5 ms·

Emphatic Yes. I'd like to expand. What I find mindblowing about it is that, as a regular consumer: * When you need more space you can't just plug in another d

by Rygian 2y ago

Emphatic Yes. I'd like to expand. What I find mindblowing about it is that, as a regular consumer: * When you need more space you can't just plug in another disk or USB stick. You also have to choose on which device you want to use it, and you have to tell all your software to use it. And that may involve shuffling data around. * As a corollary, you need to remember in which device you put which stuff. * As an extra corollary, any data loss is catastrophic by default. * File copy operations still fail, and when they fail, they do so without ACID-strong commit/fallback semantics. * Backups don't happen by default, and are not transparent to the end user. * Data corruption can be silent. Bonus, but related: * You can't share arbitrary files with people without going through a 3rd party.

nine_k 2y ago
This is because most of the non-technical retail customers don't value reliability too much. They want more capacity and good speed at the lowest price point. Hence the proliferation of QLC / MLC NVMe drives with a small SLC write cache. It's not very stable, and it can only keep the write speed high for small files, but hey, you can get a terabyte for $50, and it loads the latest game real fast! Similarly, many users don't have much valuable, unique data on their computers. The most important stuff very often lives completely in the cloud, where it's properly backed up, etc. Also, the most ubiquitous computing device now is a smartphone. It has all the automatic backup stuff built in, you can put an SD card into it, and it will transparently extend the free space, without hassle. Even on PCs, MS and Apple nudge the users very prominently to use OneDrive and Apple Cloud for backing up their desktops / laptops. But past certain size, it costs money though, hence many people opt out of that. Again, because most people value the lowest price, and just hope for the best; because what could ever happen? Silent data corruption can still be an issue, but, frankly, malware is a much bigger threat for a typical non-technical user. Technical people have no trouble setting up all that: mount your disks under LVM, run ZFS on top of it, set up multiple backups, set up their own "magic wormhole" to share files with stranger easily. But they know why they are doing that. Educating users about IT hygiene is key for improving it, much like educating people about the dangers of not washing hands, or of eating unhealthy stuff, helped improve their health.
- rietta 2y ago
  And without care. Everyone's precious photo albums will go with them to the grave. We live in a time where the books and data we write are likely to vanish long before any previous period. We don't leave behind books, codexes, or scrolls, or stone tablets anymore. Scholars will have more clue about life in 4th century via the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection than 21st century Terra Haute, Indiana.
  - bloomingeek 2y ago
    Absolutely! Cell phone are a great example. Most people love taking pics, but rarely give much thought about storing them for the future. Why? It's kind of difficult, from the angle of categorizing the subject matter. Most of us on this website, I'm guessing, enjoy this sort of activity. But I'm guessing most people would rather go to the dentist then sort through photos and decide the best place to put them, both folders and storage.
    - autoexec 2y ago
      > But I'm guessing most people would rather go to the dentist then sort through photos and decide the best place to put them, both folders and storage. Most people tend to love going through their old photos, thinking of the people and places depicted, and sorting them. For an extremely long time this was entirely the norm and it took place mostly using large cumbersome physical books where meta data was recorded by hand by writing on the back of the photo. It's become much easier now that files are digital, only slightly offset by the fact that digital has enabled us to take many more photos than in the past. What I see more often are people who have no idea when the photos on their phones are actually stored at all (what's a file system?), let alone how to copy them off their phone and onto something more appropriate besides resorting to something like emailing photos to themselves which has all the problems of adding and successfully transferring large file attachments. It's a chore because companies really don't want people to have access to their own files unless it's on the company's terms and using their cloud servers.
  - throw0101a 2y ago

by Rygian 2y ago

nine_k 2y ago

This is because most of the non-technical retail customers don't value reliability too much. They want more capacity and good speed at the lowest price point. Hence the proliferation of QLC / MLC NVMe drives with a small SLC write cache. It's not very stable, and it can only keep the write speed high for small files, but hey, you can get a terabyte for $50, and it loads the latest game real fast! Similarly, many users don't have much valuable, unique data on their computers. The most important stuff very often lives completely in the cloud, where it's properly backed up, etc. Also, the most ubiquitous computing device now is a smartphone. It has all the automatic backup stuff built in, you can put an SD card into it, and it will transparently extend the free space, without hassle. Even on PCs, MS and Apple nudge the users very prominently to use OneDrive and Apple Cloud for backing up their desktops / laptops. But past certain size, it costs money though, hence many people opt out of that. Again, because most people value the lowest price, and just hope for the best; because what could ever happen? Silent data corruption can still be an issue, but, frankly, malware is a much bigger threat for a typical non-technical user. Technical people have no trouble setting up all that: mount your disks under LVM, run ZFS on top of it, set up multiple backups, set up their own "magic wormhole" to share files with stranger easily. But they know why they are doing that. Educating users about IT hygiene is key for improving it, much like educating people about the dangers of not washing hands, or of eating unhealthy stuff, helped improve their health.

rietta 2y ago
And without care. Everyone's precious photo albums will go with them to the grave. We live in a time where the books and data we write are likely to vanish long before any previous period. We don't leave behind books, codexes, or scrolls, or stone tablets anymore. Scholars will have more clue about life in 4th century via the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection than 21st century Terra Haute, Indiana.
- bloomingeek 2y ago
  Absolutely! Cell phone are a great example. Most people love taking pics, but rarely give much thought about storing them for the future. Why? It's kind of difficult, from the angle of categorizing the subject matter. Most of us on this website, I'm guessing, enjoy this sort of activity. But I'm guessing most people would rather go to the dentist then sort through photos and decide the best place to put them, both folders and storage.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    > But I'm guessing most people would rather go to the dentist then sort through photos and decide the best place to put them, both folders and storage. Most people tend to love going through their old photos, thinking of the people and places depicted, and sorting them. For an extremely long time this was entirely the norm and it took place mostly using large cumbersome physical books where meta data was recorded by hand by writing on the back of the photo. It's become much easier now that files are digital, only slightly offset by the fact that digital has enabled us to take many more photos than in the past. What I see more often are people who have no idea when the photos on their phones are actually stored at all (what's a file system?), let alone how to copy them off their phone and onto something more appropriate besides resorting to something like emailing photos to themselves which has all the problems of adding and successfully transferring large file attachments. It's a chore because companies really don't want people to have access to their own files unless it's on the company's terms and using their cloud servers.
- throw0101a 2y ago