an archival medium. People are concerned about the usecase of "I don't need the data immediately but it shouldn't take several minutes" and SMR completely fails at that.

wegs 7y ago

I have a few types of data: * Most data is reasonably small, and super-critical. I might have legal documents, personal emails, source code, etc. My business might have basic employee information, or sales transactions. Most of that, efficiently-stored, would fit in a box of 1.44MB floppies. * I have medium-sized data like photos (product, family, etc). * I have big data, like videos. A workplace might have surveillance videos, while I might have copies of movies I like, and ISOs of software I bought. The above is a bit of a obfuscated to not reveal personal information (I took analogies to the types of data I and my business have). In many cases, it doesn't make sense to have multiple storage locations and to manage all that yourself (management gets too expensive). It's cheaper to keep your big stuff on expensive media than to take time or to hire a software engineer. At some point, I also start to either discard things explicitly (erase a file), or implicitly (photos/videos with lossy compression). A question is when that happens. The answer, I think, just moved from "at 8TB, on a WD drive" to "at 1TB, on an SSD."