modern storage is crazy - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 10:32:07 am
content: __O__M__G__ things like hard drives are going crazy!This morning I browsed through five different online stores, phoned to six physical ones, and none of them can sell me anything under 2Tbyte!!!"sorry, the minimal size we have is 2Tbyte"Which is not exactly correct,Seagatestill has someBarraCuda 500GByte HDDin their catalog, but no-store has it for sale, and if you contact aSeagate dealer... there is a minimal order of 100 units.So I have just contacted my usual CDD ("computer-drug dealer"), and ordered qty=8 sATA 250GB disks!(yes,yes,yes, I know ... you can find some on Amazon, but ... I'm paranoid about HDDs ... on Amazon they are usually declared "brand new" while they are second hand, refurbished, cleaned and polished .... sometimes not even very well and find other people's files on the HDDanyway ...)Jesus, I have a couple of twin SCSI-to-sATA box, the firmware can only address 1Tbyte of total space, and there are 4 HDD slots, I cannot mount four HDDs of 2TByte each! Neither I can mount 500GByte each (unless I am ready to downgrade the capacity to the half)4x250GByte = 1TByte -> perfect!4x500GByte = 2TByte -> on each disk, 50% space wasted1Tbyte of total space looked so huuuuuuuugggggggeeeeeeee when I bought the storage-box (in 2009), nowadays it's nothing because people is looking for things like theSynology-DiskStation-DS1821with eight HDD bays, and then each disk is about14Tbyte14Tbyte on a single physical HDD, I didn't even think it existed, and that DiskStation has 8 bays of themand 8 x 14Tbyte = ....?!?!?#~'~...... WTF <0---+++it's too big, my mind is 32bit, it overflowsI can't count, can you?I can't use such a storage-thing, too big, can you?Seriously, I cannot even imagine how you can format and use so big storage space.For Youtube video? Or for what?Are those huge DISKs reliable? Or too dense (too many Gbyte per mm^2)? Hence prone to failure?mumble

author: m98
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 10:51:53 am
content: I don't see what you're trying to achieve? Why are you buying deliberately small disks for your ancient storage box, instead of just getting a new one? If you want predictable reliability, use RAID 1, 5 or 10.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 11:14:35 am
content: Quote from: m98 on April 26, 2022, 10:51:53 amI need to support some old machines, they don't have sATA, they only have SCSI and you can't install any modern PCI / PCIe cards, there are no drivers and it won't work, so a good solution is a sATA-to-SCSI box, which works well, it exposes each sATA disk as if it was a SCSI disk, but the LBA addressing is limited to a quarter of TeraByte on each disk.Anyway, what I am doing is not *THE* point, but rather if those modern 14TB disks are asreliableas the smaller ones I am using.Personally I don't think so; as I understand it, modern disks are less reliable, so let's fix the problem with RAID? For example,RAID-6appears to be mandatory for that Synology 8-bay drive.Note, I have to replicate the array for a second twin setup, that 1 Tbyte array was created in 2009 and is currently only 40% full, I wonder what people is expecting to store in 112TByte of space.

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 11:37:24 am
content: I share the same concern and still use Win7. My solution is to keep a few 500 gb SSD as spares. They are still available from Amazon at about $60 locally (Cleveland, Ohio). I use RAID1. Just ordered 2 more.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 11:52:10 am
content: Quote from: jpanhalt on April 26, 2022, 11:37:24 amQuote from: DiTBho on April 26, 2022, 10:32:07 amI am paranoid, but also inconsistent, so I just ordered two BarracudasI will check them with SMART, if I find they have been used, I will return them.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 03:34:09 pm
content: QuoteThat can be irritating but I don't see it as unusual or crazy. The stores will want to sell stuff that shifts and not have oddball things sitting around for years waiting for the one weirdo that doesn't desire the latest and greatest, and for which they will make minuscule profit.If you look around you'll see that there is generally a minimum price for hard disks, which is basically the lowest they will sell a disk at and still make a decent profit. Whatever the current disk size is for that price, that's the smallest disk they will sell. From what you say, that seems to be 2TB now.

author: ConKbot
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 03:44:45 pm
content: If you can get the system to support iSCSI, then whatever is serving up the iSCSI is hardware agnostic.And the reliability is about the same, it's just that much more data, that the non-recoverable read error rate is no longer stastically insignificant. I.e. of you put together a raid array with 8x 16tb drives, the 1 in 10^15 error rate is no longer a one in a million chance when you're doing an array rebuild after a hardware failure, hence RAID-6 being more prominent.

