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Do you store stuff on multiple disks? I struggle with windows as a NAS. Windows storage space sucks hard (particularly their RAID5 style parity which has unacc

by cm2187 3y ago

Do you store stuff on multiple disks? I struggle with windows as a NAS. Windows storage space sucks hard (particularly their RAID5 style parity which has unacceptable performances, but also I had it failing without reporting it, and it doesn't handle parity with column size >8). The native windows software raid is deprecated, and can't handle disks of different sizes. I use stablebit drivepool for a secondary backup where I don't really need parity (backup of the backup). But it comes with all sort of issues of its own (some weird file locking bugs, performance limited to single disk, also if you setup an SSD cache, it can't handle files larger than the smallest SSD (happened when backing up a vhdx). For NAS, for the moment I haven't found anything beating linux based NAS solutions (synology style) for simplicity and stability. For MDISC, call me skeptical. I think in 10-15 years you will struggle to find anything to read a CD or DVD, like you would struggle now to read a Zip or floppy disk. The most durable and cheapest way to do long term of storage is to replicate your data on new media regularly. The price / GB drops so fast that no non-retail form of storage (MDISC, LTO, etc) will be economical vs buying a big drive from time to time (every 5-7y). You can buy a 12TB drive for $200-300 now.

tallanvor 3y ago
Honestly, for me, JBOD works fine on my media PC. With some manual re-balancing about once a year, it works fine for me.
vel0city 3y ago
I've got nearly 30-year-old optical drives that still work fine today. I can plug a 3.5" floppy drive into my Android phone and it still works. Sure, there's a chance in a decade or so SATA ports disappear, but USB adapters still work. Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? ZIP drives had a number of mechanical issues (click of death). That's probably the biggest reason why they're challenging to try and use today. But as it stands right now, I can take a CD-ROM drive from the 90s, use a cheap USB adapter, and plug it in to a USB port on a brand-new Linux or Windows or MacOS device without issue. And even then, so what. In 25 years when I'm an old man I'll need to plug in my last optical drive into my 8 year old computer to read the disks and move that data off into the four dimensional hypercrystal storage mediums we'll all be using, and then I'll go into my cryogenic storage chamber to sleep for another 100 years and then transfer my data to the next media format when I wake.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one. Sure, now I can find it. In 10 years? N=1 anecdote: two years ago I helped to recover data from a 2.5" USB drive, which was left in a desk for 5 years. I was forced to use R-Studio and still I got only 90% of data in good enough condition.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    A 2.5" HDD isn't the same kind of media as an M-DISC. Magnetic storage will lose its charge over time. I've lost content from bitrot on magnetic media many times as well. Arguing I won't be able to read an M-DISC in 10 years because your magnetic media wore out in 5 years is beyond comparing apples to oranges. > It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one. I've got a pile of them already. I'll likely keep at least one, probably multiple, along with the optical drive/enclsure (of which I do have multiple as well). I imagine if I hold on to a new in box USB optical drive it will also probably have a cable. So in 10 years when I need to get the data off the drive, I'll probably just use the cable that's right there with the drive that's currently sitting on my desk. I can go down the street to Microcenter right now and buy one, they have dozens of cables in-stock in-person. There are other stores around in-person which also still sell them. There's loads of vendors online which sell them new today. To my eyes they're not hard to find today at least. I can't imagine in 10 years I'll have somehow exhausted the cables I currently have and will need to source one and there won't even be a listing on ebay for one when there's probably at least many hundreds of millions if not billions of them in existence at the moment. For reference, every PS3 had a mini-USB cable, and there were >84M of those sold. How many other devices came with a mini-USB cable? How many were manufactured and sold on their own? How many are still being produced? I can't imagine there being probably near billions of something existing and then disappearing entirely a decade from now, other than some kind of food or truly disposable item.
