The end of the Hard Disks

[Picuino]

I have read several articles with the same title during the last years, giving the HDD as finished.
For me the HDD will still be indispensable for many years to come as a mass storage medium.

Forbes: Death Of The Hard Disk Could Come Sooner Than We Thought
https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2021/08/03/death-of-the-hard-disk-could-come-sooner-than-we-thought/?sh=6a27ded5146b

TECHTARGET: Hard disk drives to remain dominant storage media in 2022
https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/feature/Hard-disk-drives-to-remain-dominant-storage-media

Edit:Title

[kripton2035]

are you sure ?
samsung already sells 30TB ssd drives, whereas the biggest hard drive I know of it "only" 20TB in size.
ok the 20TB hard drive costs 10x less than the 30TB ssd, but in 5 years at most the ssd price will drop at the same level.
mass storage will come soon to ssd, and hard drives will remain only for their lower price.

[SiliconWizard]

Yeah, the end for personal devices - desktop computers, laptops, etc - sure. It has already happened for the most part.

But SSDs are still way too expensive per storage unit for large capacities, and the need for more storage is going to increase exponentially, at least on servers.

I don't know when the cost of SSDs will plummet enough to be a better alternative. But with the production issues we're currently experiencing in the semiconductor industry, I do not expect that to happen within 5 years. We still don't even know if things are gonna be completely back to "normal" within 5 years - not to mention being able to increase production several fold.

[bd139]

Not so sure about that. We stopped buying non SSD storage off Amazon about 2 years ago. We have no hard disks at all anywhere globally any more.

Think we have 500TB just in one amazon region...

[spostma]

harddisks are irreplaceable for long-term backups!

if you leave a MLC SSD unpowered and uncooled for some years,
you will see massive data corruption.

SSDs need to be powered up regularly, so the firmware can do a background refresh data of flash cells that leak.

[bd139]

Hard disks don't spin up either and have mechanical problems. Tape rollers degrade as well.

Keep your data moving and verified.

[Zenith]

The end of the hard drive is on the way. Who'd want a hard drive in a laptop, where the advantages of an SSD are huge, particularly in terms of robustness?

In desktops, if you are really determined to cheap out, I think there are some HDD only systems, but if you pay a bit more you get an SSD/HDD system with much faster boots and program loads. I can see why the cheap 1TB HDDs sell, but I can't see why 1TB Blacks are still selling, at a price well into SSD territory.

The niche for HDDs is where you want a lot storage and you are not bothered about speed, but cost is important. 4TB USB HDDs used for backups for instance.
Another is for surveillance systems, where speed isn't important, but the limited write life of SSDs is. I can't see SSDs ousting HDDs in those areas any time soon.

[Zenith]

harddisks are irreplaceable for long-term backups!

if you leave a MLC SSD unpowered and uncooled for some years,
you will see massive data corruption.

SSDs need to be powered up regularly, so the firmware can do a background refresh data of flash cells that leak.

The SSD problem gets worse as the TBW increases, and it's much worse with QLC.

You get bit decay in HDDs too, as the magnetisation patterns decay over time. It's as well to do a read/rewrite in place about every year.

[Bud]

HDD storage is provided by the Cloud operators as a service, do not think it is going to go away any time soon.

[xrunner]

All my PCs have been changed over to SSDs. The HDs that were the main drive are now relegated to holding a cloned image of the SSD for backup. But they are not connected at all until needed for a new clone or an emergency restoration.

[bd139]

HDD storage is provided by the Cloud operators as a service, do not think it is going to go away any time soon.

Might be surprised there. If you buy a few million SSDs they get rather cheap. HDDs require more power, more cooling and have lower density too.

Watch this space.

[rfeecs]

Well, there's always magnetic tape.

[bd139]

Rotting spindles and knackered transports. That’s dying too 

Print it out on archive and buy a fire safe 

Incidentally I know someone who works at the national archives here and this is a whole discipline which is really really deep.

[DiTBho]

Well, there's always magnetic tape.

just bought qty=12 DDS2 cartridges, just in case 

[Picuino]

harddisks are irreplaceable for long-term backups!

if you leave a MLC SSD unpowered and uncooled for some years,
you will see massive data corruption.

SSDs need to be powered up regularly, so the firmware can do a background refresh data of flash cells that leak.

And I don't trust cloud services enough to leave my information there. If I were in the management of a company, I would trust them even less.

[jorgeh]

Well, there's always magnetic tape.

just bought qty=12 DDS2 cartridges, just in case 

dds2 ? I would say why??, but probably for a heavy regulated industry.

and I personally do no longer sell any device that uses an HDD as the main drive. notebooks i just install SSD's. but as other said for large storage capacity as an end user I will choose an HDD.

[DiTBho]

The best ever is to have a fiber channel iSCSI engine combined with a ram-disk that exports things to a sATA interface or directly to the PCI.
Basically, you don't have a storage device locally, you just have a super fast optic link and a mechanism that gets and sends disk blocks over the optic fiber channel.

I saw it in an hack-camp meeting, home made with cheap fpga and low spec stuff, so ... relatively slow (25Mbyte/sec read/write), but impressive and I am still shocked for what one could achieve if done with high-spec modern technology (e.g. faster fpga than a poor SP6, 2GBps instead of 40Mbps optic trans-receiver, DDR4@xxxGhz instead of SDRAM@133Mhz, etc)


will it be the future of storage? or just too much cyberpunk? we will see 

[bd139]

All our storage was DAS because redundancy and distribution was at the software level not the hardware 

Latency is important. iSCSI is shit for that. Thus 64TB of DAS enterprise PCI-E SSD per node…

[DiTBho]

dds2 ? I would say why??, but probably for a heavy regulated industry.

They are cheap and funny for my SCSI media-tower, they are also usually good for six years, which is not bad for a temporary backup-media.

[Circlotron]

Print it out on archive and buy a fire safe 

Make sure you use acid free paper!

[DiTBho]

iSCSI is shit for that

yup, iSCSI is problematic when latency matters.

[Zenith]

dds2 ? I would say why??, but probably for a heavy regulated industry.

They are cheap and funny for my SCSI media-tower, they are also usually good for six years, which is not bad for a temporary backup-media.

DDS2 is only 4GB per cartridge, 8GB with usually achievable compression. It's amazing the way the amount of storage available has increased. As I recall they could only manage 4GB an hour.

[Zenith]

Print it out on archive and buy a fire safe 

Make sure you use acid free paper!

Vellum. British Acts of parliament have always been written on vellum because it resists decay.

[bd139]

Print it out on archive and buy a fire safe 

Make sure you use acid free paper!

Vellum. British Acts of parliament have always been written on vellum because it resists decay.

Waste of vellum.

[CatalinaWOW]

I think the tipping point is here.  I was surprised by how fast CRTs disappeared after introduction of LCDs.  Hard drives won't die quite as quickly, but I think if you look around in five years you will find spinning disks only in specialty markets.

[David Hess]

Hard drives still have a place where greater capacity for a given cost is required and lower performance is acceptable.  High capacity SSDs are not only expensive, but have compromised retention and endurance.  MLC is a good compromise on retention and endurance but limits SSD capacity.

The increasing problem with hard drives is that their capacity has increased more than their speed, so rebuild time in RAID has become long enough to compromise RAID reliability.  Managed filesystems like ZFS should improve this situation but are not universally supported.

My PCs boot from HDD RAID which is also used for bulk storage, and SSDs are used for portable storage.  I do *not* use SSDs for scratch space because I found that it was wearing through their endurance too quickly, and that was with better MLC SSDs.

[bd139]

Capacity vs endurance is rarely a problem. How often do you write a whole TB disk?

[David Hess]

Capacity vs endurance is rarely a problem. How often do you write a whole TB disk?

It *was* a problem for me, and that was with better MLC disks than the cutting edge higher capacity devices which have a worse endurance.  Buying larger devices increases the endurance for a given throughput, but costs proportionally more.  I was writing the "whole device" quickly enough to burn through it in a year, versus the 5 year warranty.

[Zenith]

Capacity vs endurance is rarely a problem. How often do you write a whole TB disk?

It depends what you are doing. With normal PC use, it's probably at the most 4TB per powered on year. Even for a rubbishy SSD, that's decades, so wear out is hardly a problem. Video editing does a lot of writing. Regular backups to disk involve a lot of writes. Surveillance involves massive mounts of writes.

[SiliconWizard]

And for "data centers", there is an enormous amount of writes.

[Circlotron]

I think the tipping point is here.  I was surprised by how fast CRTs disappeared after introduction of LCDs.  Hard drives won't die quite as quickly, but I think if you look around in five years you will find spinning disks only in specialty markets.

Let's hope the same mentality that thinks vinyl records are superior to properly done  CDs doesn't prevail here also.

[Halcyon]

harddisks are irreplaceable for long-term backups!

if you leave a MLC SSD unpowered and uncooled for some years,
you will see massive data corruption.

SSDs need to be powered up regularly, so the firmware can do a background refresh data of flash cells that leak.

The SSD problem gets worse as the TBW increases, and it's much worse with QLC.

You get bit decay in HDDs too, as the magnetisation patterns decay over time. It's as well to do a read/rewrite in place about every year.

SSD lifetime for most consumers far exceeds the life of the whole computer. I still have SSDs in use that are about 10 years old and the wear indicator shows minimal wear.

As for hard drives, I've never had to re-write data. I've had data sitting on my old NAS for about 12 years without a problem (ZFS routinely checks for data corruption). I have drives that are over 25 years old that still read perfectly fine.

These issues just don't seem to manifest in normal usage.

[David Hess]

Let's hope the same mentality that thinks vinyl records are superior to properly done  CDs doesn't prevail here also.

Unlike magnetic storage, optical storage did not continue scaling because the diffraction limit for the optics was reached.  Increased density now requires a better numerical aperture or shorter wavelength, and those have already been stretched.  I doubt there will be a generation after Blu-ray.  I wonder what happened to near field recording.  Magneto-optical drives already used tricks like heat assisted recording and scalloped recording and topped out long ago.

Flash has its own scaling limit which has nothing to do with feature size.  The floating gate memory cells eventually lack a long enough retention to be useful.  The smallest logic process with floating gate memory is currently 28 nanometers.  3D Flash made a huge improvement in density.

Hard drives have the paramagnetic limit which has been reached, but there are several options being used to do better so further improvement will happen.

[Zenith]

I think the tipping point is here.  I was surprised by how fast CRTs disappeared after introduction of LCDs.  Hard drives won't die quite as quickly, but I think if you look around in five years you will find spinning disks only in specialty markets.

Let's hope the same mentality that thinks vinyl records are superior to properly done  CDs doesn't prevail here also.

The esoteric audio scene revolves around various things, usually expensive and with no engineering basis, which are supposed to enhance the sound quality by subjective measures. My favourite is "sonically competent mains leads". It's not the same with data storage. HDDs the size of a washing machine, with a 1.25 kW power consumption and a capacity of 500MB are not going to become sought after, because the bits have "almost overpowering presence".

