It never ceases to amaze me how far we can still take a piece of technology that was invented in the 50s.
That’s like developing punch cards to the point where the holes are microscopic and can also store terabytes of data. It’s almost Steampunk-y.
Solid state is kinda like a microscopic punch card.
So are optical discs
Much more so than solid state.
More like microscopic fidget bubble poppers.
When the computer wants a bit to be a 1, it pops it down. When it wants it to be a 0, it pops it up.
If it were like a punch card, it couldn’t be rewritten as writing to it would permanently damage the disc. A CD-RW is basically a microscopic punch card though, because the laser actually burns away material to write the data to the CD.
They work through electron tunneling through a semiconductor, so something does go through them like an old punch card reader
Current ones also store multiple charge levels per cell, so they’re no longer one bit each. They have multiple levels of “punch” for what used to just be one bit.
Talking about steam, steam-powered things are 2 thousand years old at least and we still use the technology when we crack atoms to make energy.
What the Romans had wasn’t comparable with an industrial steam engine. The working principle of steam pushing against a cylinder was similar, but they lacked the tools and metallurgy to build a steam cauldron that could be pressurized, so their steam engine could only do parlor tricks like opening a temple door once, and not perform real continuous work.
That’s how most technology is:
- combustion engines - early 1900s, earlier if you count steam engines
- missiles - 13th century China, gunpowder was much earlier
- wind energy - windmills appeared in the 9th century, potentially as early as the 4th
Almost everything we have today is due to incremental improvements from something much older.
This isn’t unique to computing.
Just about all of the products and technology we see are the results of generations of innovations and improvements.
Look at the automobile, for example. It’s really shaped my view of the significance of new industries; we could be stuck with them for the rest of human history.
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Dude i had a 240 gb ssd 14 years old. And the SMART is telling me that has 84% life yet. This was a main OS drive and was formatted multiple times. Literally data is going to be discontinued before this disk is going to die. Stop spreading fake news. Realistically how many times you fill a SSD in a typical scenario?
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How the hell a SSD can coil whine… Without mobile parts lol… Second, realistically for a normal user, it’s probable that SSD is going to last more than 10 years. We aren’t talking about intensive data servers here. We are talking about The hardcorest of the gamers for example, normal people. And of course, to begin with HDDs haven’t a write limit lol. They fail because of its mechanical parts. Finally, cost benefit. The M.2 I was suggesting is $200 buck for 4Tb. Cmon it’s not the end of the world and you multiply speeds… By 700…
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Imagine a M.2 with coil whine, what is the posibility…
SSDs won’t hold data for much longer compared to HDDs
Realistically this is not a good reason to select SSD over HDD. If your data is important it’s being backed up (and if it’s not backed up it’s not important. Yada yada 3.2.1 backups and all. I’ll happily give real backup advise if you need it)
In my anecdotal experience across both my family’s various computers and computers I’ve seen bite the dust at work, I’ve not observed any longevity difference between HDDs and SSDs (in fact I’ve only seen 2 fail and those were front desk PCs that were effectively always on 24/7 with heavy use during all lobby hours, and that was after multiple years of that usecase) and I’ve never observed bit rot in the real world on anything other than crappy flashdrives and SD cards (literally the lowest quality flash you can get)
Honestly best way to look at it is to select based on your usecase. Always have your boot device be an SSD, and if you don’t need more storage on that computer than you feel like buying an SSD to match, don’t even worry about a HDD for that device. HDDs have one usecase only these days: bulk storage for comparatively low cost per GB
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I doubt the high pitched whine that you’re hearing is the SSD failing. The sheer amount of writes to fully wear out an SSD is…honestly difficult to achieve in the real world. I’ve got decade old budget SSDs in some of my computers that are still going strong!
How many platters?!
30 to 32 platters. You can write a file on the edge and watch it as it speeds back to the future!
30/32 = 0.938
That’s less than a single terabyte. I have a microSD card bigger than that!
;)
Now now, no self-shaming about the size of your card. It’s how you use it!
Some IOT perverts are into microSD
Can’t even put it into simplest form.
I mean, cool and all, but call me when sata or m2 ssds are 10TB for $250, then we’ll talk.