author: SpacedCowboy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 04:14:40 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on April 26, 2022, 11:14:35 amHard drive failures in large disks arepretty much the sameas smaller ones. The failures presumably come from systemic issues to do with rotating rust at high angular velocity, rather than a weakness in the storage system itself.Quote from: DiTBho on April 26, 2022, 11:14:35 amRAID6's advantage is not because larger hard drives fail more often (though it would help with that), it's because when a customer buys hard drives, they very rarely buy a single drive from multiple sources to form their drive pool, so if there is a problem in a batch of drives that makes failure more likely, it's possible for more than one of that group of drives (s)he bought to exhibit the same problem.The scenario RAID6 helps prevent against is:Lose a drive in a RAID5 arrayPurchase new one (or have spare, hot or cold)Install new drive if necessaryStart rebuild of the arrayAnother drive fails before the rebuild is completeWhen you're rebuilding the array, you're putting far more stress on the system than during day to day use - seeks will be going back and forth over all the drives for hours on end, and *that* is not the time to find out you have another dodgy drive. So, you have 2 parity disks and even if both of them go down, you're not SOL. At that point you make a simple backup of the data as the first step, then you purchase two more disks and rebuild the array.Quote from: DiTBho on April 26, 2022, 11:14:35 amI have 116TB of raid at home on an Areca hardware RAID controller...Code:@xanadu:~$ df -h /raidFilesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on/dev/sda1 116T 52T 64T 45% /raid... mounted across a 10Gbit network to all the other computers. I've used about half of it so far, with data on it going back 30 years, and it's backed up weekly to aQuantum SuperLoader 3with 16 LTO-9 tapes (well, 15 + a cleaner tape) hosted on the same machine. One week I back up to cartridge A (8 tapes), the next week to cartridge B (7 tapes + clean) etc.Code:@xanadu:~$ lsscsi[0:0:0:0] tape IBM ULTRIUM-HH8 M571 /dev/st0[0:0:0:1] mediumx QUANTUM UHDL 0094 /dev/sch0[1:0:0:0] disk Areca ARC-1882-VOL#000 R001 /dev/sda[1:0:16:0] process Areca RAID controller R001 -[N:0:2:1] disk Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB__1 /dev/nvme0n1[N:1:4:1] disk Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB__1 /dev/nvme1n1[N:2:2:1] disk SAMSUNG MZVLW1T0HMLH-00000__1 /dev/nvme2n1People have different use-cases, and just because it doesn't make sense for your case, doesn't mean it's not crucial for someone elseI would be the first to agree that I'm atypical in use-case , but I'm far from the only person who runs RAID6 - in my case with an additional hot spare.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 05:20:58 pm
content: Yeah disks are getting pretty big.I guess the point is that these days making a 100GB disk is just as difficult as making a 1TB one, so they might as well make those. They probably stopped manufacturing the old bigger disk heads, so if they are using the new tiny fine heads and platters they might as well use the capacity. More dense data also makes the drive faster because one rotation brings more data bits past the head.Id say if you want low capacity drives for use with adapters try using SSDs, they are commonly available even under 100GB and when you don't care about capacity you can more easily spring for a more reliable enterprise grade SLC flash ones.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 05:39:51 pm
content: SSDs are pretty much at cost parity for HDDs around 500GB now, that's probably why you can't find any.For instance, this:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-WDS500G2B0A-Blue-Internal/dp/B073SBZ8YH/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2JX0LBGFLVXN4&keywords=500gb+sata&qid=1650994715&sprefix=500gb+sata%2Caps%2C48&sr=8-3

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 05:44:09 pm
content: Have you looked at used drives? I haven't bought anything under 1TB in years and the only 1TB drives I have bought are SSDs. The last several hard drives I've bought are 8TB and I'd have liked to have gone larger but that's the current sweet spot. The main thing I use bulk storage for these days is video and backups. There is no market for spinning drives under 2TB anymore.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 05:46:21 pm
content: Quote from: Berni on April 26, 2022, 05:20:58 pmMost series of drives use the same platters/heads, so a 1TB version will have a single platter with one head, a 2TB will have heads on both sides of the platter, the 4TB model will have two platters and so on. The smallest drive offered will be one side of a single platter using whatever tech is used in the largest.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 05:50:53 pm
content: We have to wonder what century the OP is living in.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 08:20:06 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 26, 2022, 05:50:53 pmOne year ago, I didn't have the money, but I was tempted to buy a restoredAlfa Romeo 6C(1929/1930), hence I bought the dead corpse of a "Car" made in in 1873, well ... "Car" ... it's more the corpse of an horse-drawn carriage with three wheels in which someone tried to insert an experimental internal combustion engine, but which in 1885 inspired theBenz-Motorwagen, the first car to go into production with an internal combustion engine.Talking about internal combustion, I have a ***copy (it's a copy of the copy of the copy of the original, bought on eBay) of the manifest of the first experiment done in 1826 with internal combustion of a hydrogen and oxygen mixture. Nobody believed it would work.And next to that manifest, on the same wall of the garage where I am trying to restore (rebuild? ... many parts are rotten or missing, it's a disaster) the "motor tricycle", I have a copy of the original manifest published in 1876 for Statue of Liberty of New York, before it was installed, when news paper were excited to announce some new great stuff, the navy was transporting all pieces by ship from Europe, the locals in New York thought about how to build the base on which to install the iron-lady.About cars and monuments, I think I live in the 19th century, while about computers, I think I live between the 20th and the 21th century, specifically around 1972 and 2009