    - saltcured 3y ago
      Hmm, I've seen old HDDs fail to spin up or otherwise have catastrophic malfunction, but never heard of them having real bit rot. I recently booted up some portable PCs from around 1990 to review their HDD content and scrub the disk state before handing them over as e-waste. Easily 25 years on the shelf. I would think you'd have to do something very wrong like storing the HDD near a degausser to lose the magnetic recording. I do think that SSDs and particularly cheap flash "thumb drives" are capable of having bit rot when left on the shelf for many years.
teslabox 3y ago
I have an mdisc drive, and a few mdisc DVDs I haven’t burned yet. Someone on/r/datahorder noticed they don’t sell real mdiscs anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593967
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- RajT88 3y ago
  Wow, that is evil! I can see exactly the thought process behind this change as well... People buying M-Disc's will not notice that they've been sold BluRay discs for decades when they start to decay some day. It's a malfeasance which will only be discovered in the distant future once the discs start decaying, and will be someone else's problem by then. Meanwhile whatever product manager will have made their promotions for cost cutting and increasing revenue. tl;dr only buy the M-Disc's which are rated for 4x write speed.
RajT88 3y ago
> The native windows software raid is deprecated, and can't handle disks of different sizes. First I've heard of the deprecation! I'm not sure the second part is true though. I recall during setup my 14tb drives were not exactly the same size, and I found some way around it by just creating a volume of the same size as the first. My OS/Scratch is mirrored 10tb drives, which didn't have the same issue. These were refurbs since I didn't want to break the bank on scratch space. > I think in 10-15 years you will struggle to find anything to read a CD or DVD, like you would struggle now to read a Zip or floppy disk. CD/DVD drives were wayyy more prolific than floppy drives. Personal computing exploded in the 90's when optical drives were the standard. > The most durable and cheapest way to do long term of storage is to replicate your data on new media regularly Yeah, basically where I'm at. My prior NAS, I went through a few sets of drives. The latest ones I didn't even wait until one of the drives crashed, I just swapped out the hardware once the drives hit 5 years of age. I'd love some backup solution where I can archive stuff, and just leave it for decades, hence MDISC.
- cm2187 3y ago
  > First I've heard of the deprecation The option to create software RAID 5 from disk management has been removed already from Windows 10 desktop (you are supposed to use windows storage space, but as I mentioned, it really sucks for RAID 5). I am sure Windows Server will follow at one point. > I recall during setup my 14tb drives were not exactly the same size, and I found some way around it by just creating a volume of the same size as the first Yeah you can create a RAID volume of the min size across all disks. And then you can probably even create another RAID volume with the rumps of the larger disks. But you end up with multiple volumes. More modern solutions (synology, windows storage space) allow you to create a single volume that spans all disks and utilises their whole capacity. Synology by creating a bunch of RAID 5 volumes behind the scene, then joining them with a RAID 0-like (don't think it's RAID, just some sort of virtual volume). Windows storage space by writing strips of your data randomly across all your disks (the number of columns is decorrelated from the number of disks), ensuring that every strip is at most on one disk for single parity.

