Some of it may be, but the fact that the LTS versions (20.04 & 22.04) are downloaded overwhelmingly more than the others seem to indicate it’s more intentional.
Im most excited about the potential for crystal based storage. Right now there is work being done to etch silica glass internally, allowing for incredibly long term preservation and durability. It can even be rewritten, though the tech is definetly best for achival purposes and is being pursued primarily by movie companies wanting high quality storage.
DNA also sounds interesting, though it doesnt seem like a good way of preserving data long term. DNA is very fragile, and seems like an odd route to take for long term archiving.
DNA also sounds interesting, though it doesnt seem like a good way of preserving data long term. DNA is very fragile, and seems like an odd route to take for long term archiving.
Yeah the 5D quartz disk is very cool.
Anyways if you think about storage density DNA isn’t that “odd”. With DNA you can store dozens of copies of the data and parity checks in a very small space so even if some gets corrupted you can still get it. I get that organic stuff has its limits but the density is just mind blowing.
Density is defintly amazing in DNA, its just so fragile. Even our own bodies have a constant degridation of our DNA… I wonder if they could take that concept and make something sturdier by using slightly different molecules to make up the chains.
Maybe shorter chains with stronger cross bonding & a gentle method of reading the chain could also help?
Its definetly an interesting route & itll be cool to see what happens with it over the next 10-15 years.
I recall watching a documentary (on Curiosity Stream maybe? I’m no longer subscribed) on data storage longevity. It covered DNA storage, which I think this PBS video w/ transcript provides more recent coverage of its developments. As well as holographic storage, which I could only find the Wikipedia page for.
As for which one I think might be the future, it’s tough to say. Tape is pretty good and cheap but slow for offline storage. Archival media will probably end up all being offline storage, although I could see a case for holographic/optical storage being near line. Future online storage will probably remain a tough pickle: cheap, plentiful, fast; select at most two, maybe.
Those companies are such a drag for human society because they are afraid of their bottom line. the Music Industry and Amazon also would have burned down the Library of Alexandria if they had deemed it worrisome to their profit.
You say that data is critical for your business, have you considered a cloud backup as well? AWS has very cheap storage options depending on the speed the file needs to be available at. Also I’d definitely not go with flash memory, bit flips can be a real danger. I’d go with a 1 TB HDD in an enclosure, additionally to a cloud backup
OP already says that multiple backups and cloud copies exist. I do not recommend mechanical hard drives because they’re inherently fragile. If OP really needs high-quality long-term archival storage that is robust and lasts forever, I will recommend a tape drive and do so with a straight face.
Bit-flipping is, frankly, a non-issue to such an extent that even considering it seriously is moving into tinfoil hat territory.
This was what I was thinking about. I would definitely not use gdrive a a critical backup and the glacier tier at aws should be sufficient and cheaper than a hdd for years
Backblaze B2 is another option. Not sure if its as cheap as Glacier as its hard to compare usage based billing.
I pay about $1-2 USD/mo for 100GB. Storage is about $0.02/day, The rest of the cost is access costs.
I use rclone to do my own encryption. Most of the cost is probably backing up my phone nightly (Round Sync which is rclone on Android). Specifically signal results in a new 400Mb backup every night with 99% of the same data as the last backup.
On its own, no, but it can be used, like any cloud storage solution, as part of a robust backup strategy. Particularly, if the desktop sync feature is enabled, every client machine that has the sync application installed will download and synchronise the contents of the Google Drive locally. If the Google Drive servers go kaput this still means you’ve essentially got several off-site backup copies of the data on Google Drive.
I agree with tapes if the data is large and not accessed frequently. Magnetic tapes are still one of the most information-dense mediums, surprisingly. WORM tapes are Write Once Read Many and are used by serious large enterprises for long-term archival storage.
If you avoid QLC drives, keep it at a reasonable temperature, and don’t use a drive that’s had a large number of write cycles, it will be fine for a year.
I would definitely read everything on the disk yearly so the controller can detect any weak blocks and rewrite them though. A good way to read everything would be to take a checksum. You can then compare that to the previous checksum to make sure the files haven’t changed too.