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 08:28:36 pm
content: What's wrong with 250 / 256/ 480 / 500 / 512 / 960 GB SATA SSDs?They also still make 16/32/64 GB 44 pin IDE SSDs using MLC flash memory (44 pin = ide for laptops, easily converted to regular IDE)Not even gonna mention 4 GB / 8 GB / 16 GB / 32 GB SATA DOM SSDs for thin clients.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2022, 08:31:44 pm
content: @SpacedCowboythanks, you clarified my doubts

author: elekorsi
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 08:26:15 pm
content: I was allways fascinated by the prices of Siemens Simatic memory cards. For example, list price for the 256MB (yes, megabytes) is 364€... 32GB model will cost you an arm and a leg with the price tag of 1038€. And those are active products and not some obsolete old parts...I suspect that in the hardware they are all the same, they just make them look smaller... Oh, forgot to say, 4MB model is cheap it's only 53€

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 12:37:58 am
content: You may be able to change the HPA (Host Protected Area) size to make it appear smaller than the upper limit of the system you're putting it in.Quote from: elekorsi on April 27, 2022, 08:26:15 pmProprietary standard means they can charge as much as they want. On the other hand, those are probably NOR flash, which is not cheap either.

author: eugene
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 01:45:23 am
content: I suppose the OP is looking for some 4MB memory cards too.Just kidding around; I totally get his frustration. Ten years ago I bought a Synology NAS and stuffed two 2TB drives into it (RAID 1.) I thought 2 TB was ridiculous at the time and I was right; the drive is still only half full. The really sad thing is that the drives are 5.25". If one of them fails I'm not sure I could even find a replacement!

author: xrunner
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 01:52:29 am
content: I remember I had a Radio Shack Tandy 1000 with I think a 10 or 20 MB hard drive for the thing. Man was that awesome!

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 05:14:13 am
content: Quote from: eugene on April 28, 2022, 01:45:23 amYou could replace them both with a matched set of newer drives, you could probably get 2 or even 4TB drives for next to nothing and it would be worth it just for the power savings over 5.25" drives.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 09:19:25 am
content: Last time I checked few years ago, a 256GB SSD was like 30 dolaridoos. I guess precision milled metal costs more than some puny chips in a green board.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 01:33:52 pm
content: Still got a 8M Sony Memory Stick, and a 32M Nokia branded SD card. Also some 512M SD cards, and a few boxes of old IDE and SATA drives, all sub 1G, with most of them still working, at least they did pass SMART full scan with no errors. Failed ones were stripped, and went to scrap metal, and I have a nice collection of magnets on the fridge, useful for many applications, including using to operate reed switches at a distance, and holding down the GPS in the car, so that I can easily remove it.

