Technology

Yeah, nvme drives show how little space the storage takes up. Just stick a bunch of them inside the 3.5" format, along with a controller and cooling, and that would be great for a large/slow (relative to NVME) drive capped by SATA speeds.

I don't miss the noise hard drives make, plus it's nice to not really worry as much about what kind of magnetic activity might be going on around it, like is my subwoofer too close or what if my kid somehow gets her hands on a powerful magnet and wants to see if it will stick to my PC case.

100%. 36tb is peanuts for data centres

I'd want to be able to lose two drives in an array before I lose all my shit. So RAID 6 for me.

Repeat after me: RAID is not a backup solution, RAID is a high-availability solution.

The point of RAID is not to safeguard your data, you need proper backups for that (3-2-1 rule of backups: 3 copies of the data on 2 different storage media, with 1 copy off-site). RAID will not protect your data from deletion from user error, malware, OS bugs, or anything like that.

The point of RAID is so everyone can keep working if there is a hardware failure. It’s there to prevent downtime.

It's raid rebuild times.

The bigger the drive, the longer the time.

The longer the time, the more likely the rebuild will fail.

That said, modern raid is much more robust against this kind of fault, but still: if you have one parity drive, one dead drive, and a raid rebuild, if you lose another drive you're fucked.

I recall IT people losing their minds when we hit the 1TB

1TB? I remember when my first computer had a state of the art 200MB hard drive.

I fear HAMR sounds like a variation on the idea of getting a coarser method to prepare the data to be written, just like on SMR. These kind of hard drives are good for slow predictable sequential storage, but they suck at writing more randomly. They're good for surveillance storage and things like that, but no good for daily use in a computer.

I mean, newer server-grade models with independent actuators can easily saturate a SATA 3 connection. As far as speeds go, a raid-5 or raid-6 setup or equivalent should be pretty damn fast, especially if they start rolling out those independent actuators into the consumer market.

As far as latency goes? Yeah, you should stick to solid state...but this breathes new life into the HDD market for sure.

I bought a seagate. Brand new. 250gb, back when 250gb on one hard drive cost a fuckton.

It sat in a box until I was done burning the files on my old 60gb hard drive onto dvd-r's.

Finally, like 2 months later, I open the box. Install the drive. Put all the files from dvds onto the hard drive.

And after I finished, 2 weeks later it totally dies. Outside of return window, but within the warranty period. Seagate refused to honor their warranty even though I still had the reciept.

That was like 2005. Western Digital has now gotten my business ever since. Multiple drives bought. Not because the drives die, but because datawise I outgrow them. My current setup is 18TB and a 12TB. I figure by 2027 I'll need to update that 12TB to a 30TB. Which I assume will still cost $400 at that point.

Return customer? No no. We'll hassle our customer and send bad vibes. Make him frustrated for ever shopping our brznd! Gotta protect that one time $400 purchase! It's totally worth losing 20 years of sales!

I've bought 2 Seagate drives and both have failed. Meanwhile, I still have my 2 15yo WD drives working.

I hope I didn't just jinx myself. Lol