91–100 of 116 posts
Why aren't you using tapes? Wouldn't that be more suited for back ups - larger and less failures. You probably don't have a lot of reads anyways?
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It's a mixture of a couple things. One is that we tend to run pretty lean and our engineers are all booked up for the foreseeable future. Linux users are a passionate community, but we can't quite justify the development time for a market segment that is not very large. Additionally, because we run an unlimited model, a lot of people would immediately sign up and back up their Linux servers for $5/month and we'd sail…
It's worth considering though that the Linux compatibility is worth more than the actual market share. Our company (with roughly 90% Mac / 5% Linux / 5% Windows users) went with Crashplan to have a single backup solution for all of the employees.
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I was thinking of a Frankendrive with 5 actuators, which can do 5 parallel reads/writes, as long as they don't overlap. But the new dimensions would probably be the roadblock.
I was going to ask this too, but start with a simple 2nd voice coil on the opposite side of the spindle, keep the 3.5" form factor and just make it longer. My guess is the motion of one actuator would disrupt the airflow of the other, since we're talking about micrometer-ish (?) mechanical tolerances. This might be able to be mitigated by interleaving which side each arm wrote to. So the left arm's heads address the…
At my first job, sysadmin and programming on a PDP-11/44, 1-2 fascinating Winchester drives were procured for it. They had clear plastic covers, and you could see everything, the disk, the actuator, which had two heads, and it was by and large square, I'm almost positive it was rotary, not solenoid based straight stroke like many '70-80s drives, CDC's famous line in particular.
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Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. We securely wipe the drives, then we sell them to a "used hard drive reseller".
Does "secure wipe" mean ATA SE, i.e. hdparm --security-erase, or --security-erase-enhanced?
With hard drive size increasing so quickly but hard drive transfer speeds basically flat, I wonder if there are long-term implications for them with respect to recovery from backup and downtime. For example, if a whole rack goes down, and they are on 32TB drives in the future, for example, could it takes a week or more for their data to get online?
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I chose to get 4 ST4000DM000 drives based on previous reports. Sure HGST drives never die, but it's cheaper to RMA or buy a single new drive if one fails, than the added cost of 4 reliable drives. Assuming only one fails, which is a risk I'm willing to take with my very non-mission-critical data. I don't read this as 'which drive to buy' but more as 'which drive not to buy'.
> HGST drives never die Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. I know you didn't mean that as an absolute, but I just want to point out 100% of drives fail. It's my OCD that makes me point this out. We have NEVER found a drive that lasted forever. There are two types of drives: 1) those that have already failed, and 2) those that are about to fail. For any data you would be annoyed to lose, you need three copies in three l…
Also, not sure there are three pieces of storage software that I trust and are readily available to me.
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Does "secure wipe" mean ATA SE, i.e. hdparm --security-erase, or --security-erase-enhanced?
For that volume I'd think a degausser would be used.
Anyone have a reason why the WD30EFRX has such poor reliability in their last table? Granted it's a smaller sample size. Only asking 'cause it's my main data hard drive...
Looks like they're offline. Google cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DNdyZ1...
Backblaze always gives great stats with these. I upvoted the story before looking at it.