There are rational reasons for continuing to use HDDs in some areas. It's hard to see them being supplanted in surveillance systems for a long time. Maybe within five years, USB external drives for backup will disappear.

Intel's Optane doesn't have the endurance problems of Flash SSDs, but it's very expensive.

[bd139]

I just asked our ops guys what they use in our CCTV box. It’s 4x Crucial MX500 2TB SSDs 

[Mechatrommer]

You can brag about your company hard earn money or for business purpose ssd.. but ssd price is still 5-10x, no.. hdd wont die anytime soon.

[bd139]

They bought them because the 6TB HDD in the box died after 3 months. Not having CCTV coverage was riskier than paying out.

[xrunner]

They bought them because the 6TB HDD in the box died after 3 months. Not having CCTV coverage was riskier than paying out.

Earlier this year I got a new security camera system (old one finally failed). The cams use a wireless link and the main unit has nice big display and has (or shall I say had) a 3 TB HDD for data storage (not to run the system). After I got it running I had to check inside and have a look. The HDD is user replaceable but after I shut it off and touched the HDD it was literally so hot it wasn't fun to handle. After a few weeks the HDD just failed. They sent me another HDD but it got really hot the same. I wondered if the thing would format an SSD (the HDDs use SATA) so I bought one - figured if it didn't work I'd use it in a PC. Well it formatted fine and so far no problems, plus it uses less energy.

[Zenith]

Earlier this year I got a new security camera system (old one finally failed). The cams use a wireless link and the main unit has nice big display and has (or shall I say had) a 3 TB HDD for data storage (not to run the system). After I got it running I had to check inside and have a look. The HDD is user replaceable but after I shut it off and touched the HDD it was literally so hot it wasn't fun to handle. After a few weeks the HDD just failed. They sent me another HDD but it got really hot the same. I wondered if the thing would format an SSD (the HDDs use SATA) so I bought one - figured if it didn't work I'd use it in a PC. Well it formatted fine and so far no problems, plus it uses less energy.

If you have an HDD with a max power dissipation of about 6W getting hot like that, it sounds like bad engineering.

[DiTBho]

DDS2 is only 4GB per cartridge

my DVDRAMs are also 4GB per cartridge, practically 4GB is *the* unit of my backups, more than enough for text, C and vhdl sources 

[xrunner]

Earlier this year I got a new security camera system (old one finally failed). The cams use a wireless link and the main unit has nice big display and has (or shall I say had) a 3 TB HDD for data storage (not to run the system). After I got it running I had to check inside and have a look. The HDD is user replaceable but after I shut it off and touched the HDD it was literally so hot it wasn't fun to handle. After a few weeks the HDD just failed. They sent me another HDD but it got really hot the same. I wondered if the thing would format an SSD (the HDDs use SATA) so I bought one - figured if it didn't work I'd use it in a PC. Well it formatted fine and so far no problems, plus it uses less energy.

If you have an HDD with a max power dissipation of about 6W getting hot like that, it sounds like bad engineering.

Attached is pic of 3TB HDD removed from security cam system. Do you know anything about this brand? I never had any HGST brand before this system.

[bd139]

HGST are Hitachi. They were originally IBM but sold off in 2003 after the whole Deskstar (Deathstar) click of death issues.

No comment on them recently. YMMV as always.

[NiHaoMike]

I don't think it will be long before 2.5" HDDs get completely replaced by SSDs in the market, the cost per TB difference is becoming quite narrow. 3.5" HDDs are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

[tunk]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST
According to Backblaze some of them have a relatively low failure rate:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2022/
And I have 12 HGST Deskstar 6TB NAS (HDN726060ALE614) in a Dell
md1200 running 45k hours without problems.

[bd139]

Backblaze stats don't track MTTF / MTBF properly. There should be a statistical failure distribution for each drive type and they should be comparable.

[madires]

My guess is that SSDs will keep replacing HDDs in many applications. However, in areas where price or write endurance matters HDDs will prevail until SSDs can compete here too.

[Zenith]

Attached is pic of 3TB HDD removed from security cam system. Do you know anything about this brand? I never had any HGST brand before this system.

HGST was IBM's HDD business.  IBM did very well in the early 3.5" 1" high market and then they had two disastrous products, with huge failure rates - Deskstars aka Deathstars. Then they sold the business to Hitachi. It carried on under Hitachi for a few years and then it was sold to Western Digital. It carried on under WD semi autonomously and their products were directed toward the server end of the market.

Last I looked HGST HDDs had the best reliability stats at about 1% annual failure rate, Toshiba were next at about 4%, then came WD and Seagate at much higher rates - around 10% of the top of my head. These were at best crude figures, because the market is very segmented.

[Zenith]

I don't think it will be long before 2.5" HDDs get completely replaced by SSDs in the market, the cost per TB difference is becoming quite narrow. 3.5" HDDs are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

2.5" HDDs are really aimed at the laptop market. The typical laptop drives are 5400rpm (slow) because of the power and heat dissipation requirements, and were designed to take rough treatment, even while running, but that was always going to be a difficult engineering challenge. SSDs are much faster, vastly more robust, and use a bit less power.

I really can't see why the 2.5" HDD market still exists. You can buy a very respectable 1TB 2.5" SATA drive for about £75 and the mechanical 2.5" drive equivalent - inferior in just about every way - starts from about half that much. I suppose some people just have to have the cheapest..

[Mechatrommer]

otoh it is agreed that hdd for OS is extinct, esp the 2.5" laptop.  the price of 120-480GB ssd is bearable and really worth it for OS performance. Anybody who still choose hdd for OS, even for 3.5" PC, albeit they have the full right to do whatever with their own body, have choosen to stay behind in dinasour age and unaware that they are crippling themselves. I was talking data storage 4TB and above for hdd still applicable. 30TB ssd?  You can brag any goodness in it, you cant afford it.

[Zenith]

otoh it is agreed that hdd for OS is extinct, esp the 2.5" laptop.  the price of 120-480GB ssd is bearable and really worth it for OS performance. Anybody who still choose hdd for OS, even for 3.5" PC, albeit they have the full right to do whatever with their own body, have choosen to stay behind in dinasour age and unaware that they are crippling themselves. I was talking data storage 4TB and above for hdd still applicable. 30TB ssd?  You can brag any goodness in it, you cant afford it.

I was just looking at ready made desktop PCs on ebuyer at less than £700. Most have a 256GB or 512GB SSD only. Very few have both SSD and HDD, or just HDD. I'm sure about a year back it was mostly SSD and HDD systems.

Yes, 4TB and over seems like where HDDs are most applicable.

[Mechatrommer]

You dont need extra storage if what you do are only docx, xlsx and some selfie pictures. The os ssd repartitioned will be enough, i have 2 internal extra hdd and 3 external to store videos, photography pictures, offline installers backup etc.. if they all have to be ssd, i'll need sponsorship from your royal majesty..

[bd139]

People do a lot of hoarding. Clean your shit out 

Everything I've ever done in the last 40-odd years and macOS takes up 150GB. That includes photos and videos. Grows by about 5GB a year at the moment and most of that is DSLR shots.

[rob77]

People do a lot of hoarding. Clean your shit out 

Everything I've ever done in the last 40-odd years and macOS takes up 150GB. That includes photos and videos. Grows by about 5GB a year at the moment and most of that is DSLR shots.

depends on the work you do... try to archive few FPGA projects (whole dev enviroment including VM OS image, software, toolchain...etc...to make sure you can restart the project in the future) you hit 150GB quite quickly.

[james_s]

It's all down to cost for me. I still use hard disks in my media server and for backup but I've gone to SSD in all of my modern stuff already. I think it will be a while before SSD is competitive with >4TB drives from a cost standpoint but I do think it will happen sooner or later.

[Zenith]

People do a lot of hoarding. Clean your shit out 

Everything I've ever done in the last 40-odd years and macOS takes up 150GB. That includes photos and videos. Grows by about 5GB a year at the moment and most of that is DSLR shots.

Hoarding is a big problem, but it's in my nature. The photos only amount to maybe 50GB and some of those are duplicates. The films are a big one, plus I have the BBC Complete Works of Shakespeare on DVDs to put on HDD. Then there are the archives of systems long gone I'll probably never want again, (but you never know) which still exist on my HDD.

This system has a 256GB SSD and a 3TB HDD. The SSD has plenty of spare space on it, but the HDD is getting rather cramped. Sorting out this mess might be good for the soul, but it seems easier to just buy more storage. A beautiful 4TB SSD for £350 or a dated, clunky HDD for <£100. Penny pinching (you're a Ferengi and you know about this)  is another weakness, and if I have to cross that bridge, I'll probably cheap out.

[bd139]

Fair points. Another perspective is worth considering. Having dealt with a deceased parent leaving me with a full 4TB NAS, it’s in everyone’s interest to keep it trimmed. I curate my data religiously at this point.

[james_s]

I don't care what happens to my data after I'm gone. Most of my bulk storage is movies and music, that isn't too hard to sort through and it's all on a few 8TB disks on a separate machine. My daily driver laptop has only 1TB and that's enough for all the important stuff.

[David Hess]

People do a lot of hoarding. Clean your shit out 

Everything I've ever done in the last 40-odd years and macOS takes up 150GB. That includes photos and videos. Grows by about 5GB a year at the moment and most of that is DSLR shots.

Just my oscilloscopes directory, without general Tektronix and HP data, is 254GB.

[SiliconWizard]

Yeah. This part of the discussion about needed storage space very much sounds like some "ought to be enough for anybody" mantra.

[Zenith]

Speed and convenience against money, with other considerations thrown in such as reliability and data retention. I think it will be a time before I get rid of my 3 and 4TB USB external drives for backup. The 1TB USB2 external drive is a bit of an embarrassment, but it has backups of the thin clients I was into playing with a couple of years back.

A lot of discussions on this site boil down to money. If no one was allowed to comment unless they had a personal fortune of $500 million, it would be very boring.  "My 8640B has died, the display is playing up, what should I do"? "Either throw it away, or get your chaps to sort it out. They should be able to find one in as new condition for $5,000, and if you are seriously interested in RF sig gens, $30,000 should snag you something better than that in every way. Why are you wasting our time with silly questions?"

[bd139]

People do a lot of hoarding. Clean your shit out 

Everything I've ever done in the last 40-odd years and macOS takes up 150GB. That includes photos and videos. Grows by about 5GB a year at the moment and most of that is DSLR shots.

Just my oscilloscopes directory, without general Tektronix and HP data, is 254GB.

This is hoarding.

Note the NHS article on it. It now includes data 

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/hoarding-disorder/

[eugene]

Yeah. This part of the discussion about needed storage space very much sounds like some "ought to be enough for anybody" mantra.