Mechanical drives have issues with long term storage as well. When hard drives get older, sometimes they will just refuse to spin up after sitting for a long time.
Chances are enterprise drives will last far longer than 5 years easily in my experience, but in my opinion 15% off isn’t enough to justify not having a warranty. I see those sales often enough on legitimate drives.
Enterprise drive sales aren’t restricted in anyway, you just need to buy them from a reputable seller. I personally would avoid Amazon, there are tons of “deals” like the one you found on there and they don’t make it obvious. A legitimate seller example - www.connection.com/product/…/41308811?cac=Result
I was a bit off, they were 15% cheaper than the Ironwolf on the same website/from same seller (156, not USD, vs 179, not USD).
For a better comparison, I went to WD’s official store and for what I spent on these two 8TB Exos (312, not USD) I can get two 4TB Red Plus (310, not USD). Can’t make a direct comparison with other Seagates because their “buy now” section redirects me to Amazon, which, as you said, is not the best since they allowed third party sellers, but on there the 8TB Ironwolf is 250 (!!).
As you already know, I’m not in the US so I can’t buy from there. Unfortunately, Seagate’s “buy now” section (which should be official retailers) brings me to either Amazon or other chains that don’t have much else besides portable drives.
At this point I have two options, really: try again the same online store (which is kinda like Amazon, many third party sellers), but getting Ironwolf, which should be more likely to be “legit”, and of course check them as well when they arrive, or settle for two 4TB WD Red Plus (which isn’t ideal as I’m already nearing 2.5TB total, but should allow me to get by a while longer) bought directly from WD.
edit: looking at the link you provided, I paid 30% less for my Exos. Would that sway you towards keeping it without warranty (apart from the seller’s, which is one year I think)? Mind that I don’t need enterprise-grade drives, and I think even NAS drives are overkill for my needs. For example a WD Blue with its 55TBW per year might be enough for me (that’s 150GB a day everyday for a year, which is above my average writes), but those don’t come big enough (I need 6TB min to be comfortable) nevermind, they do come in 8TB size, just at a lower spinning speed (5640rpm), but they cost more (267) than the Ironwolf, and are SMR and have 128MB cache. Sounds like a bad deal!
Care to elaborate? Seagate is one of my favorite brand. And i read a lots of reviews and tech articles before purchasing any components. I am curious to learn about what i have missed about them. Thx
A lot of people have very strong opinions of brands based on a woefully inadequate sample size. Typically this comes from a higher than expected failure rate, possibly even much higher than expected. It could’ve been a bad model, a bad batch at manufacturing, improper handling from the retailer, or even an improper running environment. But even the greediest data hoarders only have a few dozen drives, often in just a couple of environments and use-cases.
Very few of these results are actually meaningful trends. For every person that swears by WD and will never touch a Seagate, there’s someone else that swears by Seagate and will never touch another WD. HGST and Toshiba seem to have a very slight edge on reliability, but it’s very small. And there are still people that refuse to touch them because of the “Death Star” drives many years ago.
It’s also very difficult to predict which models will have high failure rates. By the time it becomes clear one is a lemon, they’re already EoL.
I avoid buying WD new because of their (IMHO completely illegal) stance on warranty, but I’m comfortable buying their stuff used.
Don’t worry too much about brand. Instead go for specs and needs. Follow a good backup strategy and you’ll be fine
HGST is a part of WD and has been for quite a while.
But a big part of why the average consumer drive kind of sucks is that there is way more money in enterprise level drives so very little resources get put toward client drives.
Owned by, yes. Have their operations actually been integrated though? I haven’t checked in a long time, but it was still a separate division last time I did.
You would think ppl on Lemmy are somewhat more able to read, understand and interpret data like published by backblaze but it seems like they are just as everywhere blind because of a onetime experience 10 years ago (3tb constallation drivr by Seagate)
To summarize a few details, the PM1633A is a SAS3 (aka SAS 12 Gbps) SSD drive, which accepts an SFF-8482 plug. This SFF-8482 plug is the one named in the SAS3 standard for use on drives. You mention the LSI 9311 HBA, which does support SAS3 and has a pair of SFF-8643 receptacles, which is specified in the SAS3 standard for use on backplane aggregators. That is to say, when multiple drives are bundled up onto a single cable.
