General > General Technical Chat
modern storage is crazy
james_s:
If drives had gotten more reliable the need for backups is decreased. I don't think drive reliability has changed substantially over the last 30 years or so though. Nothing is ever perfect, backups of critical data are always good to have, although there is a broad range of data that is technically replaceable but inconvenient, so one has to weigh the effort of keeping meticulous backups against the effort of reconstructing if something fails.
amyk:
--- Quote from: tooki on April 29, 2022, 06:10:16 pm ---
--- Quote from: eugene on April 28, 2022, 01:45:23 am ---I suppose the OP is looking for some 4MB memory cards too. :-DD
Just kidding around; I totally get his frustration. Ten years ago I bought a Synology NAS and stuffed two 2TB drives into it (RAID 1.) I thought 2 TB was ridiculous at the time and I was right; the drive is still only half full. The really sad thing is that the drives are 5.25". If one of them fails I'm not sure I could even find a replacement!
--- End quote ---
You definitely did not buy 5.25” hard disk drives for your NAS ten years ago, since they stopped making 5.25” hard disks over 22 years ago (and even then they were extraordinarily rare). Not even old stock, since the last one of those was just 19GB.
--- End quote ---
They made 5.25" disks up to 47GB:
If drive manufacturers were interested in using 5.25" platters again, 47TB would probably fit in that size. The drive above has 14 platters.
Ranayna:
--- Quote from: james_s on April 30, 2022, 12:22:16 am ---If drives had gotten more reliable the need for backups is decreased. [...]
--- End quote ---
The need for backups is only tangentially related to the reliability of drives.
I personally never had a drive fail or other catastrophic hardware failure, but i still lost data :p
There are just too many ways of losing your data besides drive failures, that backup of important data is mandatory.
--- Quote from: amyk on April 30, 2022, 02:24:59 am ---If drive manufacturers were interested in using 5.25" platters again, 47TB would probably fit in that size. The drive above has 14 platters.
--- End quote ---
5 1/4" drives would be slooooooow, compared to 3.5" disks, and spinning rust is already slow compared to SSDs. The seek times would be significantly longer, and also the large platters cannot be driven to the high RPMs of modern disks without starting to wobble.
There is a reason why, back in the day, the highest performance harddisks generally were 2.5". Even many 3.5" harddisks used smaller platters.
DiTBho:
I don't want a fast disk, I want a reliable disk!
mariush:
--- Quote from: DiTBho on April 30, 2022, 11:15:56 am ---I don't want a fast disk, I want a reliable disk!
--- End quote ---
Would you spend $300 on a 7-10 year warranty "enterprise" drive, $200 on a "nas grade" 5 year warranty drive or $150 on a 2-3 year warranty "desktop" grade drive?
That's the problem... people chase the lowest prices.
Personally, I go for "nas grade" drives for longer warranty and don't mind paying 20-50$ over the price of a cheap drive. I recently went and bought a 4TB WD Red Plus drive because I didn't want SMR drive, and those Red Plus are guaranteed to be CMR drives (and most 8 TB and higher are CMR in WD's lineup)
I would rather spend $400 for 2 drives instead of a single enterprise drive, because at least if one drive fails, there's the other as spare until the warranty replaces the drive or I buy another.
The "enterprise" drives may be better or faster, but they still fail, infant mortality, random failures, their MTBF is just a bit better than the other drives MTBF, you're not guaranteed it won't fail.
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