It would take almost 9000 340kB floppies to store a full length movie in HD. That's 100 disks per minute of video.

[james_s]

This is hoarding.

Note the NHS article on it. It now includes data 

What's wrong with hoarding? Hard disks are dirt cheap and they don't take up much space. Imagine how much history would simply be lost if nobody had the sense to save a hoard of it? I've been saved numerous times by someone who had saved a copy of some obscure old data somewhere. When I think of hoarding, I envision people saving mountains of empty pizza boxes, expired food, or broken deteriorating stuff that they never do anything with yet steadfastly refuse to part with even if there is somebody else who wants to use it or it is objectively trash with no useful value.

[Zenith]

What's wrong with hoarding? Hard disks are dirt cheap and they don't take up much space.

Data is one thing, it doesn't take much space. 1960s oscilloscopes and their plugins and plugins for the mainframes you mean to acquire are quite another. I must have about 20. Then there are the boatanchors, which currently run to about fifteen.

I confess I have a serious junk problem, which can only be solved by buying a bigger house.

In my defence, my grandfather and mother were notorious harbourers of junk/rubbish, so it's obviously genetic and their fault for giving me these genes.

[bd139]

Yeah there as well  .  Some days it all annoys me. Particularly as I'm in the middle of moving house at the moment.

[james_s]

What's wrong with hoarding? Hard disks are dirt cheap and they don't take up much space.

Data is one thing, it doesn't take much space. 1960s oscilloscopes and their plugins and plugins for the mainframes you mean to acquire are quite another. I must have about 20. Then there are the boatanchors, which currently run to about fifteen.

I confess I have a serious junk problem, which can only be solved by buying a bigger house.

In my defence, my grandfather and mother were notorious harbourers of junk/rubbish, so it's obviously genetic and their fault for giving me these genes.

But that's cool stuff, not everyone's cup of tea, but there are plenty of people out there that would appreciate it, and as long as it's stored such that it is protected from deterioration and your house is still livable and sanitary I don't really see the problem. It's different than hoarding piles of newspaper, rotting food, or scores of cats or dogs. The hoarders that bother me the most are the ones that have a whole bunch of good stuff they aren't taking care of and refuse to part with. I've seen multiple cases where some guy had a barn full of nice vintage radios or arcade games or other collectible things just rotting into trash as the building deteriorated. It's such a shame, personally I'd much rather give something to somebody who can enjoy it than just let it rot.

[magic]

They bought them because the 6TB HDD in the box died after 3 months. Not having CCTV coverage was riskier than paying out.

I hope the four SSDs are in RAID1 or at least 1+0, then

When SSDs go, they go all out, not a single bit is left.

[BradC]

I just asked our ops guys what they use in our CCTV box. It’s 4x Crucial MX500 2TB SSDs 

And that's fine for a small recorder. Once you scale it up a bit the argument for SSD is still a harder sell.

[Mechatrommer]

People do a lot of hoarding. Clean your shit out 

Everything I've ever done in the last 40-odd years and macOS takes up 150GB. That includes photos and videos. Grows by about 5GB a year at the moment and most of that is DSLR shots.

Just my oscilloscopes directory, without general Tektronix and HP data, is 254GB.

This is hoarding.

Note the NHS article on it. It now includes data 

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/hoarding-disorder/

do you consider archives in muzeum as hoarding? Saving movies from decades ago to watch again later as hoarding? If yes, then we are fine as hoarder, because government the brilliant minds did it too. But if no, then we are not hoarding for me hoarding is when you keep multiples of the same item (usually non functional) for no particular useful reason other than interest. Sometime we keep few as 'spare' or 'backup', not simply hoarding. And TBytes data inside a disk compartment is not the same as whats piling at the back of you house requiring more and more space.

[mnementh]

   https://xkcd.com/1360/

mnem
"ahem."

[magic]

This is how real men do it.

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[Kjelt]

In the mean time hdd manufacturers have invested in smaller read write head technology and they continue producing larger capacity cmr hdd's also for datacenters.
My new NAS needs about 40+TB of storage to hold my media so I will also buy some probably 16TBs.
Then I also need the old NAS to backup this 40TB so I have to buy 7x16TB hdds = 112TB costing aprox €2200.-
If I would opt for all SSD's also datacenter class it would set me back aprox. €50000.- 
You guys were saying.....

https://tweakers.net/nieuws/199168/western-digital-begint-met-leveren-van-nieuwe-22tb-hdds.html

[mnementh]

People do a lot of hoarding. Clean your shit out 

Everything I've ever done in the last 40-odd years and macOS takes up 150GB. That includes photos and videos. Grows by about 5GB a year at the moment and most of that is DSLR shots.

Just my oscilloscopes directory, without general Tektronix and HP data, is 254GB.

This is hoarding.

Note the NHS article on it. It now includes data 

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/hoarding-disorder/

I have 25 years of eMails on HotMail. A couple times a year I delete all the most prolific advert eMails to keep below the limit; I can't be arsed to actually seek out all the personal mail I actually give a fuck about and make a local copy. Yes, some of those 25-year-old eMails are still important; when I'm feeling nostalgic for friends & family no longer with us, I'll review those footprints left by the ghost in the machine.

To me it's no different than the proverbial footlocker full of old photographs & keepsakes. 

mnem
"Photographs and memories;
Christmas cards you sent to me
All that I have are these,
To remember you..."

[david77]

As many other have stated, I expect the mechanical HDD for storage applictions will be around for some time but for my system drives I wouldn't part with SSD drives, only over my cold dead body.

As it happens I'm in the process of replacing my current (20+ yeas old) home server at the moment. This time I'll put the Linux system on a SSD but the bulk storage will be on 2x 2TB WD HDD again.

[David Hess]

As many other have stated, I expect the mechanical HDD for storage applictions will be around for some time but for my system drives I wouldn't part with SSD drives, only over my cold dead body.

Like I said, I had problems with page, temporary, and work files wearing through SSD endurance too quickly.  The systems I have use something like a 4 drive hardware RAID for their boot, temporary, and work volumes, which in practical tests provides comparable performance to an SSD, and gives the benefit of bulk storage and redundancy.

I may use an SSD for setting up a system or reconfiguring it, or if the workload is not going to result in excessive usage and redundancy is not required.

[Zenith]

Like I said, I had problems with page, temporary, and work files wearing through SSD endurance too quickly.

I use SSDs with a couple of Linux systems - I don't use MS.  A few years back limiting writes and over-provisioning was a big thing, you don't hear so much of it these days, but there are a few things worth doing. One is limiting the amount that Firefox writes to disk to recover your current tabs, if you like the feature, it doesn't have to be done every 15 seconds. Another is the updates don't have to be checked every fifteen minutes. Another is that you don't want a system with heavy memory pressure swapping to an SSD. Enough RAM avoids some of this, and you may be able to put temporary files on a ramdisk.

[David Hess]

Like I said, I had problems with page, temporary, and work files wearing through SSD endurance too quickly.

I use SSDs with a couple of Linux systems - I don't use MS.  A few years back limiting writes and over-provisioning was a big thing, you don't hear so much of it these days, but there are a few things worth doing. One is limiting the amount that Firefox writes to disk to recover your current tabs, if you like the feature, it doesn't have to be done every 15 seconds. Another is the updates don't have to be checked every fifteen minutes. Another is that you don't want a system with heavy memory pressure swapping to an SSD. Enough RAM avoids some of this, and you may be able to put temporary files on a ramdisk.

On the system where I could do it, I added as much RAM as I could.  On my new workstation where I first noticed the problem, I moved my work volume to the RAID.  Before that I went through 9% of the SSD endurance in 1 month.  Now I go through 4% in maybe 6 months, but I could improve that; it has taken this long to get a meaningful measurement.

I have been using Crucial B500, M500, and P5 drives so 3D-TLC with an endurance of 350 to 600 (1) depending on model and size, but arguably sufficient for the cost.  MLC drives have 5 to 10 times better endurance but are hard to find, older, and cost a lot more.  QLC is worse by 3.

The Intel S4510 is an oddball 3D-TLC with 10 times the specified endurance of other 3D TLC drives, so I am not sure what is going on with that.

(1) Ratio of endurance to capacity, so 350 to 600 GB per GB.

[Mechatrommer]

i'm not sure whats the endurance figure is that about? but you people seem to worry too much about ssd endurance? i have ssd (os) that work for years with everyday browsers do the caching things, mere 8GB RAM etc. once i've backup my windows installation into hdd using backup tool, i dont have to worry anymore. if ssd fails, i'll buy another ssd and restore the backup, but so far i've not encounter such situation.

[Zenith]

For most people SSD endurance doesn't matter. Even a cheap SSD, without DRAM cache and with QLC, is going to become obsolete and there'll be cheaper, better replacements, long before the TBW limit is reached. How much use is a 64GB SSD these days? Some of this is a hangover from the days when SSDs were small and expensive.

For some situations and some applications, it does matter.

[Halcyon]

For most people SSD endurance doesn't matter. Even a cheap SSD, without DRAM cache and with QLC, is going to become obsolete and there'll be cheaper, better replacements, long before the TBW limit is reached. How much use is a 64GB SSD these days? Some of this is a hangover from the days when SSDs were small and expensive.

For some situations and some applications, it does matter.

Exactly, I have an old 160 GB Intel X25-M SSD in one of my machines with over 40 TB written. According to Intel's own data, this equates to only 7% wear. That SSD is approaching 14 years old now and was used in an everyday desktop PC (now I only use it from time to time when I need to run legacy software). There is plenty of life left in these old SSDs, unless you are an extremely heavy user that's constantly writing a lot of data to them.

[Kjelt]

I have got a 480GB Samsung DC SSD now for over eight years used for downloading and parring and unrarring usenet files.
I can not read the TBW since it is a pro drive but my estimate would be around a thousand TB.
The thing still works, data I write to it is compared 100% with the original with bcompare AFAICT BUT it toggles bits sometimes. So it is now completely unreliable.
I see this during the parring phase, it completes the build then tries to unrar and poof fails. Running the par sw again it reveals suddenly again damaged blocks. Really weird but replacing the ssd witha new one it was fixed.
So becarefull with old highly used ssd's. It is not always obvious they are dying and it would wreck havoc on your binaries.

[tooki]

I think the tipping point is here.  I was surprised by how fast CRTs disappeared after introduction of LCDs.  Hard drives won't die quite as quickly, but I think if you look around in five years you will find spinning disks only in specialty markets.

Except that the CRT to LCD transition wasn’t all that quick. It happened over the course of about 20 years. Much like SSDs, it happened first in portable computers, then high end desktops, then mainstream. It took a long time for LCDs to become a) good enough and b) cheap enough to displace CRTs.