When used for SAS3, SFF-8643 supports up to four drives. And so you will find forward-breakout cables online that go from SFF-8643 to 4x SFF-8482.
The cable you mentioned – an SFF-8643 to SFF-8639 – is meant for U.2 drives. Because of the 4x PCIe lanes used for U.2, a single drive uses all the pins in an SFF-8643 plug, which is why this cable can only attach to a single drive. Because SFF-8639 is backwards compatible with SFF-8482, this could still be used for SAS3 drives, but it would waste the other three “lanes” in the cable.
With all that said, I would not recommend the cable you listed, and instead replace it with the aforementioned forward-breakout to 4x SFF-8482. This way, you can later buy three more SAS3 drives. I presume you’re not planning to ever use U.2 here.
Also, regarding the choice of HBA, was there a reason you chose the 9311? I have both the venerable 9300-8i and a newer 9305-16i. Both work great for me and support SAS3. It’s notable that power and heat is lower on the 9305. The 9300, 9305, and 9311 all have the same pair of SFF-8643 connectors.
Thank you for the much needed help. I have been clueless and trying to find a decent inexpensive solution.
QA: Q “was there a reason you chose the 9311?” A: no, only that it looked nice.
The 9300-8i is 1/4 the price so I will go with it.
I took a gamble on a cheap used drive purchase at $500 for local game installs. The drive arrives in 2 days. I couldn’t find out what connection type the drive had or power delivery needs
Here are the products I have selected based on your recommendation. Do these look like good choices?
The first link is an SFF-8087 to 4x SFF-8482. While this cable could technically support SAS3 speeds, the SFF-8087 connector was specified for SAS2, not SAS3. As a result, you won’t really find any HBAs that have an SFF-8087 connector and do SAS3 over it. This cable is incompatible with the 9300-8i from your second link. I would choose something more like this: www.amazon.com/dp/B01GPD5KFK . Also be advised that if your SSD isn’t recognized with this cable, the reviews mention that the 3.3v power pin – if you have one at all – might need to be disabled, to avoid PWDIS issues.
For the second link, that Inspur 9300-8i appears identical to the HBA I have, and it’s worked fine for me, although I only have SAS2 drives hooked up to it right now. The nice thing is that the listing advertises “IT mode”, which was important to me, because burning firmware to switch to IT mode is a sad experience.
EDIT: BTW, when you receive this drive, you should probably dump the SMART data to see how much lifetime is left on this SSD. This is an enterprise SSD, so it’s possible that it came from several years of use as a caching drive in a server somewhere. That could do a number to its remaining lifetime, but I would imagine its performance would fit well for your use-case.
An aside: one-to-many breakout cables have a forward and backward variety, and care must be taken to avoid buying the wrong one. This link explains the difference, which is still applicable to SAS3: …unraid.net/…/6723-sas-to-sata-cables-forward-or-…
Note that some combinations of backwards breakout cables simply don’t exist, so there might be only one version available for sale. Still, read the product descriptions carefully for which end is meant for the HBA and which end goes to drives or the backplane.
BTW OP: when you get this set up, please run some benchmarks and tell this community how it performs. I’ve had a free PM1633A sitting on my desk for 1.5 years, just because I haven’t gotten around to it. I’m keen to know how it behaves.
Sure, I would love too. Do you know what software to run in Windows to provide good results? I can temporarily attach it to my linux machine if necessary
I’m afraid I don’t have much experience with benchmarking in Windows. I think I’ve seen CrystalDiskMark mentioned in a few places, and it’s FOSS under MIT License.
Cool, I will give it a try. I may install it to my linux machine and access over samba. I need to test if game installs will work over network like this first
100TB, external enclosures, no backups 🤔 I would pickup a used storage server with a lot of drive bays from eBay. The external bays seem attractive but I’ve never heard good stories about performance or reliability.
datahoarder
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.