author: SpacedCowboy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 04:51:06 pm
content: When I got my first computer, at 12, it came as components and a bare PCB. It was a Xmas present (together with a b&w, dial-tuned portable TV which I thought was awesome). After 3 months of watching TV in my bedroom, and swearing it was just as good as the one everyone shared downstairs! My parents started getting antsy about me not doing anything about the "computer" they'd bought me. We weren't well-off (my dad was a docker in Liverpool in the UK, and we lived in a 2-up/2-down terraced house in one of the less--wonderful parts of town, but they did their damndest to get me everything they thought was important, and it didn't matter to me that the TV was second-hand...)So, off to the shed in the back yard, built it all up - young innocent me thought this was a tough thing to do, all that soldering of chips... These days it's 0201 or bust, but I digress. The thing eventually worked, and I plugged it into my TV, and typed in the famous example in the manual.Code:PRINT 1 + 1 = 2Which of course printed '1' since 1+1 does equal 2. All elated, I summoned parents-mine to the bedroom to show them, and my dad took one look at the screen, grumbled "I knew it, he's buggered it" and left the room. It took me about a week to convince him that the computer was working perfectly...Anyway, that got me hooked on computing, and I spent a year or so saving up for a *colour* one. Come next Xmas, Atari were doing a fire-sale at Dixons, and you could get a computer,with a floppy disk drive, not a tape-deck for £120. I had about £100 by then, but persuaded my nan to pitch in as that year's Xmas present. That disk drive could store 127 KB, which was *enormous*That computer lasted me about 5 years, and just before I went to college, I bought the (at the time) state of the art Atari-ST as an upgrade. This thing had 1MB of RAM!!! Who could ever use that much ? And the floppy drive it came with could store 720 KB, and the user interface was amazing. That computer got me through college, GFA basic was (heh) basically amazing at writing simple little programs to for example simulate heat dispersing through a cube (I was reading Physics) and the black-and-white "hi-res" monitor that gave you 640x480 was really sharp and precise.About a year in, I bought my first ever hard disk, squandering a fair chunk of my student grant and consigning myself to ramen for a few months - it had a whopping 10MB on it. I could have gone for the cheaper 5MB one, but by this point I was savvy, so I knew that was just a trap and bought the seemingly-too-large one instead. I still remember using Signum to create lab-reports, and although it took about 30 minutes to print, and made a hell of a racket on the dot-matrix printer for the entire time, I remain convinced that my "pretty-as-hell" lab-reports contributed significantly to my overall lab grade. I took as much lab as I could...So yeah, as I sit here using my Mac Studio Ultra on three 4K monitors, with enormous storage on tap over a network-speed I could never have dreamed of, things (and not just storage) have indeed changed

author: eugene
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 05:02:33 pm
content: Would there be any point in the drive manufacturers offering built in RAID? Instead 10TB it might be 2TB with built in RAID 6. It's true you would not be able to swap a single platter if there's a failure, but it would allow you to recover all of the data and put it on a new unit.Wouldn't help if most failures are controller related. There's probably a solution for that too, but it might be a subject for a different thread....

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 05:05:29 pm
content: I don't see much advantage there. In my experience most failures are not the platters themselves but the head amplifier or other internal components. I don't think internal RAID would buy you anything, the whole point of RAID is that you can swap out an individual failed drive and rebuild the array.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 05:19:23 pm
content: QuoteOnly for neophytes. Anyone worth their salt who thinks RAID is going to fix something will, of course, use drives from multiple sources.

author: eugene
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 05:32:45 pm
content: C'mon guys. I'm not suggesting that it would be as good as other solutions, I'm just wondering if a 2TB internal HD with built-in RAID would somehow protect the data better than a 10TB drive that's 95% empty.It's a way to make use of those over sized drives in a typical laptop (for example.)

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 07:34:06 pm
content: No, because RAID is never for data protection. edit : I mean SHOULD never be used for data protection, or as the only data protection method. There are RAID versions that offer some data protection, in case of a single or multiple drive failures.A hard drive with internal raid would still have a single point of failure.. let's say a short circuit on the circuit board or over voltage event blows up the eeprom chip that stores the drive geometry info (number of platters, surfaces, tracks, lists of bad sectors, etc) and the controller can no longer access the data.People/Companies often buy hard drives from multiple locations, or buy drives staggered, just so that they'll get the same model but with different batch numbers, different manufacturing dates.For example, what if the factory had a small batch of components that were faulty and were all used on hard drives in week 10 of 2021? If you buy 6 drives from the same store to make a raid 5/6 chances are you're gonna get consecutive serial numbers, as the store probably ordered a box of 25-50 drives. Then, you could have a situation where all six drives fail after a year of 24/7 usage, all within a few days or so from each other.btw, a bit off topic... .. Seagate even had a firmware bug that cause drives to lock and no longer respond after some amount of time of operation :http://www.datarecoveryspecialists.co.uk/blog/firmware-bug-on-seagate-hard-driveHad you bought a few drives at the same time, you'd be screwed with all these drives failing at nearly the same timeBy making a RAID 5 / 6 or higher with drives with different production dates you reduce the risk of all drives in the raid failing within a few days from each other, or potentially while you spend 10-20 hours to repair the raid by replacing the faulty drive.If you want data protection, you could have your raid with some parity / spare drive as hot spare, and you'd have some way of periodically (ex at 2am every day or every sunday night) clone the drives to another computer that's in another location (another room so in case of fire you won't have both computers damaged, or at least another power circuit in case you have some power event that blows both computers' power supplies)Then ideally you'd also copy the critical data to a drive or tapes and put it in a safe, or upload the data to a remote location (a storage server in a datacenter is cheap, 50-100$ a month, you can just encrypt archives with some error correction info (quickpar for example) and upload them to a remote machine.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 07:59:11 pm
content: Quote from: mariush on April 28, 2022, 07:34:06 pmd'oh, I have six of those in my 2009-2010 NASThe article saysQuoteMy disks are 7200.12, firmware CC44: I am not sure now if 7200.12/CC44 in the bug-blacklist.Code:2010-01-5385, qty=6, Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 SATA 500GB, 005-953, €44,90, €269,40