[Mechatrommer]

CRT to LCD was a quick change for me. much much earlier than the ssd existence in our market... weight and size of CRT was the big issue, price iirc was comparable so it was a no brainer for me, except in the beginning, my biggest issue with LCD was with a slight change of viewing angle, the color can change visually, i am sensitive to this (beside dead pixels) as photo editing is my trade, but those issues are long gone with latest LCD tech.

[Zenith]

It's hard to say how long these transitions take. I'm sure I saw the first LCD displays on laptops in the early 80s. Around 1990 I saw a colour LCD screen on a LAN analyser. Subjectively, for the mainstream, they came in in the late 90s, but I never thought they were worth buying. As I recall transition to the point where LCD displays really were worth having and CRT displays disappeared, was around 2006.

Apparently SSDs have been around since 1991. They were probably very expensive and only suited to a few niche markets. Just as a casual recollection, the mainstream computer suppliers started to stock SSDs about 12 years ago.

[free_electron]

i don't see spinning rust disappear any time soon.
last time i went on vacation my laptop needed a spinning drive.. (two actually) simply to keep a backup of the memory cards in my cameras.
i uses 256G memory cards to shoot video and pictures. they fill up fast . making a backup is necessary. a 4 terabyte ssd is very expensive. a 5 terabyte usb hdd is 50$ ...

[Mechatrommer]

if i dont be careful with selfie videos, things can get out of hand in a matter of days. that earlier meme will apply pretty quickly.

[tooki]

CRT to LCD was a quick change for me. much much earlier than the ssd existence in our market...

The switch to SSDs came much later in every market.

weight and size of CRT was the big issue, price iirc was comparable so it was a no brainer for me, except in the beginning

There was only a short period of time where the prices were comparable: for the longest time, CRTs were significantly cheaper. For any given size of display, once LCDs became comparable in cost and image quality, CRTs vanished fairly quickly. This happened progressively across display sizes, because the biggest LCDs have always been disproportionately expensive compared to smaller ones.

But until that very brief period where LCDs and CRTs of a given size coexisted at similar cost, the LCD was invariably significantly more expensive. The first desktop LCD with a modern widescreen resolution was the 1998 Silicon Graphics 1600SW (1600x1024px, 17.3”) at $2500 (over $4500 today). At the time, a top-quality 17” (4:3) CRT cost $500, and a top-quality 21” CRT could be had for $1300. The same $1300 also got you a 15” 1024x768 LCD that was inferior to the 17” CRT in every way possible other than thickness and weight.

[Kjelt]

Still some gamers still prefer a HD Sony trinitron above any flatscreen.
Prices of those sky rocketed out of proportion.

[james_s]

Still some gamers still prefer a HD Sony trinitron above any flatscreen.
Prices of those sky rocketed out of proportion.

I still have one of those, it's a great monitor but I replaced it in regular use with a LCD years ago. Maybe I should try to sell it again since it's just taking up space, it would be a nightmare to try to ship it anywhere though.

[Zenith]

I bought a secondhand IIyama 21" CRT monitor in 2004. I didn't rate any of the remotely affordable LCD monitors then. When it died a couple of years later, the market had changed and there may not have been any CRT monitors around.  It certainly made sense to buy an LCD monitor then. I don't recall CRT monitors even survived in niche markets much.

Those old 21" CRT monitors were huge, and took a lot of desk space.

[Mechatrommer]

I bought a secondhand IIyama 21" CRT monitor in 2004.

i think i switched during this time as well but i dont think i've ever spent more than $600 on 24"++ LCD...

But until that very brief period where LCDs and CRTs of a given size coexisted at similar cost, the LCD was invariably significantly more expensive. The first desktop LCD with a modern widescreen resolution was the 1998 Silicon Graphics 1600SW (1600x1024px, 17.3”) at $2500 (over $4500 today). At the time, a top-quality 17” (4:3) CRT cost $500, and a top-quality 21” CRT could be had for $1300. The same $1300 also got you a 15” 1024x768 LCD that was inferior to the 17” CRT in every way possible other than thickness and weight.

so thats probably a 6 years timespan into the demise of CRT. i didnt quickly made the upgrade since i was satisfied with my 17 (or 19?) inch CRT, until it started playing up. my first ssd is like 10 years ago, price gap maybe closing in but data retention for ssd storage/backup purpose is still questionable, 1 year retention is quite a pathetic figure.

[tooki]

I bought a secondhand IIyama 21" CRT monitor in 2004. I didn't rate any of the remotely affordable LCD monitors then. When it died a couple of years later, the market had changed and there may not have been any CRT monitors around.  It certainly made sense to buy an LCD monitor then. I don't recall CRT monitors even survived in niche markets much.

Those old 21" CRT monitors were huge, and took a lot of desk space.

At the first computer store I ever worked at (in early 1999), my boss had the 24" Sony widescreen CRT (GDM-FW900). Now THAT was a beast! But honestly, while the color quality of those Trinitrons is great, the edge-to-edge sharpness and geometry struggled with that aspect ratio in the flat-CRT construction. The short neck doesn't help (but was necessary to make it fit on a halfway ordinary desk).

[free_electron]

Those old 21" CRT monitors were huge, and took a lot of desk space.

And heavy ! i had a nokia 445X  that thing could run 1600x1200

https://www.ebay.com/itm/125353103895?hash=item1d2fa09217:g:qswAAOSwt1Rim~7U

i used a number-nine systems video card GX64 pro. with the 4Meg VRAM. i could run Windows 3.1 in 1600x1200 and autotrax using the VESA driver at high resolution. that was great for PCB design. everyone else was cramped at 640x480 or 800x600 ...

[Mechatrommer]

and very difficult to carry around on its center of gravity, thats why my transition was quick, i was afraid to lose a backbone.

[tooki]

But until that very brief period where LCDs and CRTs of a given size coexisted at similar cost, the LCD was invariably significantly more expensive. The first desktop LCD with a modern widescreen resolution was the 1998 Silicon Graphics 1600SW (1600x1024px, 17.3”) at $2500 (over $4500 today). At the time, a top-quality 17” (4:3) CRT cost $500, and a top-quality 21” CRT could be had for $1300. The same $1300 also got you a 15” 1024x768 LCD that was inferior to the 17” CRT in every way possible other than thickness and weight.

so thats probably a 6 years timespan into the demise of CRT. i didnt quickly made the upgrade since i was satisfied with my 17 (or 19?) inch CRT, until it started playing up. my first ssd is like 10 years ago, price gap maybe closing in but data retention for ssd storage/backup purpose is still questionable, 1 year retention is quite a pathetic figure.

Yeah. I mean, 2002 is when Apple switched the iMac to LCD, but they were on the early side. 2005 is when I got my first desktop LCD, a Dell 2405FPW, a lovely 24" LCD (which I still own and occasionally use as an extra display) that was exceptionally well-priced for the time.

I know Apple introduced its first (optional) SSD in 2008, in the original MacBook Air, because I was working for Apple at the time and actually staffed the Apple booth at the Macworld Expo where the Air was introduced. IIRC it cost $1000 extra to upgrade the 120GB HDD to the 64GB SSD when custom ordering. Very, very nice product at the time. (Incidentally, the original MB Air used a 1.8" hard disk, like the iPods, because even the thinnest 2.5" HDDs were too big!) Just two and a half years later, SSD became standard in the MacBook Air.

My first SSD was a 256GB upgrade installed into my MacBook to replace the hard disk, followed shortly by a 512GB one installed into my Mac Pro (tower). The only hard disks I've bought since then are multi-terabyte units strictly for backups.

[tooki]

and very difficult to carry around on its center of gravity, thats why my transition was quick, i was afraid to lose a backbone.

Yep! When I worked as a computer tech full-time in 1999 and 2001/02 (and sporadically through 2008), most of my clients were in the graphic arts, so many had 21" CRTs. Whenever possible we'd move those with two people.

Any time you carry a CRT on your own, though, it's imperative to have the screen facing you, so you can lean it onto your chest for stability. Makes it far easier to carry than any other orientation.

[CatalinaWOW]

When the first flat screens came out in the 90s the thinness advantage was obvious, but pundits predicted CRTs would be around for a long time because of the fully capitalized manufacturing base and the associated economies of scale.  But as sales volume for LCDs grew that economy of scale equation started tipping.  Things like shipping cost and warehousing volume requirements started really hurting CRTs.  All the same kind of things are in play with SSDs.  The speed advantage in desktop and laptop applications is obvious.  Prices are converging.  If you strongly prefer spinning rust, buy it soon.  A decade from now (and maybe much sooner) it will be like analog oscilloscopes, a fond memory and a collectors item.

[james_s]

I have no particular attachment to "spinning rust", what I do like is rock bottom cost per TB and large multi-TB drives. When the cost per TB for SSD drops below that of mechanical drives, I'll switch to SSD for my bulk storage and backup needs.

[SiliconWizard]

I have no particular attachment to "spinning rust", what I do like is rock bottom cost per TB and large multi-TB drives. When the cost per TB for SSD drops below that of mechanical drives, I'll switch to SSD for my bulk storage and backup needs.

Which is again going to take a... while.

[Mechatrommer]

well like others said, magnetic tapes still exist, even if its only for niche market, i believe we still can get them if we need to...

[nightfire]

My take on that, as a sysadmin in a small privately owned company:

For normal computers, there is usually no reason NOT to have an SSD as a boot drive and for ordinary operations.
Especially recent notebook systems also profit from lower latencies of the M.2 PCIe based SSDs over SATA systems.

But in the Server section it is different. Here, especially for backup, HDDs still have a very valid place, due to:
- price per GB
- robustness in a power-off state

Even if a HDD would not spin up after a few years of non-powered storage, some data reconstruction lab like ontrak should be able to get to the data, with  the flash chips of a SSD i am not hat sure.
Also some big storage systems alleviate the disadvantages of HDDs with big controllers and caches, so available tech can still be used in a good manner, as long as the admins know their limits.

[CatalinaWOW]

I agree.  Right now lowest cost for large capacities come in disk drives.  And arguably reliability is higher.  But those who keep pointing this out are much like those who pointed out correctly that 24 inch CRTs were superior to the 14 inch and 17 inch LCD monitors which were the first affordable flat screens.  The comparably sized LCD screens were at first just not available and then higher cost.  But the time it took to flip those statistics was stunningly short.  I thought at the time it would be a decade.  It was more like two years. 

I suspect many will be surprised by how fast SSD takes over.  I am not ready to predict two years, but I wouldn't put money down against it.  And I would put money on it being less than a decade.  Once it happens those who want hard drives for whatever reason will be like the current folks who want Trinitron monitors.  Their reasons might well be valid, but they are searching in specialty markets and paying very high prices.

[NiHaoMike]

a 5 terabyte usb hdd is 50$ ...

Where did you get that good deal? PC Part Picker lists $95 for the cheapest 6TB drive. (There are no cheap 5TB drives listed.)

[Kjelt]

I'll switch to SSD for my bulk storage and backup needs.