Not sure whether we’ll arrive there the tech is definitely entering the taper-out phase of the sigmoid. Capacity might very well still become cheaper, also 3x cheaper, but don’t, in any way, expect them to simultaneously keep up with write performance that ship has long since sailed. The more bits they’re trying to squeeze into a single cell the slower it’s going to get and the price per cell isn’t going to change much, any more, as silicon has hit a price wall, it’s been a while since the newest, smallest node was also the cheapest.
OTOH how often do you write a terabyte in one go at full tilt.
I don’t think anyone has much issue with our current write speeds, even at dinky old SATA 6/GB levels. At least for bulk media storage. Your OS boot or game loading, whatever, maybe not. I’d be just fine with exactly what we have now, but just pack more chips in there.
Even if you take apart one of the biggest, meanest, most expensive 8TB 2.5" SSD’s the casing is mostly empty inside. There’s no reason they couldn’t just add more chips even at the current density levels other than artificial market segmentation, planned obsolescence, and pigheadedness. It seems the major consumer manufacturers refuse to allow their 2.5" SSD’s to get out of parity with the capacities on offer in the M.2 form factor drives that everyone is hyperfixated on for some reason, and the pricing structure between 8TB and what few greater than 8 models actually are on offer is nowhere near linear even though the manufacturing cost roughly should be.
If people are still willing to use a “full size” 3.5" form factor with ordinary hard drives for bulk storage, can you imagine how much solid state storage you could cram into a casing that size, even with current low-cost commodity chips? It’d be tons. But the only options available are “enterprise solutions” which are apparently priced with the expectation you’ll have a Fortune 500 or government expense account.
It’s bullshit all the way down; there’s nothing new under the sun in that regard.
the M.2 form factor drives that everyone is hyperfixated on for some reason
The reason is transfer speeds. SATA is slow, M.2 is a direct PCIe link. And SSDs can saturate it, at least in bursts. Doubling the capacity of a 2.5" SSD is going to double its price as you need twice as many chips, there’s not really a market for 500 buck SATA SSDs, you’re looking for U.2 / U.3 ones. Yes, they’re quite a bit more expensive per TB but look at the difference in TBW to consumer SSDs.
If you’re a consumer and want a data grave, buy spinning platters. Or even a tape drive. You neither want, nor need, a high-capacity SSD.
Also you can always RAID them up.
For the context of bulk consumer storage (or even SOHO NAS) that’s irrelevant, though, because people are already happily using spinning mechanical 3.5" hard drives for this purpose, and they’re all already SATA. Therefore there’s no logical reason to worry about the physical size or slower write speeds of packing a bunch of flash chips into the same sized enclosure for those particular use cases.
There are reasons a big old SSD would be suitable for this. Silence, reliability, no spin up delay, resistance to outside mechanical forces, etc.
Sure it makes sense: Pretty much noone, but you, is going to buy them, and stocking shelves and warehouses with product costs money. All that unmoved stock would make them more expensive, making even more people not buy them. It’s inefficient.
whoa
Dude
The two models, […] each offer a minimum of 3TB per disk
Huh? The hell is this supposed to mean? Are they talking about the internal platters?
More than likely
I thought I read somewhere that larger drives had a higher chance of failure. Quick look around and that seems to be untrue relative to newer drives.
One problem is that larger drives take longer to rebuild the RAID array when one drive needs replacing. You’re sitting there for days hoping that no other drive fails while the process goes. Current SATA and SAS standards are as fast as spinning platters could possibly go; making them go even faster won’t help anything.
There was some debate among storage engineers if they even want drives bigger than 20TB. The potential risk of data loss during a rebuild is worth trading off density. That will probably be true until SSDs are closer to the price per TB of spinning platters (not necessarily the same; possibly more like double the price).
If you’re writing 100 MB/s, it’ll still take 300,000 seconds to write 30TB. 300,000 seconds is 5,000 minutes, or 83.3 hours, or about 3.5 days. In some contexts, that can be considered a long time to be exposed to risk of some other hardware failure.
What happened to using different kinds of drives in every mirrored pair? Not best practice any more? I’ve had Seagates fail one after another and the RAID was intact because I paired them with WD.
You can, but you might still be sweating bullets while waiting for the rebuild to finish.
