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This article is really bad: "making slow hard drives and tapes obsolete" and "In contrast to data usually stored on the best hard drives and the best SSDs of to

This article is really bad: "making slow hard drives and tapes obsolete" and "In contrast to data usually stored on the best hard drives and the best SSDs of today..." No. My understanding from the video is that it's a write-once solution, so if anything it would just be a replacement for tape backup, so not sure why it's comparing it to hard drives and SSDs.

lcuff 3y ago
Not only that, but the article describes a system that is in a remote data center, not something I can have in my laptop. Although if it fit in my laptop for the same price as a hard drive. I could probably 'struggle along' with a write-once solution and not worry about filling 10,000 Terabytes any time soon. Complete history on every file!
mattashii 3y ago
The title could use some changes in wording, but "In contrast to data usually stored on the best hard drives and the best SSDs of today..." was clearly referring to the data retention time of those media, and that is indeed often quoted as being on the order of years, not thousands of years, for HDD/SSD data carriers. I'd say that's quite contrasting indeed, if that ceramic storage can keep its promise of 5000 years data retention.
- rowanG077 3y ago
  I always wonder about what we will do for reading. It's not easy to read back a few decade old tape even if the tape is pristine. You would really have to scavenge for a working tape drive. Multiply that timeframe and I really don't see how having it being stored for thousands of years as that appealing.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > was clearly referring to the data retention time of those media, and that is indeed often quoted as being on the order of years, not thousands of years Correct, but the primary reason those technologies have shorter retention times is because they are rewritable. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison that doesn't make any sense. It would make sense if the article was clear that this was about improving archival storage options, and then comparing to things like CDs/DVDs, tape, and film.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    They have shorter retention times not because they are rewritable, but because: * HDDs fail, or these days helium leaks out at end of lifespan. * SSDs slowly have the data leak out of floating cells.
varenc 3y ago
Many data centers use spinning disk hard drives in a write-once configuration. This is fine for some use patterns and lets them take advantage of SMR and higher density. Dropbox has blogged about this: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/extending-magic-pocket-innovation-with-the-first-petabyte-scale-smr-drive-deployment https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/extending-magic-pocket-i... My understanding is that every drive is write-once and once full it doesn’t change. Eventually, if most of the file data/blocks stored on a drive are deleted by users, the whole drive is erased and re-written. That said, while being write-once only isn’t a blocker, my guess is seek latency will still prevent this tech from replacing spinning disks.
- laluser 3y ago
  It does change due to deletes. Otherwise, it would be obscenely expensive to never delete data. Garbage collection is hard but since it’s async it’s also possible to do efficiently while on SMR.
  - Valgrim 3y ago
    At this scale, does it really matter? Right now everything I record in the cloud has an infinite history attached to it, so nothing is ever really "deleted" as I understand it, the index merely points to the latest version of a file. If the deletion is meant as a security feature, then you can "delete" a file by making it encrypted and deleting it's decryption key.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      Most clouds these days do have a limit on maximum version retention. Otherwise you'd effectively get infinite storage for free. If a cloud storage provider doesn't charge for infinite version, that's not very different from offering "unlimited storage" plans: They have pretty good statistics of how much the average user really uses on an "unlimited" plan and will price their services accordingly. Revision history just adds another term to the same equation.
    - varenc 3y ago
mlyle 3y ago
> My understanding from the video is that it's a write-once solution, If you have enough capacity, write-once is enough. Indeed, MLC SSDs can often be rewritten a couple hundred times. Consumer HDDs are specified for 180TB written per year. Would you rather have: * A HDD that can store 22TB and can be written 180TB per year for 5 years until the helium leaks out (900TB total writes). * A 10,000 TB storage cartridge that can initially store 10,000TB, but as you "erase" stuff the capacity falls. The latter can tolerate 1,000 TB "erased" per year for 5 years and still store 5,000TB at the end.
lxgr 3y ago
Exactly. I guess "making CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays obsolete" doesn't have the same ring to it.

lcuff 3y ago

Not only that, but the article describes a system that is in a remote data center, not something I can have in my laptop. Although if it fit in my laptop for the same price as a hard drive. I could probably 'struggle along' with a write-once solution and not worry about filling 10,000 Terabytes any time soon. Complete history on every file!

mattashii 3y ago

The title could use some changes in wording, but "In contrast to data usually stored on the best hard drives and the best SSDs of today..." was clearly referring to the data retention time of those media, and that is indeed often quoted as being on the order of years, not thousands of years, for HDD/SSD data carriers. I'd say that's quite contrasting indeed, if that ceramic storage can keep its promise of 5000 years data retention.

rowanG077 3y ago
I always wonder about what we will do for reading. It's not easy to read back a few decade old tape even if the tape is pristine. You would really have to scavenge for a working tape drive. Multiply that timeframe and I really don't see how having it being stored for thousands of years as that appealing.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> was clearly referring to the data retention time of those media, and that is indeed often quoted as being on the order of years, not thousands of years Correct, but the primary reason those technologies have shorter retention times is because they are rewritable. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison that doesn't make any sense. It would make sense if the article was clear that this was about improving archival storage options, and then comparing to things like CDs/DVDs, tape, and film.
- mlyle 3y ago
  They have shorter retention times not because they are rewritable, but because: * HDDs fail, or these days helium leaks out at end of lifespan. * SSDs slowly have the data leak out of floating cells.

varenc 3y ago

Many data centers use spinning disk hard drives in a write-once configuration. This is fine for some use patterns and lets them take advantage of SMR and higher density. Dropbox has blogged about this: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/extending-magic-pocket-innovation-with-the-first-petabyte-scale-smr-drive-deployment https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/extending-magic-pocket-i... My understanding is that every drive is write-once and once full it doesn’t change. Eventually, if most of the file data/blocks stored on a drive are deleted by users, the whole drive is erased and re-written. That said, while being write-once only isn’t a blocker, my guess is seek latency will still prevent this tech from replacing spinning disks.

laluser 3y ago
It does change due to deletes. Otherwise, it would be obscenely expensive to never delete data. Garbage collection is hard but since it’s async it’s also possible to do efficiently while on SMR.
- Valgrim 3y ago
  At this scale, does it really matter? Right now everything I record in the cloud has an infinite history attached to it, so nothing is ever really "deleted" as I understand it, the index merely points to the latest version of a file. If the deletion is meant as a security feature, then you can "delete" a file by making it encrypted and deleting it's decryption key.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Most clouds these days do have a limit on maximum version retention. Otherwise you'd effectively get infinite storage for free. If a cloud storage provider doesn't charge for infinite version, that's not very different from offering "unlimited storage" plans: They have pretty good statistics of how much the average user really uses on an "unlimited" plan and will price their services accordingly. Revision history just adds another term to the same equation.
  - varenc 3y ago

mlyle 3y ago

> My understanding from the video is that it's a write-once solution, If you have enough capacity, write-once is enough. Indeed, MLC SSDs can often be rewritten a couple hundred times. Consumer HDDs are specified for 180TB written per year. Would you rather have: * A HDD that can store 22TB and can be written 180TB per year for 5 years until the helium leaks out (900TB total writes). * A 10,000 TB storage cartridge that can initially store 10,000TB, but as you "erase" stuff the capacity falls. The latter can tolerate 1,000 TB "erased" per year for 5 years and still store 5,000TB at the end.

lxgr 3y ago

Exactly. I guess "making CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays obsolete" doesn't have the same ring to it.