As you could have read in other topics you do realize that the ssd needs to be powered on regularly in order to guarantee data integrity ?
So IMO not really suitable for long time storage as backup medium.

[Halcyon]

The best backup strategy is to backup often and keep data "moving". That means testing relatively frequently, re-writing old volumes, and migrating from media that is getting old.

You shouldn't back up your old files once and hope that they are still readable in 10 years time if you need to rely on the backup. With tape backup, you erases and re-wrote tapes quite regularly.

[Zenith]

well like others said, magnetic tapes still exist, even if its only for niche market, i believe we still can get them if we need to...

At one time tape around the early 90s, magnetic tape became an option in the consumer market, but HDD sizes rapidly overtook the capacity of affordable tape backup. It exists now as a professional backup medium where it has several advantages, such as being suitable for offsite storage, where it's hard to see HDDs or SSDs displacing it. For most of us, USB external HDDs are a very practical means of backup. I don't see that changing quickly.

In some niche markets such as telecomms, 1/2" tape survived years after it had died out everywhere else. They really couldn't cope with rapid change, and they were prepared to pay to have new 1/2" tape drives made in small volumes.

[Zenith]

The best backup strategy is to backup often and keep data "moving". That means testing relatively frequently, re-writing old volumes, and migrating from media that is getting old.

You shouldn't back up your old files once and hope that they are still readable in 10 years time if you need to rely on the backup. With tape backup, you erases and re-wrote tapes quite regularly.

Yes, there'd be a procedure of full backups, with partial backups in between, and there'd possibly be offsite storage as part of it. There'd almost certainly be a fireproof safe for the tapes. Most of the tapes would be reused fairly often. You might even be doing striped backups across more than one tape drive. All of this would need thought through procedures which were followed. It would depend on the data loss risk you were guarding against. For most of us, if the house burned down we'd have other worries than whether we had an off-site backup of our computer files, but a company would have to be able to cope with a fire.

Another risk was having a write-only tape drive.

[free_electron]

a 5 terabyte usb hdd is 50$ ...

Where did you get that good deal? PC Part Picker lists $95 for the cheapest 6TB drive. (There are no cheap 5TB drives listed.)

Western digital 5Tb USB enclosure. they come in yellow/red/orange/blue/black enclosures. They were 50$ on an amazon deal a couple of years ago when WD changed the cases to new style. I got one in every color. There is no adapter/converter inside ! so it is not a SATa with a sata<>usb bridge. The drive board has a usb connector. They are slow (5400rpm) but perfect for backup of photo/video footage.
I take video underwater and a 128Gig microsd fills quickly when you shoot in 4k. Came back from last vacation with 3+TB footage. a 4TB ssd costs an arm and a leg...

[free_electron]

for backup
- one copy is no copy
- two copies is half a copy
- three copies is still not a backup

Have two copies (besides the original) on different machines , preferably in different locations. It's not just the storage medium , it's also how to access the medium. I have it on tape ... anyone has a 9600bpi drive ? you think i am joking ? i have it backed up on (re)writable cd/dvd ... how many computers still have an optical drive ? i have it on usb stick... where the is that damn adapter to go from old usb to usb-c.
I have it on a nas... what if the motherboard in the nas dies ? are you sure that nas with that firmware will still be around ? are you certain you can access that drive from a regular computer ? oh, but it is using ext-3 (or whatever filesystem) ... yeah , in just a "slightly" modified version... and if they encrypted the drive and the motherboard died .. kiss the encryption key goodbye as it was stored in the TPM of that motherboard.

[Mechatrommer]

how many computers still have an optical drive ?

at least there are 3 here..

[CatalinaWOW]

Having an optical drive is only half the answer.  I was recently going through backups, recovering photographs from the early 2000s stored on DVD+R disks.  Reads were slow and about half of the DVDs were partially or totally unreadable.  I was about to write them off to corrosion or one of the other failure mechanisms these media have but on a lark decided to spend $35 on a new SATA optical drive.  Suddenly all the data was accessible.  At least long enough to move it to a more current media.  It turns out that both of the DVD readers in the machine dedicated to this purpose had degraded. 

I have kept a variety of storage devices, just in case.  I have several flavors of 5.25 inch floppies, a couple of 3.5 inch floppies, a couple of ZIP drives and a stack other things.  But if I was really serious about being able to use them I would have to perform active maintenance.  I don't care that much about data that old.

[james_s]

I'll switch to SSD for my bulk storage and backup needs.

As you could have read in other topics you do realize that the ssd needs to be powered on regularly in order to guarantee data integrity ?
So IMO not really suitable for long time storage as backup medium.

In my case my largest backup needs are not long term cold storage, the backup drives are powered up regularly and the backup is updated. I have not personally had any issues with data loss due to SSDs not being powered for extended periods but I suppose it's something to consider if I were going to archive something and not touch it for a long time.

[TimFox]

Having an optical drive is only half the answer.  I was recently going through backups, recovering photographs from the early 2000s stored on DVD+R disks.  Reads were slow and about half of the DVDs were partially or totally unreadable.  I was about to write them off to corrosion or one of the other failure mechanisms these media have but on a lark decided to spend $35 on a new SATA optical drive.  Suddenly all the data was accessible.  At least long enough to move it to a more current media.  It turns out that both of the DVD readers in the machine dedicated to this purpose had degraded. 

I have kept a variety of storage devices, just in case.  I have several flavors of 5.25 inch floppies, a couple of 3.5 inch floppies, a couple of ZIP drives and a stack other things.  But if I was really serious about being able to use them I would have to perform active maintenance.  I don't care that much about data that old.

I assume the problem with your old optical drives is degradation of the laser--how old were they?

[free_electron]

how many computers still have an optical drive ?

at least there are 3 here..

yes, old ones you bought 5 year ago. Go to a store and try to find a laptop with an optical drive. If you need a mac : good luck ..
As for dvd drives : if you never use them the lenses collect dust and a kind of haze develops over it. most lenses are polycarbonate.

I ditched all that stuff. floppies, optical disks , usb sticks...

Two nas boxes that mirror each other , in different geographical locations, unencrypted drives , standard EXT-2 format ,  clone in the nas + clone between nas) and an encrypted backup subset stored at a cloud provider.
cloning is not automatic. we don't want a good file to be overwritten by a corrupted newer version of the file. I use a tool called ViceVersa and keep multiple versions (similar to apple timemachine. Viceversa has very fine control of the archiving options).

Verified i can pull a drive, hook it to a computer esata (or usb<>sata) port and access it without problems. No jbod or raid , that too is nothing but trouble in case of a disaster. Often you need the exact raid controller to be able to rebuild. Fat good that stack of drives does you if the disk structure is unreadable due to controller differences.

[james_s]

yes, old ones you bought 5 year ago. Go to a store and try to find a laptop with an optical drive. If you need a mac : good luck ..
As for dvd drives : if you never use them the lenses collect dust and a kind of haze develops over it. most lenses are polycarbonate.

The drives aren't built in anymore but they're still around and they are readily available. My laptop doesn't have a built in optical drive but an external one was one of the first accessories I bought for it. You may not use them but they are still widely used, most people I know own at least one. I use mine regularly, and I use USB keys often.

[SiliconWizard]

The best backup strategy is to backup often and keep data "moving". That means testing relatively frequently, re-writing old volumes, and migrating from media that is getting old.

You shouldn't back up your old files once and hope that they are still readable in 10 years time if you need to rely on the backup. With tape backup, you erases and re-wrote tapes quite regularly.

I agree with that. The best long-term strategy for data retention is... replication. (I know I already said that, but that's incidentally how life works.)
Which is a more workable scheme if the storage media are cheap.

[tooki]

yes, old ones you bought 5 year ago. Go to a store and try to find a laptop with an optical drive. If you need a mac : good luck ..

Good luck finding a Windows laptop with an optical drive, either. It doesn’t matter though: whether Mac, Windows, or Linux, just get a $40 external DVD-RW drive that plugs in with USB.

[Mechatrommer]

how many computers still have an optical drive ?

at least there are 3 here..

yes, old ones you bought 5 year ago.

wrong! 10+ years ago.

Go to a store and try to find a laptop with an optical drive. If you need a mac : good luck ..

laptop (for work) is only for new kids on the block. they are only for presentation (connecting to projector) or if i have to go outstation for weeks or months.

As for dvd drives : if you never use them the lenses collect dust and a kind of haze develops over it. most lenses are polycarbonate.

thats why the 3 machines i disconnect the power and sata cables to save the laser diode's useful life. only to connect them when i have cd/dvd to read/write. i have more damaged dvd drive that i learnt the fact the hardway from. the reason i keep and try to save them as long as i can is because i still have bunches of cd/dvd around, and full boxes of empty dvdr.

The drives aren't built in anymore but they're still around and they are readily available. My laptop doesn't have a built in optical drive but an external one was one of the first accessories I bought for it. You may not use them but they are still widely used, most people I know own at least one. I use mine regularly, and I use USB keys often.

ditto.. i have one for the wifey's laptop. i dont use it anymore as we can transfer data or install OS from USB stick nowadays.

[free_electron]

yes, old ones you bought 5 year ago. Go to a store and try to find a laptop with an optical drive. If you need a mac : good luck ..

Good luck finding a Windows laptop with an optical drive, either. It doesn’t matter though: whether Mac, Windows, or Linux, just get a $40 external DVD-RW drive that plugs in with USB.

one more thing to carry, can't find when needed , broken when needed ... and how much longer will that be around ? who still buys recordable disks ? the storage capacity is too small these days. blu ray writer, maybe ..
But the quality of the optical media has gone to snot... i have Startrax CD . double speed, written on an original Kodak CD writer (external ,big machine on a SCIS card ) size of a VCR . They are still perfectly readable. They are the solid gold disks (no organic layer )
The stuff they sell now ? leave it on your desk in the sun for a week and it's a coaster ...

[free_electron]

laptop (for work) is only for new kids on the block. they are only for presentation (connecting to projector) or if i have to go outstation for weeks or months.

i don't have desktops anymore. I Buy used z-books. True mobile workstations. Shove em in a dock and done. if i need to relocate : grab the machine and go.

The drives aren't built in anymore but they're still around and they are readily available. My laptop doesn't have a built in optical drive but an external one was one of the first accessories I bought for it. You may not use them but they are still widely used, most people I know own at least one. I use mine regularly, and I use USB keys often.

i have not loaded a cd or dvd or bluray in at least 5 years. i tossed them all out . movies are streaming only ( i don't really buy movies. stream when it is included in prime or netflix. i only own a few like the back to the future trilogy ). Software is download only these days and has been for a long time. the rest are old files that i moved off optical and into the nas.
I have not seen an optical disk in years. I keep a few like OS installation disks if needed for some test equipment like logic analysers. once the OS is running on those : network and pull the rest off the nas. i don;t have any machines that cannot network. i have one older scope that uses a floppy drive but i never save there anyway.

usb keys ... i've lost so many , stepped on em , crushed them ... They are always crappy construction. The little eyelets break. They seem to be designed in such a way that you will lose them. I had one that was shaped like a steel house key. Put on your keyring . Worked great ! . Till one day it stopped working .. nothing .. i look in the connector end : the guts had fallen out. the usb drive was a plastic block that was inserted through the usb opening. only the outer shell was there. contacts , circuit board and chips  were gone..

drop the file(s) on a shared public thing like dropbox or google drive and move on. Not only that but usb sticks these days can be infected with bootloaders and other nasties , or be fake and designed to fry the computer.
At least iwth shared folders you can write-protect those.