Yep. It’s a little nerve wracking when I replace a RAID drie in our NAS, but I do it before there’s a problem with a drive. I can mount the old one back in, or try another new drive. I’ve only ever had one new DOA, here’s hoping those stay few and far between.
radarr goes brrrrrr
sonarr goes brrrrrr…
barrrr?
…dum tss!
Haven’t bought Seagate in 15 years. They improve their longevity?
I have one Seagate drive. It’s a 500 GB that came in my 2006 Dell Dimension E510 running XP Media Center. When that died in 2011, I put it in my custom build. It ran until probably 2014, when suddenly I was having issues booting and I got a fresh WD 1 TB. Put it in a box, and kept it for some reason. Fast forward to 2022, I got another Dell E510 with only an 80 GB. Dusted off the old 500 GB and popped it in. Back with XP Media Center. The cycle is complete. That drive is still noisy as fuck.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data
Backblaze reports are cool
Nice data but I stick with Toshiba old HGST and WD. For me they seem to last much longer than Seagate
I bought 16TB one as an urgent replacement for a failing raid.
It arrived defective, so I can’t speak on the longevity.Not worth the risk for me to find out lol. My granddaddy stored his data on WD drives and his daddy before him, and my daddy after him. Now I store my data on WD drives and my son will to one day. Such is life.
And here I am with HGST drives hitting 50k hours
Edit: no one ever discusses the Backblaze reliability statistics. Its interesting to see how they stack up against the anecdotes.
My personal experience has been hit n miss.
Was using one 4TB Seagate for 11 years then bought a newer model to replace it since I thought it was gonna die any day. That new one died within 6 months. The old one still works although I don’t use it for for anything important now.
Vastly. I’m running all seagate ironwolf pros. Best drives Ive ever used.
Used to be WD all the way.
I’m going to have to pass though. They cost too much. I buy refurb with 5 year warranty
I can’t wait for datacenters to decommission these so I can actually afford an array of them on the second-hand market.
Home Petabyte Project here I come (in like 3-5 years 😅)
better start preparing with a 10G network!
Way ahead of you… I have a Brocade ICX6650 waiting to be racked up once I’m not limited to just the single 15A circuit my rack runs off of currently 😅
Hopefully 40G interconnect between it and the main switch everything using now will be enough for the storage nodes and the storage network/VLAN.
Exactly, my nas is currently made up of decommissioned 18tb exos. Great deal and I can usually still get them rma’d the handful of times they fail
Where is a good place to search for decommissioned ones?
eBay sellers that have tons of sales and specialize. You can learn to read between the lines and see that decom goods are what they do.
SaveMyServer is a perfect example. Don’t know if they sell drives though.
Serverpartdeals has done me well, drives often come new enough that they still have a decent amount of manufacturers warranty remaining (exos is 5yr) and depending on the drive you buy from them spd will rma a drive for 5 years from purchase (but not always, depends on the listing, read the fine print).
I have gotten 2 bad drives from them out of 18 over 5 years or so. Both bad drives were found almost immediately with basic maintenance steps prior to adding to the array (zeroing out the drives, badblocks) and both were rma’d by seagate within 3-5 days because they were still within the mfr warranty.
If you’re running a gigantic raid array like me (288tb and counting!) it would be wise to recognize that rotational hard drives are doomed and you need a robust backup solution that can handle gigantic amounts of data long term. I have a tape drive for that because I got it cheap at an electronics recycler sold as not working (thankfully it was an easy fix) but this is typically a super expensive route. If you only have like 20tb then you can look into stuff like cloud services, bluray, redundant hard drive, etc. or do like I did in the beginning and just accept that your pirated anime collection might go poof one day lol
What kind of tape drive are you using? My array isn’t as large as yours (120tb physical), but it’s big enough that my only real options for backup are tape or a whole secondary array for just backup.
Based on what I’ve seen, my options are a prohibitively large number tapes with an older LTO standard or prohibitively expensive tapes with a newer LTO standard.
My current backup strategy consists of automated backups to Backblaze B2 for the really important stuff like personal documents or projects and hoping my ZFS array doesn’t fail for everything else.