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 08:07:25 pm
content: Quote from: mariush on April 28, 2022, 07:34:06 pmCan you elaborate why RAID1 on separate drives should not be used for data protection? I have been doing that for >20 years and have had at least 3 individual drive failures, but preserved my data. (I keep OS, Desktop, and programs I use on a separate drive, which soon will be RAID1 too).

author: SpacedCowboy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 08:07:47 pm
content: That wouldn't likely protect as much as you think it would, IMHO. A couple of things off the top of my head that could go wrong:If there is a systemic issue with the device as a whole (eg: a power failure) then all the platters are simultaneously goneIf there's a head crash on one platter, it's probably going to impact all the others too - even the debris of that first head-crash could easily cause more, but if something goes so wrong that you have a head crash on one platter, that same event is probably going to affect others tooOne of the key points of RAID is "Redundant". If your system is tightly-coupled (and the platters in a disk drive are *very* tightly coupled), you're likely not getting the 'redundant' part correct. The idea is that a failure in one part of the system doesn't affect the others - and that's very tough to do if they're tightly coupled together.I'm not a RAID expert, just a satisfied customer, but even if you go with internal RAID on an SSD (to abrogate the latter point above), the power thing is still a relevant problem, IMHO.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 08:07:53 pm
content: Quote from: eugene on April 28, 2022, 05:32:45 pmWhat oversized HDDs? I have a 1TB SSD in my laptop, it's getting more filled than I'd like it to be so I'm going to have to clean house soon. At the time I bought it though anything larger was drastically more expensive, I haven't looked lately. I can think of exactly 0% of hard drive failures I've experienced where some kind of internal RAID wasting half the space would have helped.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 08:32:18 pm
content: Quote from: jpanhalt on April 28, 2022, 08:07:25 pmRAID 1 only helps with the most basic of hardware failures, when a hard drive dies on its own. If you're lucky and you notice the faulty drive right away and you replace it fast, your data is safe... otherwise as I explained, if you have drives with consecutive serial numbers, made in same factory, same week, same year, there's increased chances the other drive could fail for the same reasons the other failed already so you need to rush to replace the broken drive.For any other reasons, RAID 1 doesn't help you keep your data safe.For example, let's say the power supply craps out and outputs 15-20v instead of 12v to the hard drives and kills the motor on both... or burns a hole through both drives circuit boards. Now BOTH drives in your RAID 1 are dead.I've also seen the SATA connector on one drive shorting out causing the sata housing to melt and even make flames, and luckily there was no hard drive immediately above the other drive otherwise that drive's sata connector would have caught fire as well.If it's a work computer, let's say you fire an employee and he decides to kick the pc potentially causing both hard drives to fail at same time. Or maybe there's a small earthquake and the PC falls off the desk to the floor while it's working - few hard drives have acceleration sensors outside laptop models.Or maybe something as basic as a heavy book or a flower pot falls from a shelve above the computer on the computer case, the mechanical shock could damage both drives.Or let's say a pipe breaks and you have water up to your knees in your house and your computer is on the floor, below water.Besides hardware failures... Let's say you accidentally download some ransomware that encrypts all your files ... both drives will have encrypted files, you're screwed.

author: Ranayna
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 08:33:06 pm
content: Quote from: jpanhalt on April 28, 2022, 08:07:25 pmIt comes down to semantics.RAID (except obviously RAID 0) is for data availability. Some RAID levels have speed advantages compared to others or single drives.It protects you of failures of one or more of the actual drives. Thats it.It does not protect you against a lot of things that you would want your data to be protected from, among others:- accidental deletion- a cryptolocker- Controller failure- data corruption due to faulty ramRAID can complement backup, but can *never* replace a proper backup.

author: eugene
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 08:48:19 pm
content: OK. Now we all know some of the different ways that storing redundant copies of data on separate platters, or even separate drives in the same enclosuremightnot save one's data.Still looking for creative ways to use a single drive that has 10 or 20 times the capacity I need in my laptop.

