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In 2012 I was working at the Internet Archive. I remember the 2011 Thailand floods restricted the supply of hard disks and pushed up prices. The best deal we c
by edward 5y ago
In 2012 I was working at the Internet Archive. I remember the 2011 Thailand floods restricted the supply of hard disks and pushed up prices.
The best deal we could find was buying these Seagate hard disks as external drives at retail from Costco. We picked up a truck load. Then had somebody with a screw driver remove them all from the enclosures and install them in new servers.
The error rate was high, the drives didn't last long in production.
- bigiain 5y agoDropbox (or maybe BackBlaze?) called that "shucking".
- LordDragonfang 5y agoIf you're thinking of the same article as I am, it was indeed Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/
- andruby 5y agoThat was BackBlaze https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/
- taylorfinley 5y agoI don't know if Backblaze's usage predates it becoming the common way to describe this practice, but it's definitely caught on. For example see any deal post on an external drive on reddit /r/datahoarder
- sbarre 5y agoI worked at an ISP in 1996, where we would buy external Boca 28.8k modems in bulk from retailers and take the boards out to put them in our racks because they were cheaper - yet identical - to the "ISP-grade" versions that Boca sold as just boards. Back then we referred to it as shucking the modems, so it's definitely not a new term in IT/computing (never mind the actual origin of the word).
- colordrops 5y agoThe Thailand story was a cover for the NSA buying a huge number of drives for the new data facility in Utah.
- segfaultbuserr 5y agoToo bad for the NSA that they couldn't use Chia mining as the cover back then. /s
- Lammy 5y agoGood thing NSA et al aren't also competing for parallel-computing hardware or it would be even harder to buy a new GPU. Luckily all participants in online discussion forums are real humans who can tell me what to blame :)
- semi-extrinsic 5y agoSource?
- simondotau 5y agoI'm 99.9% sure that this post wasn't meant to be taken seriously.
- 3np 5y agoSource for this claim? Sounds entirely like unfounded speculation. (Wikipedia page on the facility in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center)
- madaxe_again 5y agoI did precisely this too, as I needed storage for a few thousand hours of video footage I’d shot for a documentary, needed it now, and nobody had anything other than external HDDs in any kind of useful size. I was really careful - I had two NASes, each with raid 5 volumes holding a full copy of the footage, as it was irreplaceable. I got up one morning to find a disc had failed in one of them. Swapped it. During the restripe, another failed. Oh well, I have the other NAS, I thought, and after replacing the busted disks and reformatting the failed one, started copying the data over again - and then a disk failed in the backup nas. And then another. And then another in the previously failed one. And that was that. Five disks, all dead, within a day of each other, all the same model. The WD drives in them were all absolutely fine. I haven’t bought a seagate drive since, and never will again.
- ta988 5y agoThat's the reason I never put the same brands/models in RAID. It is logistically a bit more complicated, but I've often noticed failures like that really close in time.
- rightbyte 5y agoYe copying sick HDs always make me nervous. It is like taking your really old and scrappy car for a last ride to the salvage yard going over the whole country.
- squeed 5y agoHah, I remember a pallet or the now-empty IA enclosures showing up at Noisebridge. They were super useful - a USB3-SATA adapter. I still have mine for occasional data spelunking.
- DominoTree 5y agoDuring the current IC shortage, I've been buying quantities of assembled breakout boards that have chips I need and desoldering them. In many cases it's actually cheaper than buying the bare ICs at their normal price.