I have an ibm qualstar lto8 drive. I got it because I gambled, it was cheap because it was throwing an error (I forget what the number was) but it was one that indicates an issue in the tape path. I was able to get the price to $150 because I was buying some other stuff and because ultimately if the head was toast it was basically useless. But I got lucky and cleaning the head and tape path brought it back to life. Dunno how long it will last. I’ll live with it though because buying one that’s confirmed working can be thousands
You’re right that lto8 tapes are pricey but they’re quite a bit cheaper than building an equivalent array for backup that is significantly more reliable long term. A tape is about 12tb and $40-50, although sometimes they pop up cheaper. I generally don’t back up stuff continually with this method, I back up newer files that haven’t been synced to tape once every six weeks or so. It’s also something that you can buy a bit at a time to soften the financial blow of course. Maybe if you get a fancy carousel drive you’d want to fill it up but frankly that just seems like it would break much easier
More modern tapes have support for ltfs and I can basically use it like an external hard drive that way. So it’s pretty much I pop a tape in, once a week or so I sync new files to said tape, then as it gets full I swap it for a new tape. Towards the end I print a directory of what’s on it because admittedly doing it this way is messy. But my intention with this is to back up my “medium critical” files. Stuff that if I lost I would be frustrated over, but not heartbroken. Movies and TV shows that I did custom muxes of to have my ideal subtitles, audio tracks, etc. all my dockers so stuff like my Jellyfin watch status and komga library stay intact, stuff like that. That takes up the bulk of my nas and my primary concerns are either the array fully failing or significant bit rot, and if either of those occur I would rebuild from scratch and just copy all the tapes back over anyway so the messy filing isn’t really a huge issue.
I also do sometimes make it a point to copy harder to find files onto at least 2 tapes on the outside chance a tape goes bad. It’s unlikely given I only buy new tapes and store them properly (I even go to the effort to store them offsite just in case my house burns down) but you never know I suppose
The advertised values of tape capacity is crap for this use. You’ll see like lto 8 has a native capacity of 12tb but a compressed capacity of 30tb per disk! And the disks will frequently just say 30tb on them. That’s nonsense here. Maybe for a more typical server environment where they’re storing databases and text files and shit but compressed movies and music? Not so much. I get some advantage because I keep most of my stuff in archival quality (remux/flac/etc) but even then I still usually dont get anywhere near 30tb
It’s pretty slow. Not the end of the world but just something to keep in mind. Lto8 is supposed to be 360MBps for uncompressed and 750MBps for compressed data but I don’t seem to hit those speeds at all. I’m not really in a rush though and everything verifies fine and works after copying back over so I’m not too worried. But it can take like 10-14 hours to fill a tape. If I ever do have to rebuild the array it will take AGES
For my “absolutely priceless” data I have other more robust backup solutions that are basically the same as yours (literally down to using backblaze, ha).
You got an incredible deal on your tape drive. For LTO8 drives, I’m seeing “for parts only” drives sold for around $500. I’d be willing to throw away $100 or $200 on the possibility that I could repair a drive; $500 is a bit too much. It looks like LTO6 is more around what my budget would be.; it would require a much larger number of tapes, but not excessively so.
I remember when BD-R was a reasonable solution for backup. There’s no way that’s true now. It really seems like hard drive capacity has far outpaced removable media. If most people are streaming everything, those of us who actually want to save their data locally are really the minority these days. There’s just not as much of a compelling reason for companies to develop cheap high-capacity removable discs.
I’m sure I’ll invest in a tape backup solution eventually, but for now, at least I have ZFS with paranoid RAIDZ.
It was about a year ago and I’ve found general prices have gone up on basically everything, even stuff for parts, in the past few years, but more importantly it was also a local sale in person with a vendor I know. I find that’s the only way to actually get deals anymore. If you buy stuff like this and are stuffing a network rack at home it makes sense to befriend a local electronics recycler or two if you live in an area where that’s a thing.