[Mechatrommer]

I saved all sw installers in ext hdd so i can do complete os+sw's installation offline independent of anything.. and because i maintain few pc's, even friends' that ask for help. if you like me you'll know online sw installation is a hassle esp if many of them. And i dont use any usb key, never! i use patch.exe 

[Haenk]

It turns out that both of the DVD readers in the machine dedicated to this purpose had degraded. 

Unlikely.
However the venting fans of the case often pull (unfiltered) air through the drives, leaving dust and whatever on the lenses, leading to the mentioned read errors.

[tooki]

usb keys ... i've lost so many , stepped on em , crushed them ... They are always crappy construction. The little eyelets break. They seem to be designed in such a way that you will lose them. I had one that was shaped like a steel house key. Put on your keyring . Worked great ! . Till one day it stopped working .. nothing .. i look in the connector end : the guts had fallen out. the usb drive was a plastic block that was inserted through the usb opening. only the outer shell was there. contacts , circuit board and chips  were gone..

During my stint as a computer technician, I learned something about users: they tend to fall into one of two groups, those who are really gentle on their gadgets, and those who are really hard on them. Sounds to me like you fall more into the latter group!

(I’m more in the first group, and I’ve never had a flash drive get lost, fail or break.)

Also, this is part of why broadcast video gear is so expensive: it’s all built to handle the latter group’s style of handling without failing. :p

[tooki]

one more thing to carry, can't find when needed , broken when needed ... and how much longer will that be around ?

Given that USB floppy drives are still available, LONG after becoming obsolete, I expect that USB optical drives will be available for quite some time yet. It’s likely that they’ll stop making DVD drives (much the way we don’t make CD-only data drives any more), so probably they’ll just be $50 blu-ray drives with DVD and CD backward-compatibility.

I prefer the external drives: why schlep an internal drive with me everywhere for the 1 time in two years I might need it? It’s added weight, and would represent the only mechanical component in the machine other than the CPU fan.

[tooki]

thats why the 3 machines i disconnect the power and sata cables to save the laser diode's useful life. only to connect them when i have cd/dvd to read/write. i have more damaged dvd drive that i learnt the fact the hardway from. the reason i keep and try to save them as long as i can is because i still have bunches of cd/dvd around, and full boxes of empty dvdr.

That makes literally no sense. The laser isn’t sitting there turned on all day long: it turns on when closing the drive tray triggers it to check for a disc. And in fact, it’s not one laser: in a DVD drive, there is one IR laser for reading/burning CDs, and a red one for DVDs. (In a blu-ray drive, there’s a third blue laser.) Only one laser is ever on at one time, and it’s off when idle.

As haenk said, a far more likely explanation for drive degradation is dust ingestion, which is not related to whether it’s powered up. An external drive won’t suffer that problem.

[free_electron]

one more thing to carry, can't find when needed , broken when needed ... and how much longer will that be around ?

Given that USB floppy drives are still available, LONG after becoming obsolete, I expect that USB optical drives will be available for quite some time yet. It’s likely that they’ll stop making DVD drives (much the way we don’t make CD-only data drives any more), so probably they’ll just be $50 blu-ray drives with DVD and CD backward-compatibility.

I prefer the external drives: why schlep an internal drive with me everywhere for the 1 time in two years I might need it? It’s added weight, and would represent the only mechanical component in the machine other than the CPU fan.

when's the last time you actually used an optical disc ? a dvd can hold barely 5Gbyte. a CD 0.6. That tiny micro-sd card can hold 50x more. ( or even much more these days)

I think the optical drives will disappear soon.  (apart from blu-ray players maybe)
The recordable cd / dvd is a medium without use in computers"
- A modern Os installer doesn't even fit on a DVD anymore
- writing is slow, even with fast drives
- easily damaged
- degrades in sunlight (you can't leave it on your desk)
- large
- little storage space for what it is
- risk of making coasters.

in the year 2000 you could walk into a compusa and there were whole rows of shelves with 50 or more different writers and drives. now ? go to a computer store and they have .. one model
I bought the HP-100 dvd-rw drive when it first came out and had the free upgrade to the 200 model when they discovered it could not be upgraded to do +rw

The only reason i keep one around (not even a blu-ray , just a simple cd/dvd writer) is so i can burn recovery images for some test equipment that does not have usb ports. and it sits in a n old computer running windows xp that drives dome other archaic stuff.

[free_electron]

During my stint as a computer technician, I learned something about users: they tend to fall into one of two groups, those who are really gentle on their gadgets, and those who are really hard on them. Sounds to me like you fall more into the latter group!

i'm typically in the middle. a usb stick is hanging of my keychain with my carkeys
reasons i've lost some
- the little cord snaps
- the key case is made from plastic and the attachment point for the cord is very weak (i'm looking at you HP and PNY and Lexar...)
- the entire drive falls out of the swivel cover
especially this kind of drive :
- many of the "key" style drives have the usb contacts exposed. i've had two die , probably because of ESD. i've had one fry a usb port because it made a big short when inserted. the computer actually rebooted.
these :
- i had a kingston Datatraveler. last time i neede it the guts were left behind in the last machine i plugged it in. all that was remaining was the empty shell ...

- and lets not forget the style where the cord attaches to .. the cap... so all that remains is the cap dangling from the keychain... the drive is gone.

other irritations:
- you lose the little endcap
- it has a usb-c when you need a usb-b or micro usb (for phone) or lightning and vice versa (no i don not want to carry an adapter. it's another thing to lose)
- some are wider than a usb to usb spacing so they interfere with adjacent ports.

i now use the samsung "bar" style. those have a solid metal construction with an eyelet that will not break and you can put an actual metal split ring through it so the damn thing stays put on my keychain. so far the guts have not fallen out.

[Mechatrommer]

That makes literally no sense. The laser isn’t sitting there turned on all day long: it turns on when closing the drive tray triggers it to check for a disc. And in fact, it’s not one laser: in a DVD drive, there is one IR laser for reading/burning CDs, and a red one for DVDs. (In a blu-ray drive, there’s a third blue laser.) Only one laser is ever on at one time, and it’s off when idle.

the drive is cranking every boot time remember?

As haenk said, a far more likely explanation for drive degradation is dust ingestion, which is not related to whether it’s powered up. An external drive won’t suffer that problem.

as i said i have more broken dvd drive here. when tried to repair, no dust inside, they turned on as usual, but cannot read any data. if its just a matter of dust or hazy glass, i should be able to fix them easily. my guess is those drives they sell are consumer grade and they doom to fail within 5 years of usage (turned on with PC even 99% idle)

[james_s]

when's the last time you actually used an optical disc ? a dvd can hold barely 5Gbyte. a CD 0.6. That tiny micro-sd card can hold 50x more. ( or even much more these days)

A few days ago, I backed up some of my project files on a CD. I burn CDs to play in one of my cars that has a CD player, modern head units look silly in 40+ year old cars. I make boot CDs to install Linux distros and as rescue discs. A huge majority of my hardware and software projects (KiCAD, FPGA, Python, C) can fit on a CD, a single DVD can back up almost all of the critical stuff I care about and I end up with multiple copies archived. The really big stuff like my media collection gets backed up on hard drives but most of that is replaceable. Optical drives will go away eventually but lots of people still use them, even if you don't.

[Zenith]

when's the last time you actually used an optical disc ? a dvd can hold barely 5Gbyte. a CD 0.6. That tiny micro-sd card can hold 50x more. ( or even much more these days)

A few days ago, I backed up some of my project files on a CD. I burn CDs to play in one of my cars that has a CD player, modern head units look silly in 40+ year old cars. I make boot CDs to install Linux distros and as rescue discs. A huge majority of my hardware and software projects (KiCAD, FPGA, Python, C) can fit on a CD, a single DVD can back up almost all of the critical stuff I care about and I end up with multiple copies archived. The really big stuff like my media collection gets backed up on hard drives but most of that is replaceable. Optical drives will go away eventually but lots of people still use them, even if you don't.

There's a lot of material available on optical discs, films and music. Some of it's very cheap second hand. If you have a PC you use for entertainment, a DVD drive is pretty much essential.

[Mechatrommer]

I think the optical drives will disappear soon.  (apart from blu-ray players maybe)
The recordable cd / dvd is a medium without use in computers"
- A modern Os installer doesn't even fit on a DVD anymore
- writing is slow, even with fast drives
- easily damaged
- degrades in sunlight (you can't leave it on your desk)
- large
- little storage space for what it is
- risk of making coasters.

cd/dvdr data retention is 20-30 years (100 years life expectancy), hdd is 5-10 years, ssd is 0.25-1 year atm... if dvdr drive is gone, that archival capability will be missed. currently double layer dvdr is 8.5GB the last time i checked. btw archiving job is not for the "latter" type of guy who toss around their dvds or put them under the sun.

[james_s]

There's a lot of material available on optical discs, films and music. Some of it's very cheap second hand. If you have a PC you use for entertainment, a DVD drive is pretty much essential.

I still typically buy music on CDs, then I immediately rip them onto my streaming server and pack the original CD away. I like having a physical copy of the media I buy.

[tooki]

when's the last time you actually used an optical disc ? a dvd can hold barely 5Gbyte. a CD 0.6. That tiny micro-sd card can hold 50x more. ( or even much more these days)

It’s been years since I wrote a data disc — but then again, I almost never did that even back in the day. (Back then, Mac users were much more likely than PC users to use external hard disks, thanks to high-speed external interfaces, namely SCSI and then FireWire. So I rarely had the need to burn any data but things like a copy of an OS installer disc.) Most of the discs I’ve burned over the years were audio CD “mixtapes”  for the car.

On the other hand, I still buy music mostly on CD (which paradoxically is often cheaper than downloads) and rip it. I also used to do that with DVDs, though I never bothered getting a Blu-ray drive.

That makes literally no sense. The laser isn’t sitting there turned on all day long: it turns on when closing the drive tray triggers it to check for a disc. And in fact, it’s not one laser: in a DVD drive, there is one IR laser for reading/burning CDs, and a red one for DVDs. (In a blu-ray drive, there’s a third blue laser.) Only one laser is ever on at one time, and it’s off when idle.

the drive is cranking every boot time remember?