author: KaneTW
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 08:51:33 pm
content: Quote from: elekorsi on April 27, 2022, 08:26:15 pmYou're paying for the usage license. They're just standard SD cards with some licensing stuff added.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 08:56:08 pm
content: QuoteI will echo what mariush said in his earlier posts.The advantage of RAID is that there should be no downtime for (relatively) trivial problems. If you have RAID1 and a disk fails, you can generally keep going (although the rebuild can be slow). With single drive you're stuffed until you've acquired the replacement and performed a restore, which can be from hours to days depending on how prepared you were.Also, RAID can improve perfomance.But RAID should never take the place of backups. There are many problems, from a disk faulting during a rebuild through an external actual disaster to a simple wrong finger issue. You need to do proper backupsas well, and if you're going to do those then many of the RAID solutions aren't actually necessary. Do you really need real time protection from, say, two drives failing simultaneously or can you cope with an hour offline?Personally I used to run RAID1 to save on downtime should a drive fail, but the slowness during rebuilds (which would occur if the OS didn't shut down cleanly) were too much aggro for the perceived gains, so I don't even do that nowadays. A realtime copy of changed important files (typically source code) pushed off-box as they change deals with inter-backup data loss (and adds version history to boot, which RAID1 didn't).A client had a server running RAID5. I was called in when it wouldn't boot one day and found that the data was gone. Apparently, a drive had failed but no-one noticed (because, RAID) and then another drive failed. They realised the problem and bought two replacement drives, but couldn't get them to rebuild... Of course, they didn't need backups because, RAID.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 08:58:36 pm
content: QuoteCrypto.Torrent node.Porn collection.Cloud backups for someone else.

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 10:06:22 pm
content: @mariushBasically, you seem to be saying that if a nuke hits your house or wherever you PC is, how do you protect your data? I'm not particularly worried about that, as the chance I would be a safe distance away is absolutely near zero. If I am toast, I don't care about my data.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 10:28:51 pm
content: QuoteThat's rather extreme. Suppose a fire breaks out - do you shut your PC down properly, unplug it and carry it to safety, or do you save your pets, your spouse, perhaps even yourself instead?'Disaster' can cover many things from "oops, didn't meant to type that" to, as you suggest, a direct hit from a nuke. Not all of them are disastrously disastrous, and not all of them let you mitigate the effects as they occur.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 02:21:50 am
content: Quote from: eugene on April 28, 2022, 01:45:23 am2TB5.25"drives?

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 03:54:51 am
content: Quote from: eugene on April 28, 2022, 08:48:19 pmMovies for watching on airplane flights, RAW format photos from a DSLR, music collection, backups of your other machines. How do you have 20 times the space you need on your laptop? If you can get by with so little space then dump the spinning drive and pop put an SSD in there, the smaller ones are dirt cheap and it is a *massive* peformance improvement.

author: eugene
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 03:10:19 pm
content: Quote from: amyk on April 29, 2022, 02:21:50 amThey're 3.5" I remember them looking huge... I knew they weren't 8"

author: eugene
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 03:23:17 pm
content: Quote from: james_s on April 29, 2022, 03:54:51 amI don't. Both of my laptops have a 1.5TB total and are at less than 50% capacity (which is just about right.) But, this thread is about extremely large drives (14TB) that are bigger than most people can use.

author: BradC
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 03:58:43 pm
content: Quote from: mariush on April 28, 2022, 07:34:06 pm10 in a RAID-6. Thankfully the fault only manifests itself after a power cycle and these were only cycled about once every 2 years. I fortunately found out about it before they were cycled and had the opportunity to do the firmware updates on a rotating basis with no issue. As Max would say "missed it by -> <- that much".To echo what everyone else has said. RAID is for availability, not backup.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 06:01:08 pm
content: Quote from: eugene on April 29, 2022, 03:23:17 pmNobody has a 14TB drive in their laptop.There is a huge market for massive drives, I'd love to have a couple of 14TB drives for my media server but I get by with 8TB since they're so much cheaper. If I could get 16TB in a single drive for backup use that would be great, I could backup the whole thing onto a single drive. Tons of people have media collections these days, I ripped all of my DVDs, blurays and CDs years ago and packed them all away. Lots of people into photography store many TB of RAW format images. My security cameras record onto a hard drive too, currently 4TB gets me 2-3 months of archive footage but that decreases every time I add a camera or upgrade to a higher resolution.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 06:10:16 pm
content: Quote from: eugene on April 28, 2022, 01:45:23 amYou definitely did not buy 5.25” hard disk drives for your NAS ten years ago, since they stopped making 5.25” hard disks over 22 years ago (and even then they wereextraordinarilyrare). Not even old stock, since the last one of those was just 19GB.Are you sure you’re not measuring a removable drive tray?

