You can’t write software to force a repeated overwrite of specific “sectors” on an SSD?
“Maybe in a decade or two the spinning disk will make a comeback […] Data that comes off a mechanical disk has a subtle warmth and presence that no solid-state drive can match.”
Is this a joke? Why would shock-sensitive moving parts, slower speeds, and higher power consumption ever come back into vogue? Bits are bits… there’s no glamour or fidelity lost when giving up old hard drives.
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Are you joking? Don’t tell me you don’t miss the soft but distinctive noise a spinning disk makes shortly before it’s about to die.
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Best Buy does have 8TB drives. Only $229, so there are some larger drives widely available.
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Have you looked into a GPFS based solution?
It amazes me that iSCSI refuses to die off, too… it is old now, but still so damn reliable.
For us, at a game studio it’s all about speed for our active data and we ended up putting ZDrives into our newer perforce servers and keep looking at fancycache to act as an intermediate, it’s just too terrifying a concept to have your most important data stored in RAM though, even if it does copy it out to spindle behind the scenes. That and it’s windows only when our perforce server is linux.
We also confounded Perforce when we found that upping the CPU clock improved the performance of perforce even though they claim it’s not CPU-bound.
Our biggest pressure when it comes to capacity comes from our audio and cinematics departments and from archiving projects.
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Since I replaced the obsolete DVD drive on my laptop with a disc caddy, yes. Cheapest major upgrade I ever did.
It obviously was a joke at the expense of “audiophiles”. But there are situations where large amounts of data get written very frequently, such as certain types of modelling, and for those spinning hard drives still have durability advantages. If an SSD dies that’s pretty much it for the data without very expensive recovery tools, whereas hard drives with failed electronics are still reasonably easily recoverable.
Also, magnetic storage is inherently more rad-hard than SSD. I suspect future archaeologists are more likely to get data off recovered hard drives than recovered SSDs.
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I’d like to eventually put all my Blu-ray discs onto a home server - losslessly - but I’d need to buy a few of these.
Platter drives are out of the question.
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Is this a joke? Why would shock-sensitive moving parts, slower speeds, and higher power consumption ever come back into vogue? Bits are bits… there’s no glamour or fidelity lost when giving up old hard drives.
I have to agree with you. I never noticed the difference either, but a lot of the guys at the coffee shop roll their eyes when I admit to it. Still, for me, it’s all about the packaging–it used to be an art, you know? I actually have one of those limited edition Quantum 50 meg drive boxes on my wall–you know, the one with the zipper?
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Why? They are much cheaper than SSDs still, and as the price comes down you can simply replace them with SSDs. Unless you’re planning to span all your discs across one enormous volume…in which case what could possibly go wrong?
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I remember doing some work back in the 80s on putting a microphone into a disk array and using a TMS32010 to get an FFT signature, thus getting early warning of failures. The problem was the quasi-random noise of the head drives, but nowadays with analog drives perhaps it would work, and a Pi would be far more powerful as a DSP.
Just a thought.
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Because I’d have to buy literally dozens of the things (avg 25-50GB per disc times approx 1000 discs), multiply by two for mirror backup, and supply processors and power to all of these to make them accessible on a network, as well as cooling the room down and damping to reduce the whine.
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How well does that work if you are travelling outside big urban areas? Some of the smaller cities here in the UK still don’t have 4G coverage.
I’ll stick with a couple of 1TB SSDs for now. More music than I need to listen to (even when encoded as FLAC) and a good selection of films there.
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I do think storage is at a comfortable place. With the advent of the cloud, online storage and other online services it helps alleviate some of the storage problems that would’ve arisen 15-20 years ago. Back in the early 2000’s i recall having to burn CD’s to save some files that may have been taking up a lot of space because we didn’t have an “external hard drive”, which back then meant an actual hard drive and not a portable device like these days 
I think the only think that’ll bring competition to hard drives again will have to be some huge increase in the data we consume, and i sort of doubt it’ll get there soon even with 4k around the corner. Seems like a feature that the average consumer doesn’t care too much about.
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You can’t write software to force a repeated overwrite of specific “sectors” on an SSD?
If you have info on how to do that, please post links. I haven’t seen any research in the area yet.
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I used to have a ~80 MB Quantum full-height HDD. When the heads moved from track 0 to whatever it was near the center, I swear you could see the computer’s case shake a little.
If I still had it, I’m sure it’s still work.
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Don’t forget IOPS and raw speed - having 50TB drives is no good if you can’t get the data on and off fast enough.
If you have a thousand blu-ray discs, for around 40Tb, and you intend to keep them, why have raid 1? It sounds to me like you would get away quite happily with 5 Seagate 8TB drives in a box with an i3 and an ssd for the OS. There are plenty of cases that will take 8 drives with rubber mounting, and the power supply is going to be minimal - you only need on board graphics and the drives take little power even in the unlikely case they were all going at once.
A sensible strategy would be to move stuff you plan to use in the next week or so to a fairly fast 1TB drive, and then the box will behave like a low power desktop - the big drives will only spin up during copying. The normal power consumption is going to be that of a medium size laptop.
We’re talking under $2000 for the whole lot, and you won’t be buying three of those Samsung 15TB drives for that in the immediate future.
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Given the fact that lossless compression of a 1080p 60fps stream would yield about 10GB/min you might need more than a few.
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