Which is literally 2 seconds maximum. Even cumulatively, it simply does not matter. Even if a computer did that 10 times a day for 10 years, that’s 10 hours of use, so the same as watching a half dozen feature films (a common use for a DVD drive). Completely negligible.

[Mechatrommer]

thats the "theory"

[free_electron]

hmm. i guess i'm weird.
I didn't realize people still even bought media on disks. the little music i buy is from apple. maybe one or two songs a year. i'm not big on music or films. I bought maybe 20 movies on "disc" in my lifetime. now it's on amazon. and even that is like 5 movies a year. If i can't stream it i don't want to watch it. And i'm not subscribing to 25 streaming services. Between netflix  , amazon and cbs , that's it. No disney, apple tv or anything else. i hate blu-ray. i've bought at least 4 players, that invariable became unsupported, needed endless updates to play a disc i had just bought. There is nothing more frustrating and mood-killing than coming home, planning a nice movie night and then first need to muck around for 3 hours jumping through hoops to update the player firmware because "it's not compatible with the new disc" you just brought home.

As for burning stuff to cd/dvd .. i store copies on a distributed NAS accessible from all machines in the house. It has plenty of storage and can hold 4 drives. if i run out : time to upgrade one of the drives. last time that happened was 2.5 years ago. i still have a slot free and i know the nas supports up to 16Tb drives per slot. (4 slots) i'm not going to run out. Currently loaded with 4TB drives so plenty of room to grow.
i also make it a point not to store anything on the local machines (except when traveling, but my laptop has two physical drives and i carry a USB harddisk for another copy as well) . my files reside on the nas , quadruplicated (two copies per nas and copies between nas) and versioned (like apple time machine). critical stuff has a cloud backup as well.

like i said , i keep one cd/dvd burner around so i can write a recovery disc for test equipment like infiniium scopes , logic analysers etc. those can install from cd. i wonder if anyone has ever made a box that converts a usb memory stick to ide ... or can emulate a cd player... like those floppy emulators with usb... gotta look for that...

i'm weird like that...

[tooki]

thats the "theory"

The math adds up, you can try it yourself.

What isn’t represented is usage-independent aging, and on the contrary, the advantages of running the motors now and then so they don’t seize up.

[Zenith]

Not weird, just different. I have a large collection of CDs played through a CD player - you can still buy them new. I'm not much into new trends in hifi, streaming services and all the rest of it. I suppose I could investigate a proper computer based hifi system and commit all the CDs to disc, but it hardly seems worth the trouble.

I like old films and TV series. I've been given a few boxed sets and picked up another lot through ebay or looking through charity shops (thrift stores), or picked them up at car boot sales. I particularly like black and white films. I haven't had a TV for 25 years. When I see TV at friends' places all I see is irritating rubbish. Apparently that's considered weird.

As for data storage and computer use, I don't use optical media much for that these days, but a few times over the last five years, I've been glad I've had a PC with a DVD drive.

[David Hess]

Leaving the drive powered, or for only reading, will have no affect on the laser diode operating life.

What does matter is optical power during writes because the diodes operate at close to their maximum rating.  Since the wear is some power function of the power, operating life, and the number of burned disks, can be considerably extended by only burning at the slowest speed where optical power is lower.

[free_electron]

Not weird, just different. I have a large collection of CDs played through a CD player - you can still buy them new. I'm not much into new trends in hifi, streaming services and all the rest of it. I suppose I could investigate a proper computer based hifi system and commit all the CDs to disc, but it hardly seems worth the trouble.

I like old films and TV series. I've been given a few boxed sets and picked up another lot through ebay or looking through charity shops (thrift stores), or picked them up at car boot sales. I particularly like black and white films. I haven't had a TV for 25 years. When I see TV at friends' places all I see is irritating rubbish. Apparently that's considered weird.

As for data storage and computer use, I don't use optical media much for that these days, but a few times over the last five years, I've been glad I've had a PC with a DVD drive.

I have a pure digital playlist of music. Most of it is not available on cd's except through ebay , used. Pretty hard to find a Joe Dassin cd here in the US ... Or Urbanus (flemisch comedian). But they are on apple music and the rest are digitized from my old CD collection. I still have the discs somewhere in a storage box, but they are converted to apple lossless and stored in itunes.
Most of my day to day music is through youtube, custom mixes like Staysee, or indie music like pomplamoose. i got some playlists there , or from the phone , but i prefer quiet when working. Car streams. it doesn't have an old school radio/tape/cd anymore. Only a huge touchscreen and streaming 

Between amazon prime and netflix and cbs (for star trek) i got all i need. I ditched the few blu ray discs and dvd's i had and bought them as digital. i'm done with all those crap players with their stupid drm and updates. i got so mad the last time . The player needed 4 updates and then it told me the disc was too new to be able to play. I would have to had buy a new player. For the 5 times a year a play a disc ? I Widlarized the player out of frustration. I Don't take crap like that anymore. I Wanted a nice movie night and ended up with hours of download install and then still couldn't play the disc ( the hobbit). Sony Blu-ray player.

[Circlotron]

operating life [of the laser], and the number of burned disks, can be considerably extended by only burning at the slowest speed where optical power is lower.

I didn’t know that! Good tip. Thanks. 

[Mechatrommer]

thats the "theory"

The math adds up, you can try it yourself.

What isn’t represented is usage-independent aging, and on the contrary, the advantages of running the motors now and then so they don’t seize up.

'theory' of simple math adding minutes and hours is not the same as empirical result of whats piling in my store.. you havent take into account current that goes into the laser or candela measurement which i dont claim to know but a probable factors.. as said, the reason i keep them is because i can one day reuse their parts such as motor mechanism etc which are still perfectly fine. In fact all mechanical and physical aspects of them, including laser+motor assembly are visually perfectly fine.. they just dont read for unknown reason.

operating life [of the laser], and the number of burned disks, can be considerably extended by only burning at the slowest speed where optical power is lower.

I didn’t know that! Good tip. Thanks. 

which what i usually did on those damaged dvdrw drives because i have the impression slower write give less risk of corrupted data, but then they died quickly anyway..

[james_s]

hmm. i guess i'm weird.
I didn't realize people still even bought media on disks. the little music i buy is from apple. maybe one or two songs a year. i'm not big on music or films. I bought maybe 20 movies on "disc" in my lifetime. now it's on amazon. and even that is like 5 movies a year. If i can't stream it i don't want to watch it. And i'm not subscribing to 25 streaming services. Between netflix  , amazon and cbs , that's it. No disney, apple tv or anything else. i hate blu-ray. i've bought at least 4 players, that invariable became unsupported, needed endless updates to play a disc i had just bought. There is nothing more frustrating and mood-killing than coming home, planning a nice movie night and then first need to muck around for 3 hours jumping through hoops to update the player firmware because "it's not compatible with the new disc" you just brought home.

The numbers steadily decreased for years but there was a slight uptick recently and over 46 million CDs are sold each year and that is I believe just the new ones so physical media is still very much alive if overshadowed by newer tech. I have a very old bluray player and I have never encountered even one movie that wouldn't play in it, I don't even know if the firmware can be updated, certainly I have never tried, that is a completely foreign experience to me, I don't even know what would result in that happening. I have hundreds of DVDs, blurays and CDs, and I buy more regularly, almost always used ones that cost peanuts.

I tried streaming for a while, I had Netflix and Amazon but I eventually dumped both of them because they kept losing content I wanted to watch so I set up a Plex server and have been running that for several years now. It works just like Netflix except the interface is much nicer and the content is all stuff that I want and never changes unless I change it. It runs on a tiny little i7 mini PC that lives in a closet, I rarely even have to think about it, it just works.

[james_s]

Leaving the drive powered, or for only reading, will have no affect on the laser diode operating life.

What does matter is optical power during writes because the diodes operate at close to their maximum rating.  Since the wear is some power function of the power, operating life, and the number of burned disks, can be considerably extended by only burning at the slowest speed where optical power is lower.

The laser diodes do wear, but usually when an optical drive has problems it's because the optics in the pickup get dirty. They are not sealed and contaminates in the air find their way in there. Look at all that dust inside an old desktop computer, some of that same dust gets into the optical drive. I've seen them fouled by cooking oil vapor in the air and coolant vapor in my friends machine shop was a constant hassle with optical drives, you don't see it in the air most of the time but it leaves a sticky film all over everything in the shop eventually.

[David Hess]

The laser diodes do wear, but usually when an optical drive has problems it's because the optics in the pickup get dirty. They are not sealed and contaminates in the air find their way in there. Look at all that dust inside an old desktop computer, some of that same dust gets into the optical drive. I've seen them fouled by cooking oil vapor in the air and coolant vapor in my friends machine shop was a constant hassle with optical drives, you don't see it in the air most of the time but it leaves a sticky film all over everything in the shop eventually.

I learned that negative case pressure draws dust and contaminates into the drives lesson long ago.  Since then I have designed all of my systems to operate with positive pressure and an intake filter.

[madires]

Looks like HDDs are greener than SSDs:
The Dirty Carbon Secret Behind Solid State Memory Drives (https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-dirty-carbon-secret-behind-solid-state-memory-drives)

[SiliconWizard]

Looks like HDDs are greener than SSDs:
The Dirty Carbon Secret Behind Solid State Memory Drives (https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-dirty-carbon-secret-behind-solid-state-memory-drives)

That's an interesting take.

[Kevin.D]

 I still use a blue ray optical drive for safe archival of important docs/data/photos etc , I use those M disks (available up to 28 Gig capacity) which are good for  1000 years
apparently (not sure how they arrived at that figure) but I do know they will certainly outlast standard dvd , hdd or ssd drive archived material.

[Kjelt]

(not sure how they arrived at that figure)

Elevated lifetime tests, so extreme temperatures, uv light and humidity and then calculating # errors over time.
Then calculating back to the normal storage conditions they can make an statistical estimation.

[David Hess]

When I built my new workstation last year, I included M-DISC compatible DVD and Blu-Ray burners, but I have not put them to use yet because I need to upgrade my burner software.  When I backup to disk, I use PAR2 files for error recovery.

So far I keep an offline backup of critical files on a pair of external USB SATA SSDs which are regularly checked using hashes to force scrubbing.

[Halcyon]

I still use a blue ray optical drive for safe archival of important docs/data/photos etc , I use those M disks (available up to 28 Gig capacity) which are good for  1000 years
apparently (not sure how they arrived at that figure) but I do know they will certainly outlast standard dvd , hdd or ssd drive archived material.

Be really careful with optical media for long-term storage. In a place I used to work, we would have old archives, first on CD, then DVD and eventually Bluray. I experienced problems which ranged from discs being rendered totally unreadable, to certain sectors being unreadable (which is no good for archive files unless there is redundancy built-into the file). And we're talking disks that ranged from 10 to only a few years old.