by cm2187 3y ago

tallanvor 3y ago

Honestly, for me, JBOD works fine on my media PC. With some manual re-balancing about once a year, it works fine for me.

vel0city 3y ago

I've got nearly 30-year-old optical drives that still work fine today. I can plug a 3.5" floppy drive into my Android phone and it still works. Sure, there's a chance in a decade or so SATA ports disappear, but USB adapters still work. Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? ZIP drives had a number of mechanical issues (click of death). That's probably the biggest reason why they're challenging to try and use today. But as it stands right now, I can take a CD-ROM drive from the 90s, use a cheap USB adapter, and plug it in to a USB port on a brand-new Linux or Windows or MacOS device without issue. And even then, so what. In 25 years when I'm an old man I'll need to plug in my last optical drive into my 8 year old computer to read the disks and move that data off into the four dimensional hypercrystal storage mediums we'll all be using, and then I'll go into my cryogenic storage chamber to sleep for another 100 years and then transfer my data to the next media format when I wake.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
> Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one. Sure, now I can find it. In 10 years? N=1 anecdote: two years ago I helped to recover data from a 2.5" USB drive, which was left in a desk for 5 years. I was forced to use R-Studio and still I got only 90% of data in good enough condition.
- vel0city 3y ago
  A 2.5" HDD isn't the same kind of media as an M-DISC. Magnetic storage will lose its charge over time. I've lost content from bitrot on magnetic media many times as well. Arguing I won't be able to read an M-DISC in 10 years because your magnetic media wore out in 5 years is beyond comparing apples to oranges. > It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one. I've got a pile of them already. I'll likely keep at least one, probably multiple, along with the optical drive/enclsure (of which I do have multiple as well). I imagine if I hold on to a new in box USB optical drive it will also probably have a cable. So in 10 years when I need to get the data off the drive, I'll probably just use the cable that's right there with the drive that's currently sitting on my desk. I can go down the street to Microcenter right now and buy one, they have dozens of cables in-stock in-person. There are other stores around in-person which also still sell them. There's loads of vendors online which sell them new today. To my eyes they're not hard to find today at least. I can't imagine in 10 years I'll have somehow exhausted the cables I currently have and will need to source one and there won't even be a listing on ebay for one when there's probably at least many hundreds of millions if not billions of them in existence at the moment. For reference, every PS3 had a mini-USB cable, and there were >84M of those sold. How many other devices came with a mini-USB cable? How many were manufactured and sold on their own? How many are still being produced? I can't imagine there being probably near billions of something existing and then disappearing entirely a decade from now, other than some kind of food or truly disposable item.
  - saltcured 3y ago
    Hmm, I've seen old HDDs fail to spin up or otherwise have catastrophic malfunction, but never heard of them having real bit rot. I recently booted up some portable PCs from around 1990 to review their HDD content and scrub the disk state before handing them over as e-waste. Easily 25 years on the shelf. I would think you'd have to do something very wrong like storing the HDD near a degausser to lose the magnetic recording. I do think that SSDs and particularly cheap flash "thumb drives" are capable of having bit rot when left on the shelf for many years.

teslabox 3y ago

I have an mdisc drive, and a few mdisc DVDs I haven’t burned yet. Someone on/r/datahorder noticed they don’t sell real mdiscs anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593967

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
RajT88 3y ago
Wow, that is evil! I can see exactly the thought process behind this change as well... People buying M-Disc's will not notice that they've been sold BluRay discs for decades when they start to decay some day. It's a malfeasance which will only be discovered in the distant future once the discs start decaying, and will be someone else's problem by then. Meanwhile whatever product manager will have made their promotions for cost cutting and increasing revenue. tl;dr only buy the M-Disc's which are rated for 4x write speed.

RajT88 3y ago

> The native windows software raid is deprecated, and can't handle disks of different sizes. First I've heard of the deprecation! I'm not sure the second part is true though. I recall during setup my 14tb drives were not exactly the same size, and I found some way around it by just creating a volume of the same size as the first. My OS/Scratch is mirrored 10tb drives, which didn't have the same issue. These were refurbs since I didn't want to break the bank on scratch space. > I think in 10-15 years you will struggle to find anything to read a CD or DVD, like you would struggle now to read a Zip or floppy disk. CD/DVD drives were wayyy more prolific than floppy drives. Personal computing exploded in the 90's when optical drives were the standard. > The most durable and cheapest way to do long term of storage is to replicate your data on new media regularly Yeah, basically where I'm at. My prior NAS, I went through a few sets of drives. The latest ones I didn't even wait until one of the drives crashed, I just swapped out the hardware once the drives hit 5 years of age. I'd love some backup solution where I can archive stuff, and just leave it for decades, hence MDISC.

cm2187 3y ago
> First I've heard of the deprecation The option to create software RAID 5 from disk management has been removed already from Windows 10 desktop (you are supposed to use windows storage space, but as I mentioned, it really sucks for RAID 5). I am sure Windows Server will follow at one point. > I recall during setup my 14tb drives were not exactly the same size, and I found some way around it by just creating a volume of the same size as the first Yeah you can create a RAID volume of the min size across all disks. And then you can probably even create another RAID volume with the rumps of the larger disks. But you end up with multiple volumes. More modern solutions (synology, windows storage space) allow you to create a single volume that spans all disks and utilises their whole capacity. Synology by creating a bunch of RAID 5 volumes behind the scene, then joining them with a RAID 0-like (don't think it's RAID, just some sort of virtual volume). Windows storage space by writing strips of your data randomly across all your disks (the number of columns is decorrelated from the number of disks), ensuring that every strip is at most on one disk for single parity.