71–80 of 123 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume that the drive firmware remaps all your writes to make them sequential anyway for increased write performance.
For drive-managed SMR drives, yes, but these seem to be host-managed ones. So the filesystem has to be aware of the zones.
Does that mean the drives simply will not work with an unaware filesystem or that it will work but performance will be poor?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For drive-managed SMR drives, yes, but these seem to be host-managed ones. So the filesystem has to be aware of the zones.
> ... the filesystem has to be aware of the zones. Does that mean the drives simply will not work with an unaware filesystem or that it will work but performance will be poor?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK new generation of tape has decent read-write speeds.
Decent for tape, or decent in general?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For archival spinning rust is still massively more cost effective than SSDs while offering better performance than tape, especially for random access. I'm sure eventually SSDs will be cheap enough that HDD will go the way of the floppy but we're not there yet.
Is tape even cheaper than spinning rust? Last time I priced it, the per-GB costs were similar and the tape drives themselves are quite expensive. Tape is a more reliable backup, since the moving parts are not part of the storage, but it's not a cheaper backup.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HAMR and then HDMR are expected to allow data densities to increase by 5 to 10 times what is currently achievable. HAMR will probably start showing up in a year or two. Spinning drives are definitely not going away anytime soon unless there is a much more significant drop in the cost of SSDs.
Investment in new spinning drive technologies is going away though. Nobody wants to spend R&D money on coming up with patents and ideas which will be worthless in 5 years when SSD's overtake. Science investment requires a new technology to have a prospect of a return for most of the ~20 year patent lifespan for it to look like a good investment, and spinning bits of metal aren't that right now.
Seagate and WD are spending mountains of cash to develop technologies like HAMR and MAMR which they expect to take them up to 40TB drives. These technologies require entirely new fabrication processes, etc. Very capital intensive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For archival spinning rust is still massively more cost effective than SSDs while offering better performance than tape, especially for random access. I'm sure eventually SSDs will be cheap enough that HDD will go the way of the floppy but we're not there yet.
Is tape even cheaper than spinning rust? Last time I priced it, the per-GB costs were similar and the tape drives themselves are quite expensive. Tape is a more reliable backup, since the moving parts are not part of the storage, but it's not a cheaper backup.
6.25TB tape is $28 : https://www.amazon.com/HP-HEWC7976A-Ultrium-6-25TB-Cartridge...
6TB HDD is $120 : https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-ST...
EDIT: Commenter below points out this 6.25TB tape is actualy 2.5TB physical -- still cheaper, in terms of $/GB, but not the 4x I mention above -- closer to 2x.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For archival spinning rust is still massively more cost effective than SSDs while offering better performance than tape, especially for random access. I'm sure eventually SSDs will be cheap enough that HDD will go the way of the floppy but we're not there yet.
Is tape even cheaper than spinning rust? Last time I priced it, the per-GB costs were similar and the tape drives themselves are quite expensive. Tape is a more reliable backup, since the moving parts are not part of the storage, but it's not a cheaper backup.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is tape even cheaper than spinning rust? Last time I priced it, the per-GB costs were similar and the tape drives themselves are quite expensive. Tape is a more reliable backup, since the moving parts are not part of the storage, but it's not a cheaper backup.
I know Amazon prices aren't exactly perfect for enterprise storage costs, but they imply tape is at least 4x cheaper (assuming you are using enough to amortize the cost of the tape drive): 6.25TB tape is $28 : https://www.amazon.com/HP-HEWC7976A-Ultrium-6-25TB-Cartridge... 6TB HDD is $120 : https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-ST... EDIT: Commenter below points out this 6.25TB tape is actualy 2.5…
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Raid 01 has its own risk. If the wrong two disks fail your entire array is toast
as opposed to raid 5 where if any two disks fail your array is toast, raid 6 increases this to 3. However both raid 5 and 6 have 2 huge problems: Data inflight at write time (power/hardware failures are more likely to corrupt the array, especially silently, which is the worst outcome). Parity calculations require you to spin up the whole raid5/6 array during a rebuild, massively increasing the chance of a multi drive…
So even if you rebuild an array, a bad drive might've blown away all of your data already. If you were to compare this with ZFS' "raid" Z1 (same parity, different design) you get detection and protection against silent data corruption.