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Doesn't touch on air conditioning, the fujifilm calculator lists cloud storage as vastly cheaper than disk-based storage, which AFAIK many would disagree with.

Doesn't touch on air conditioning, the fujifilm calculator lists cloud storage as vastly cheaper than disk-based storage, which AFAIK many would disagree with. > HDDs have a lifespan of approximately five years For an active datacenter, no? And speaking of active, active storage lends itself to monitoring and automated healing a lot better than tape archives.

reidjs 3y ago
What does automated healing mean in this context?
- its-summertime 3y ago
  Assuming a sane RAID situation, e.g. data being duplicated onto multiple drives. If one of those drives fails, making additional duplicates onto the surviving drives, or rebuilding the data of the failed drive onto a new drive. Can also be done with tapes, but you would require multiple tape drives (though if you can afford an automated library, thats probably nothing in comparison), additionally you can't find the failures until you take them out of "cold" storage. If you can respond to the first failure when it happens, you can react before being hit by later failures hitting the duplicates. Downside is, since you have active components, failures are expected to be more common.
laluser 3y ago
HDDs designed for industry have a lifespan of longer than 5 years in typical data centers. In fact, recently there have been many teams across industry expanding the lifetime of HDDs past 5 years well into 6 and 7. You can also check out Backblaze's drive stats to see how many drives are actually going past this time span: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2023/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-...
- deleted 3y ago
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- RF_Savage 3y ago
  And one would expect actual data center grade HDD's to do even better. Backblaze is fameous for using piles upon piles of consumer grade discs in their offering. Which is why their stats are so valuable to folks who are not running data centers, but might want a reliable drive for their NAS.
stonogo 3y ago
Tape libraries all have active monitoring and have for a while. But really, it's mostly about scale. Tape media is dense in a way that spinning disk can't catch up to.
- its-summertime 3y ago
  ~350cm³ for a tape, ~375cm³ for a 3.5in HDD, With HDDs being able to extend past the 18TB of LTO-9 tapes.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    I am too lazy to measure them right now, but your numbers must be wrong. Visually, an LTO cartridge cannot have much above a half of the volume of a 3.5" HDD and it must be at least 3 or 4 times lighter. Carrying a suitcase with twenty LTO cartridges is as easy as carrying any other typical suitcase, but carrying twenty HDDs would not be easy at all, due to the great volume and weight, and the volume in a real situation would be greatly increased by the need of adding some serious padding, in order to avoid catastrophic damage if the suitcase were accidentally dropped. More importantly, the price per TB of tapes is much lower, and when you consider the ratio between the expected lifetimes, the price per TB and per year is much, much lower. Of course, tape drives are extremely expensive, so you need to store at least a couple hundred TB to break even with the price of HDDs.
    - its-summertime 3y ago
      You are right. double checked, I think it might have been some site listing the box size for some unknown reason, 260cm³ should be the correct size.
  - stonogo 3y ago
    Your analysis ignores cooling.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  LTO-9 can cram 18TB uncompressed data onto a tape. A 3.5" HDD is a bit larger, but we already see 25TB drives. They are much heavier though, so LTO has an edge on density per mass, while HDDs have an edge on density per volume. Tapes (specially in tape library) have a huge advantage in density per dollar as capacity increases linearly with the number of tapes. OTOH, HDDs have much better latency, as even a powered down hard-disk will power up and retrieve data faster than the time it takes to load a tape and read it. I can imagine a number of ways to partition a HDD pool in ways that the access patterns allow for most drives to be unpowered at any given time.
deleted 3y ago
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reidjs 3y ago

What does automated healing mean in this context?

its-summertime 3y ago
Assuming a sane RAID situation, e.g. data being duplicated onto multiple drives. If one of those drives fails, making additional duplicates onto the surviving drives, or rebuilding the data of the failed drive onto a new drive. Can also be done with tapes, but you would require multiple tape drives (though if you can afford an automated library, thats probably nothing in comparison), additionally you can't find the failures until you take them out of "cold" storage. If you can respond to the first failure when it happens, you can react before being hit by later failures hitting the duplicates. Downside is, since you have active components, failures are expected to be more common.

laluser 3y ago

HDDs designed for industry have a lifespan of longer than 5 years in typical data centers. In fact, recently there have been many teams across industry expanding the lifetime of HDDs past 5 years well into 6 and 7. You can also check out Backblaze's drive stats to see how many drives are actually going past this time span: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2023/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-...

deleted 3y ago
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RF_Savage 3y ago
And one would expect actual data center grade HDD's to do even better. Backblaze is fameous for using piles upon piles of consumer grade discs in their offering. Which is why their stats are so valuable to folks who are not running data centers, but might want a reliable drive for their NAS.

stonogo 3y ago

Tape libraries all have active monitoring and have for a while. But really, it's mostly about scale. Tape media is dense in a way that spinning disk can't catch up to.

its-summertime 3y ago
~350cm³ for a tape, ~375cm³ for a 3.5in HDD, With HDDs being able to extend past the 18TB of LTO-9 tapes.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  I am too lazy to measure them right now, but your numbers must be wrong. Visually, an LTO cartridge cannot have much above a half of the volume of a 3.5" HDD and it must be at least 3 or 4 times lighter. Carrying a suitcase with twenty LTO cartridges is as easy as carrying any other typical suitcase, but carrying twenty HDDs would not be easy at all, due to the great volume and weight, and the volume in a real situation would be greatly increased by the need of adding some serious padding, in order to avoid catastrophic damage if the suitcase were accidentally dropped. More importantly, the price per TB of tapes is much lower, and when you consider the ratio between the expected lifetimes, the price per TB and per year is much, much lower. Of course, tape drives are extremely expensive, so you need to store at least a couple hundred TB to break even with the price of HDDs.
  - its-summertime 3y ago
    You are right. double checked, I think it might have been some site listing the box size for some unknown reason, 260cm³ should be the correct size.
- stonogo 3y ago
  Your analysis ignores cooling.
rbanffy 3y ago
LTO-9 can cram 18TB uncompressed data onto a tape. A 3.5" HDD is a bit larger, but we already see 25TB drives. They are much heavier though, so LTO has an edge on density per mass, while HDDs have an edge on density per volume. Tapes (specially in tape library) have a huge advantage in density per dollar as capacity increases linearly with the number of tapes. OTOH, HDDs have much better latency, as even a powered down hard-disk will power up and retrieve data faster than the time it takes to load a tape and read it. I can imagine a number of ways to partition a HDD pool in ways that the access patterns allow for most drives to be unpowered at any given time.

deleted 3y ago

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