It was a standard office-type set up, but after hours, the air conditioning would shut off. I'm not sure whether that contributed significantly to the humidity and therefore accelerated the damage to the discs or not?

The moral of the story is test and rotate your backups often.

[Zoli]

...
Be really careful with optical media for long-term storage. In a place I used to work, we would have old archives, first on CD, then DVD and eventually Bluray. I experienced problems which ranged from discs being rendered totally unreadable, to certain sectors being unreadable (which is no good for archive files unless there is redundancy built-into the file). And we're talking disks that ranged from 10 to only a few years old.

It was a standard office-type set up, but after hours, the air conditioning would shut off. I'm not sure whether that contributed significantly to the humidity and therefore accelerated the damage to the discs or not?
...

That's typical for the dye-based disks; however, the M-disks are based on different technology. I would place them in similar category like the mass-produced/printed disks for longevity.

...
The moral of the story is test and rotate your backups often.

That's absolutely true for all the backup media types.

[David Hess]

Just for kicks I broke out some old DVDs that that I burned 18 years ago and read them with both drives without problems.

[coppercone2]

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/08/02/1837229/the-dirty-carbon-secret-behind-solid-state-memory-drives

[Mechatrommer]

a little bit too duplicated...

Looks like HDDs are greener than SSDs:
The Dirty Carbon Secret Behind Solid State Memory Drives (https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-dirty-carbon-secret-behind-solid-state-memory-drives)

doesnt that mean more trees can breath on co2 and in return produce more o2 for us to breath on, and then we can multiply more until the earth is overcrowded, and then we'll either need to move to mars or kill each other to rebalance the population count.

[BruceEckel]

Clicking sound from a HDD is so called “Click of death” because that means the Hard drive is now broken and must be repaired or replaced.

HDD and SSD can and do fail suddenly. I have had a 1TB external drive fail on me like this, it showed no prior signs of damage before it suddenly developed click of death.

[tooki]

Lemme fix that for you:

Clicking sound from a HDD is so called “Click of death” because that means the Hard drive is now broken and must be repaired or replaced.

For all intents and purposes, hard disks cannot be repaired.

HDD and SSD can and do fail suddenly. I have had a 1TB external drive fail on me like this, it showed no prior signs of damage before it suddenly developed click of death.

For the sake of data integrity and avoiding failures, I replace them long before they start clicking, by using SMART to identify issues. Not all failures can be predicted, but some SMART parameters (or rapid changes in them) are strong predictors of imminent failure.

[Mechatrommer]

Lemme fix that for you:

Clicking sound from a HDD is so called “Click of death” because that means the Hard drive is now broken and must be repaired or replaced.

For all intents and purposes, hard disks cannot be repaired.

it depends, sometime it can...

For the sake of data integrity and avoiding failures, I replace them long before they start clicking, by using SMART to identify issues. Not all failures can be predicted, but some SMART parameters (or rapid changes in them) are strong predictors of imminent failure.

power glitch can cause some SMART parm to be marked. and disk clone will clone the SMART parm as well, so a marked SMART value as bad, can be all perfect green again. i set 10 years as limit, or if i start to hear weird sound, i dont usually remember to check SMART values.

[Kjelt]

For all intents and purposes, hard disks cannot be repaired.

Repair as in you continue using it as a normal hdd no, but to get the data back you can some times.

If the error is in the drive controller board you can buy a donor hdd and replace one rom from the original to the donor board and swap them.
Example


Sometimes it is as simple as blown resistors/fuse/diode ofcourse you have to ask what caused this but hey if it works for a couple of hours that is enough to get the data off it.
Example


If it is a mechanical issue inside the drive then you better hire a pro company esp with current helium filled disks.
So best advice: back everything up !

[tooki]

Lemme fix that for you:

Clicking sound from a HDD is so called “Click of death” because that means the Hard drive is now broken and must be repaired or replaced.

For all intents and purposes, hard disks cannot be repaired.

it depends, sometime it can...

A band-aid fix to recover data is NOT A REPAIR, and that video even says so.

power glitch can cause some SMART parm to be marked.

Not the ones that matter in regard to predicting failure.

and disk clone will clone the SMART parm as well,

Complete nonsense.

so a marked SMART value as bad, can be all perfect green again.

Certain test logs have a limited number of entries, such that the oldest tests get cycles out.

Not the important stuff though.

[tooki]

For all intents and purposes, hard disks cannot be repaired.

Repair as in you continue using it as a normal hdd no, but to get the data back you can some times.

If the error is in the drive controller board you can buy a donor hdd and replace one rom from the original to the donor board and swap them.
Example


Sometimes it is as simple as blown resistors/fuse/diode ofcourse you have to ask what caused this but hey if it works for a couple of hours that is enough to get the data off it.
Example


If it is a mechanical issue inside the drive then you better hire a pro company esp with current helium filled disks.
So best advice: back everything up !

I said “for all intents and purposes”, not “under all circumstances without exception”. Data recovery (as a result of a failure to back up properly) is the ONLY situation where any work on a failed or failing hard drive makes sense, and then the purpose is not to restore it regular use. In any situation other than data recovery, the labor cost of a repair attempt will exceed the cost of replacing the drive with a new one.

[james_s]

When I was a broke teenager somebody gave me a pair of dead 1GB hard drives, quite large by the standards of the day. I swapped the PCB from one onto the other and got one of the drives working and used it for several years. I also repaired a 8GB SCSI drive once that had a drink spilled on the computer while it was running, my friend had his whole music collection on it. Replacing one of the mosfets driving the spindle motor fixed it and he was still using it when I lost touch with him a few years later. That latter could be called data recovery, the former was a result of poverty and having more time than money.

[Kjelt]

I said “for all intents and purposes”, not “under all circumstances without exception”. Data recovery (as a result of a failure to back up properly) is the ONLY situation where any work on a failed or failing hard drive makes sense, and then the purpose is not to restore it regular use. In any situation other than data recovery, the labor cost of a repair attempt will exceed the cost of replacing the drive with a new one.

Well as a non native english speaker I do count "backup of data" as a valid purpose to repair a hdd, other cases indeed it makes no economical sense also regarding reliability etc.
But as far as reliability goes, then the same goes for instance any electrical device having suffered severe ESD due to lightning or whatever and debatable also any T&M device that has suffered damaged on its measurements inputs, at least if you need the data to be exact and reliable, unless done properly , recalibrated and certified by the manufacturer.

[tooki]

I said “for all intents and purposes”, not “under all circumstances without exception”. Data recovery (as a result of a failure to back up properly) is the ONLY situation where any work on a failed or failing hard drive makes sense, and then the purpose is not to restore it regular use. In any situation other than data recovery, the labor cost of a repair attempt will exceed the cost of replacing the drive with a new one.

Well as a non native english speaker I do count "backup of data" as a valid purpose to repair a hdd, other cases indeed it makes no economical sense also regarding reliability etc.

To me, as a native English speaker, "repair" has the connotation of a durable repair intended to return the item to regular service. Otherwise, we'd call it a "temporary repair", temporary fix", etc.

(FYI, "backup" specifically means making an extra preventative copy in advance to protect against data loss. Copying data off after drive failure is data recovery, the exact opposite of backing up.)

Anything involving anyone but the manufacturer or manufacturer-authorized data recovery provider opening the drive (as in the reply above yours) is, given the fickle nature of HDD mechanisms, inherently a quick-and-dirty fix, not a lasting repair, since letting non-cleanroom air into the drive is asking for trouble.

But as far as reliability goes, then the same goes for instance any electrical device having suffered severe ESD due to lightning or whatever and debatable also any T&M device that has suffered damaged on its measurements inputs, at least if you need the data to be exact and reliable, unless done properly , recalibrated and certified by the manufacturer.

That's comparing apples to oranges. Or apples to pencil erasers. Completely irrelevant. We're not talking about drives that have failed due to abuse. The issue is that non-abused hard disks will just... fail. And almost all of the time, it's mechanical failure.

[Kjelt]

True. They can fail as anything mechanical, electric , pneumatic etc can fail.
I don't think harddrives are particular worse if taken care of (used) properly.
In datacenters using enterprise grade harddisks that are 24/7 on in temperature and humidity controlled environment 99% if not higher of the harddisks are preventively changed after three or four years without any failure.
Personally from the 74 harddisks I ever owned I have one fail and one has a SMART entry which is not good. A lot of these harddisks were never 24/7 on, were moved, shaken, temperature cycles, lots of power on/off cycles etc.

You probably know the backblaze reports, they reveal that the AFR of hdds is equal to ssds now who had put their money on that ?

https://www.dpreview.com/news/7921185885/backblaze-reveals-failure-rates-for-hard-drives-in-2021-releases-an-ssd-report-for-the-first-time

[CatalinaWOW]

True. They can fail as anything mechanical, electric , pneumatic etc can fail.
I don't think harddrives are particular worse if taken care of (used) properly.
In datacenters using enterprise grade harddisks that are 24/7 on in temperature and humidity controlled environment 99% if not higher of the harddisks are preventively changed after three or four years without any failure.
Personally from the 74 harddisks I ever owned I have one fail and one has a SMART entry which is not good. A lot of these harddisks were never 24/7 on, were moved, shaken, temperature cycles, lots of power on/off cycles etc.

You probably know the backblaze reports, they reveal that the AFR of hdds is equal to ssds now who had put their money on that ?

https://www.dpreview.com/news/7921185885/backblaze-reveals-failure-rates-for-hard-drives-in-2021-releases-an-ssd-report-for-the-first-time

I agree that hard drive reliability is not a particular cause for concern, but my personal experience has been significantly worse than what you report.  My total quantity is smaller, though I don't have an exact count.  It is in the 30-40 range.  And I have had two hard failures, one drive that developed start-up reliability failures and one that got a SMART entry and was losing/corrupting data.  Perhaps not surprisingly the failures have occurred in drives 7-12 years old.  New enough to be relatively high capacity with tight tolerances and less margins and old enough to have seen significant use.  The failure rate has been high enough to keep me reminded of the importance of backups and fortunately I haven't lost any meaningful data for a couple of decades. 

I do also have to modify that last statement.   As the total amount of stored material has increased I have lost data - not because it wasn't on the drives, but because I can't locate it.  I know this happens because I have found some of it, sometimes years after the need.

[Kjelt]

Perhaps not surprisingly the failures have occurred in drives 7-12 years old.  New enough to be relatively high capacity with tight tolerances and less margins and old enough to have seen significant use. 

Check the smart values, probably high start stop count?
I only buy enterprise grade for my NASses and minimize the power cycles for the 24/7 on devices. The others I just turn on when I need them.
This costs energy for standby but does prolong the life , but perhaps that is just a believe of mine. Anyway I was planning to also preventively replace my 24/7 hdds and nas every 4 years but due to the bad economy and relatively low feature new synology nasses (still no 10Gb NIC) I kept waiting. 46000+ hours not bad and still going strong.