4 ms·

It already is, by spinning disks. Cheaper at the low end, faster the whole way through, random access beats linear access for end user expectations.

by dsr_ 5y ago

amelius 5y ago
You are too much focused on read speed. I just want to write huge amounts of data at a low cost, and don't mind waiting a day for retrieval. I.e., how one normally uses backups.
- TheCondor 5y ago
  And durability. I’ve had a portable usb hard drive fall over on my desk and it had major problems after that. Solid state fixes that but it’s expensive and I’ve heard they can lose data if not plugged in with regularity
  - lazide 5y ago
    Yeah, SSD is not good for long term storage (like a copy of your tax documents from last year you might need in 5 years). The expense for size also makes it infeasible to copy ongoing roll up copies of everything which is one way of solving that.
- lazide 5y ago
  Most of the time when people think backups they need faster than 24 hr turn around to restore - because it usually takes about that long to figure out they even need a backup, and most people don’t think ahead enough for 2 day recovery time to be useful for most use cases now a days. If their local snapshots are dead too, or they look for it and realize they can’t find a copy of something they thought they had, it’s often because they needed that data right away and it wasn’t there when they went to get it. Hence ‘user expectations’. That’s not in a catastrophic case (which rarely happens) that’s the ‘bob just realized he deleted the folder containing the key customer presentation last Friday’ or ‘mary just tried to open the contract copy she needed and it’s corrupted’. If it’s a once in 10 or 100 year or whatever event, a 1-2 day turnaround is not unexpected and everything else is probably broken too. The file deleted or something got screwed up happens more often and slow response there grinds things to a halt - and causes a lot of stress knowing it’s not ‘solved’.
  - amelius 5y ago
    I bet most companies who are confronted with ransom demands would die for tape backup even if restoration took a week (which is the amount of time they need anyway to get the whole mess sorted out).
    - lazide 5y ago
      For sure - that would fall under catastrophic IMO (odds of any company getting crypto ransomed are low on any given year, though increasing, and can kill the company if there isn’t any prep). A lot of companies are pretty terrible at figuring out catastrophic tail risks like this too. Tape has it’s niche, this is one of them for sure.
zozbot234 5y ago
SMR spinning disks are also being widely repurposed as "archival", somewhat tape-like media since they turned out to be quite low-performance for the most common use scenarios (which means they were getting dropped from soft-RAID arrays, etc.).
- floatboth 5y ago
  > repurposed Weren't they even originally marketed as such? At least the external enclosures that people like to shuck are usually called something like "my backup".
KaiserPro 5y ago
kinda but not. The problem with spinny disks is that you have allocate space for them. You can't quickly swap out drives to take offsite. Whats grand about tape is that its still faster to dump to your library, eject the magazines and store off site. Whilst you can do that with HDDs (think snowballs but bigger) its a lot more expensive and error prone. Tape serves a purpose, but thats pretty niche by todays standards.

It already is, by spinning disks. Cheaper at the low end, faster the whole way through, random access beats linear access for end user expectations.

by dsr_ 5y ago

It already is, by spinning disks. Cheaper at the low end, faster the whole way through, random access beats linear access for end user expectations.

amelius 5y ago

You are too much focused on read speed. I just want to write huge amounts of data at a low cost, and don't mind waiting a day for retrieval. I.e., how one normally uses backups.

TheCondor 5y ago
And durability. I’ve had a portable usb hard drive fall over on my desk and it had major problems after that. Solid state fixes that but it’s expensive and I’ve heard they can lose data if not plugged in with regularity
- lazide 5y ago
  Yeah, SSD is not good for long term storage (like a copy of your tax documents from last year you might need in 5 years). The expense for size also makes it infeasible to copy ongoing roll up copies of everything which is one way of solving that.
lazide 5y ago
Most of the time when people think backups they need faster than 24 hr turn around to restore - because it usually takes about that long to figure out they even need a backup, and most people don’t think ahead enough for 2 day recovery time to be useful for most use cases now a days. If their local snapshots are dead too, or they look for it and realize they can’t find a copy of something they thought they had, it’s often because they needed that data right away and it wasn’t there when they went to get it. Hence ‘user expectations’. That’s not in a catastrophic case (which rarely happens) that’s the ‘bob just realized he deleted the folder containing the key customer presentation last Friday’ or ‘mary just tried to open the contract copy she needed and it’s corrupted’. If it’s a once in 10 or 100 year or whatever event, a 1-2 day turnaround is not unexpected and everything else is probably broken too. The file deleted or something got screwed up happens more often and slow response there grinds things to a halt - and causes a lot of stress knowing it’s not ‘solved’.
- amelius 5y ago
  I bet most companies who are confronted with ransom demands would die for tape backup even if restoration took a week (which is the amount of time they need anyway to get the whole mess sorted out).
  - lazide 5y ago
    For sure - that would fall under catastrophic IMO (odds of any company getting crypto ransomed are low on any given year, though increasing, and can kill the company if there isn’t any prep). A lot of companies are pretty terrible at figuring out catastrophic tail risks like this too. Tape has it’s niche, this is one of them for sure.

zozbot234 5y ago

SMR spinning disks are also being widely repurposed as "archival", somewhat tape-like media since they turned out to be quite low-performance for the most common use scenarios (which means they were getting dropped from soft-RAID arrays, etc.).

floatboth 5y ago
> repurposed Weren't they even originally marketed as such? At least the external enclosures that people like to shuck are usually called something like "my backup".

KaiserPro 5y ago

kinda but not. The problem with spinny disks is that you have allocate space for them. You can't quickly swap out drives to take offsite. Whats grand about tape is that its still faster to dump to your library, eject the magazines and store off site. Whilst you can do that with HDDs (think snowballs but bigger) its a lot more expensive and error prone. Tape serves a purpose, but thats pretty niche by todays standards.