I actually moved about two years ago to a less developed area but I will still drive to where I used to live (which is like 90-120 minute drive) 1-2x a year for stuff like this. It’s worth it bc these guys still know me and they’ll cut me deals on stuff like this where ebay sellers will list it for 2-3x as much. but if you watch 8x out of 10 their auctions never sell at those prices, at best they sometimes sell for an undisclosed “best offer” if they even have that option. It’s crazy how many ebay sellers will let shit sit on the market for inflated prices for weeks, months, or longer rather than drop their prices to promote an artificial economy in the hopes that eventually a clueless buyer with fat pockets will come along. They get that and they don’t want to waste the space storing shit for ages
Full disclosure: when I lived in the area I ran a refurbishing business on the side and would buy tons of stuff from them to fix and resell, that probably helped get me on their good side. From like 2013-2019 I would buy tons of broken phones, consoles, weird industrial shit, etc, fix it, and resell it. They loved it because it was a guaranteed cash sale with no ebay/paypal fees, no risk of negative feedback for their ebay store, no risk of a buyer doing a chargeback or demanding to return, etc. I wanted their broken shit and if I couldn’t fix it I accepted the loss, would bring it back to them to recycle and admit defeat in shame
Nice, where do you get yours?
also curious, buying new is getting too pricey for me
I personally use goharddrive and serverpartdeals on eBay and have had good luck, but I’m always looking for others
Never used goharddrive but can def endorse spd
Here i am still rocking 6TB.
Just one would be a great backup, but I’m not ready to run a server with 30TB drives.
I’m here for it. The 8 disc server is normally a great form factor for size, data density and redundancy with raid6/raidz2.
This would net around 180TB in that form factor. Thats would go a long way for a long while.
I dunno if you would want to run raidz2 with disks this large. The resilver times would be absolutely bazonkers, I think. I have 24 TB drives in my server and run mirrored vdevs because the chances of one of those drives failing during a raidz2 resilver is just too high. I can’t imagine what it’d be like with 30 TB disks.
Yeah I agree. I just got 20tb in mine. Decided to just z2, which in my case should be fine. But was contemplating the same thing. Going to have to start doing z2 with 3 drives in each vdev lol.
A few years ago I had a 12 disk RAID6 array and the power distributor (the bit between the redundant PSUs and the rest of the system) went and took 5 drives with them, lost everything on there. Backup is absolutely essential but if you can’t do that for some reason at least use RAID1 where you only lose part of your data if you lose more than 2 drives.
Is RAID2 ever the right choice? Honestly, I don’t touch anything outside of 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10.
Edit: missed the z, my bad. I don’t use ZFS and just skipped over it.
raidz2 is analogous to RAID 6. It’s just the ZFS term for double parity redundancy.
Yeah, I noticed the “z” in there shortly after posting. I don’t use ZFS much, so I kinda skimmed over it.
My first HDD had a capacity of 42MB. Still a short way to go until factor 10⁶.
My first HD was a 20mb mfm drive :). Be right back, need some “just for men” for my beard (kidding, I’m proud of it).
So was mine, but the controller thought it was 10mb so had to load a device driver to access the full size.
Was fine until a friend defragged it and the driver moved out of the first 10mb. Thereafter had to keep a 360kb 5¼" drive to boot from.
That was in an XT.
it honestly could have been a 10mb, I don’t even remember. only thing I really do remember is thinking it was interesting how it used the floppy and second cable, and how the sound it made was used in every 90’s and early 2000’s tv and movie show as generic computer noise :)
You have me beat on the XT, mine was a 286, although it did replace an Apple 2e (granted both were aquired several years after they were already considered junk in the 386 era).
I remember the sound. Also, it was on a three wheel table, and the whole thing would shake when defragging.
Was fine until a friend defragged it and the driver moved out of the first 10mb
Oh noooo 😭
My first one was a Seagate ST-238R. 32 MB of pure storage, baby. For some reason I thought we still needed the two disk drives as well, but I don’t remember why.
“Oh what a mess we weave when we amiss interleave!”
We’d set the interleave to, say, 4:1 (four revolutions to read all data in a track, IIRC), because the hard drive was too fast for the CPU to deal with the data… ha.
Just a reminder: These massive drives are really more a “budget” version of a proper tape backup system. The fundamental physics of a spinning disc mean that these aren’t a good solution for rapid seeking of specific sectors to read and write and so forth.
So a decent choice for the big machine you backup all your VMs to in a corporate environment. Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.
Not sure if the general advice has changed, but you are still looking for a sweet spot in the 8-12 TB range for a home NAS where you expect to regularly access and update a large number of small files rather than a few massive ones.