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 06:12:16 pm
content: Quote from: eugene on April 29, 2022, 03:10:19 pmSo… the standard size for desktop drives for the last 35 years? Yeah, that’s shocking…

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 06:16:39 pm
content: Quote from: Ranayna on April 28, 2022, 08:33:06 pmThis. So much this.RAID. 👏 Is. 👏 Not. 👏 A. 👏 Backup!!! 👏RAID dutifully duplicates any deletion or modification caused by any reason, including software errors, malware, user error,as well as deletions made on purpose that you didn’t realize were wrong until later.Additionally, RAID doesn’t protect you from damage or loss of the entire array, as in fire or theft. That’s what off-site backups are for.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 06:23:55 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on April 26, 2022, 11:14:35 amWhatever gave you the idea that modern disks are less reliable?!?For years and years, the only pattern in disk failure has been that some individual models have proven to be abnormally unreliable in the long run. But those failures have not, in the long run, shown there to be any particularly good or bad eras for the whole industry, and rarely even for a brand. (With the arguable exception of the IBM/Hitachi/WD DeskStar models, which have had exceptionally good reliability for the past decade or two, after a single bad model around the year 2000.)

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 06:28:01 pm
content: Pure dogma and semantics. What happens when backups are destroyed in a fire or flood? Same scenario. There are degrees of safety offered by redundancy. Backups are just another form of redundancy. As reliability of storage increases, the need for multiple methods of redundancy decreases.An analogy can be made to trans-ocean commercial flights. Used to require more than 2 engines. Now just 2 is OK. Engines are more reliable today.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 08:55:03 pm
content: QuoteThat's not an appropriate analogy. And that's assuming you equate engines to storage means - if you actually relate them to drives then it's even less appropriate.I think the web fora go-to analogy involves a motor car, if you can figure one out...

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 09:30:49 pm
content: What about "redundancy" did you miss?

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2022, 11:20:52 pm
content: So, what do engines relate to? Are you saying that with more reliable drives we don't need as many backups? Surely if drives are becoming that reliable we wouldn't be needing every-increasing numbers of units in a RAID array and could manage with just RAID1.But we'd still need backups just as regularly as now.QuoteWell this is why I suggested your analogy was inappropriate. You seem to be saying that because engines are more reliable we only need two whereas before we needed more. Which literally translates, as noted above, to fewer drives in an array. But for data protection it is meaningless - if you fly through a cloud of volcanic ash, two or four engines isn't going make a lot of difference. A bunch of geese on takeoff will still see you in the Hudson. Maybe you meant parachutes were still needed despite better engines?

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 12:22:16 am
content: If drives had gotten more reliable the need for backups is decreased. I don't think drive reliability has changed substantially over the last 30 years or so though. Nothing is ever perfect, backups of critical data are always good to have, although there is a broad range of data that is technically replaceable but inconvenient, so one has to weigh the effort of keeping meticulous backups against the effort of reconstructing if something fails.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 02:24:59 am
content: Quote from: tooki on April 29, 2022, 06:10:16 pmThey made 5.25" disks up to 47GB:If drive manufacturers were interested in using 5.25" platters again, 47TB would probably fit in that size. The drive above has 14 platters.

author: Ranayna
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 07:41:50 am
content: Quote from: james_s on April 30, 2022, 12:22:16 amThe need for backups is only tangentially related to the reliability of drives.I personally never had a drive fail or other catastrophic hardware failure, but i still lost data :pThere are just too many ways of losing your data besides drive failures, that backup of important data is mandatory.Quote from: amyk on April 30, 2022, 02:24:59 am5 1/4" drives would be slooooooow, compared to 3.5" disks, and spinning rust is already slow compared to SSDs. The seek times would be significantly longer, and also the large platters cannot be driven to the high RPMs of modern disks without starting to wobble.There is a reason why, back in the day, the highest performance harddisks generally were 2.5". Even many 3.5" harddisks used smaller platters.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 11:15:56 am
content: I don't want a fast disk, I want a reliable disk!

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 11:24:40 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on April 30, 2022, 11:15:56 amWould you spend $300 on a 7-10 year warranty "enterprise" drive, $200 on a "nas grade" 5 year warranty drive or $150 on a 2-3 year warranty "desktop" grade drive?That's the problem... people chase the lowest prices.Personally, I go for "nas grade" drives for longer warranty and don't mind paying 20-50$ over the price of a cheap drive. I recently went and bought a 4TB WD Red Plus drive because I didn't want SMR drive, and those Red Plus are guaranteed to be CMR drives (and most 8 TB and higher are CMR in WD's lineup)I would rather spend $400 for 2 drives instead of a single enterprise drive, because at least if one drive fails, there's the other as spare until the warranty replaces the drive or I buy another.The "enterprise" drives may be better or faster, but they still fail, infant mortality, random failures, their MTBF is just a bit better than the other drives MTBF, you're not guaranteed it won't fail.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 12:39:52 pm
content: Quote from: jpanhalt on April 29, 2022, 06:28:01 pmNo, it's not just "dogma and semantics".RAID protects against precisely one thing, and nothing more: drive failure.It doesn't protect against any other form of data loss. It doesn't protect against natural disasters, theft, software failure, or human error.The key difference between backups and redundant storage is that in the latter, the redundancy data is always updated simultaneously with the original. (In the case of mirroring, the mirrored copy is updated simultaneously.) It's redundancy of your normal working data.Backups, on the other hand, are separate copies made periodically, but not in real-time. In proper backup systems, versioning is also implemented, so that rolling back to a prior version is possible.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 12:43:13 pm
content: Quote from: james_s on April 30, 2022, 12:22:16 amNonsense. Drive failure is but one of a multitude of reasons why backups are needed. I've been lucky and have never lost data to drive failure (I replace a drive as soon as any of the critical SMART parameters start to rise, even if the disk has not yet thrown any disk errors, let alone failed). But I have used backups many times to recover things I edited and then wanted an old version of, or from program crashes or bugs.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 12:50:05 pm
content: Quote from: amyk on April 30, 2022, 02:24:59 amSure, but the last 5.25" drives made were the Quantum Bigfoots, which topped out at 19GB, according to the interwebs.Quote from: amyk on April 30, 2022, 02:24:59 amBy the 1990s it was clear that there was no interest in doing that, and then not long after started going the other way, towards 2.5" platters for server and enthusiast disks.Additionally, the economies of scale of 3.5" drives meant that merging a bunch of those into a RAID array is cheaper than the equivalent storage might have cost in a low-volume giant server disk. But the RAID is not only cheaper, but also far faster, and can add redundancy.I also would expect that the manufacturing yields on large platters are disproportionately higher, for the same reason that physically large ICs have lower yields, because the chances of having a bad region on a big disk are higher, for a given defect rate per surface area.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 12:51:07 pm
content: Quote from: mariush on April 30, 2022, 11:24:40 amI am reading that Seagate put a kind of protective layer on the top of the magnetic platters in their 7200.xx Barracuda lines, but without testing the reliability of the solution, and as result, the protective layer can seriously damage the tiny heads, so one day you experiment the BSY-bug, which is not only a firmware problem because behind it there is that quality of your hard-disk platters sucks.Built and tested for decent quality rather than built, poorly tested, but promoted to be great, crazily fast and cheap!

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 12:52:59 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on April 30, 2022, 11:15:56 amWell, you can buy some high-reliability enterprise disks (some types do have orders of magnitude better MTBF specs than others!), but for most things, you're better off with an array or SSD.Plus a backup. Well, two backups if you wanna do things right: one at home and one off-site. (I keep my offsite backups in my locker at work and bring them home every 2 or 3 weeks to update them.)

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 12:58:48 pm
content: Quote from: tooki on April 30, 2022, 12:52:59 pmSAS instead of sATA?or FC-disks?can you suggest something?

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 03:09:38 pm
content: WD Gold Enterprise drives are specc'ed as this :datasheetLoad/unload cycles 600,000Non-recoverable read errors per bits read <1 in 1015MTBF (hours)2,500,000AFR (%) 0.35Limited warranty (years) 5Workload (in fineprint) 219 TB per yearWD Red Plus :datasheetReliability/Data IntegrityLoad/unload cycles4 600,000Non-recoverable errors per bits read <1 in 1014MTBF (hours)5 1,000,000Workload Rate (TB/year) 180Limited warranty (years) 3AFR not specified ..So you can see 2.5 M vs 1M MTBF , 219 TB/year vs 180 TB/year etc etc ... In theory the enteprise drive is better.In practice, you could buy 10 enterprise drives and 10 nas drives and have more enterprise drives fail on you within a year.Backblaze publishes stats for their inventory of drives, and their AFR is a bit higher, at around 0.5-0.7, with Seagate being much worse, close to 1-2% :https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2021/But take their results with a big grain of salt, because they don't use the hard drives as a typical person would use them - they have 4U cases where they shove 40+ drives in a case, so they're probably running much warmer than normal, and there's significantly more vibrations compared to what a drive would experience in a normal case, or in a max 8 drive NAS system.They had 202759 drives in 2021, and 1820 died ... 1.01 AFR average, but Seagate drives peaked at 4.8% AFR ( 77 out of 1611 14 TB drives died)You'll find HGST drives ( now WD Gold and other higher end models) among the lowest failure drives.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2022, 06:48:59 pm
content: Quote from: Ranayna on April 30, 2022, 07:41:50 amIn a lot of cases that doesn't matter. I use SMR drives for backing up my media server, they're slow, but I don't care, I just kick off the backup and a few days later it's finished. If I could get a single 16+TB 5.25" drive that cost less than a pair of 8TB 3.5" drives I would seriously consider it. Doubt this will happen though.