Not sure what you’re going on about here. Even these discs have plenty of performance for read/wrote ops for rarely written data like media. They have the same ability to be used by error checking filesystems like zfs or btrfs, and can be used in raid arrays, which add redundancy for disc failure.
The only negatives of large drives in home media arrays is the cost, slightly higher idle power usage, and the resilvering time on replacing a bad disc in an array.
Your 8-12TB recommendation already has most of these negatives. Adding more space per disc is just scaling them linearly.
Additionally, most media is read in a contiguous scan. Streaming media is very much not random access.
Your typical access pattern is going to be seeking to a chunk, reading a few megabytes of data in a row for the streaming application to buffer, and then moving on. The ~10ms of access time at the start are next to irrelevant. Particularly when you consider that the OS has likely observed that you have unutilized RAM and loads the entire file into the memory cache to bypass the hard drive entirely.
The fundamental physics of a spinning disc mean that these aren’t a good solution for rapid seeking of specific sectors to read and write and so forth.
It’s no ssd but is no slower than any other 12TB drive. It’s not shingled but HAMR. The sectors are closer together so it has even better seeking speed than a regular 12TB drive.
Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.
???
It’s absolutely perfect for that. Even if it was shingled tech, that only slows write speeds. Unless you are editing your own video, write seek times are irrelevant. For media playback use only consistent read speed matters. Not even read seek matters except in extreme conditions like comparing tape seek to drive seek. You cannot measure 10 ms difference between clicking a video and it starting to play because of all the other delays caused by media streaming over a network.
But that’s not even relevant because these have faster read seeking than older drives because sectors are closer together.
So I’m guessing you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
honestly curious, why the hell was this downvoted? I work in this space and I thought this was still the generally accepted advice?
Because everything he said was wrong?
Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.
Mainly because of that. Spinning rust drives are perfect for large media libraries.
There isn’t a hard drive made in the last 15 years that couldn’t handle watching media files. Even the SMR crap the manufacturers introduced a while back could do that without issue. For 4k video you’re going to see average transfer speeds of 50MB/s and peak in the low 100MB/s range, and that’s for high quality videos. Write speed is irrelevant for media consumption, and unless your hard drive is ridiculously fragmented, seek speed is also irrelevant. Even an old 5400 RPM SATA drive is going to be able to handle that load 99.99% of the time. And anything lower than 4K video is a slam dunk.
Everything I just said goes right out the window for a multi-user system that’s streaming multiple media files concurrently, but the vast majority of people never need to worry about that.
Because people are thinking through specific niche use cases coupled with “Well it works for me and I never do anything ‘wrong’”.
I’ll definitely admit that I made the mistake of trying to have a bit of fun when talking about something that triggers the dunning kruger effect. But people SHOULD be aware of how different use patterns impacts performance, how that performance impacts users, and generally how different use patterns impact wear and tear of the drive.
Come on man, everything, and mean everything you said is wrong.
Budget tape backup?
No, you can’t even begin to compare drives to tape. They’re completely different use cases. A hard drive can contain a backup but it’s not physically robust to be unplugged, rotated off site , and put into long term storage like tape. You might as well say a Honda Accord is a budget Semi tractor trailer.
Then you specifically called out personal downloads of anime as a bad use case. That’s absolutely wrong in all cases.
It is absurd to imply that everyone else except for you is less knowledgeable and using a niche case except you.
Do you know about tape backup systems for consumers? From my (brief) search it looks like tape is more economical at the scale used by a data center, but it seems very expensive and more difficult for consumers.
I’m real curious why you say that. I’ve been designing systems with high IOPS data center application requirements for decades so I know enterprise storage pretty well. These drives would cause zero issues for anyone storing and watching their media collection with them.
Oh hey, I did something right. That’s kinda neat
I am troubled in my heart. I would not have been told so in this way.
HDD read rates are way faster than media playback rates, and seek times are just about irrelevant in that use case. Spinning rust is fine for media storage. It’s boot drives, VM/container storage, etc, that you would want to have on an SSD instead of the big HDD.
And oftentimes some or all of the metadata that helps the filesystem find the files on the drive is stored in memory (zfs is famous for its automatic memory caching) so seek times are further irrelevant in the context of media playback
