this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

When I bought my first PC about 1982. The seller told me that I would never live long enough to fill up the 10MB drive. I still bought the 40MB drive and it was still too small.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think you might be off by a few years at least, a 40MB drive in 1982 would've been incredibly uncommon.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Idk man.

In the 1980s 8-inch drives used with some mid-range systems increased from a low of about 30 MB in 1980, to a top-of-the-line 3 GB in 1989.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives

Seems like 30MB wasn't horribly uncommon in "mid-range systems" in 1980, so I doubt that 40MB in 1982 would've been "incredibly uncommon."

But I've no personal experience from the time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Mid-range systems" is not referring to personal computers. "8-inch drives" is another clue.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

True, he did say PC, fair enough.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I remember getting a 2 GB hard drive and thinking I'll never be able to fill it up. Now I have video files more then 10 times that size

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Awesome can't wait til they're cheap so I can replace my many hard drives with just one much larger one.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Make sure you buy two of them so you've got a backup. I'm uncomfortable storing 16TB worth of data on one drive, no way am I putting 32TB of anything I give a shit about onto one drive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

If you have 20TB of data to store, a single drive is safer than splitting it across multiple drives. Few point of failure in total.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (20 children)

If you are storing your own data a single drive is asking to lose all your data.

3 2 1 for all your important data.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

You are not ready to be lecturing on this topic.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This single point of failure equals to putting all of your eggs in the same basket.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

If it's split up sure, but I'm talking about a raid > 0 setup and/or having backup copies of your data onto drive #2

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

First, if you have more than one disk, you should be either getting redundancy through mirroring, or building arrays of several disks with redundant methods like RAID5 / RAID6 / ZFS zraid2.

Second, no single copy of data is safe, you must always have recent, tested backups.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

You can buy large second hand enterprise hard disks for relatively cheap. 20TB disks are like 250 bucks.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Still not enough to hold all my porn.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Holy shit how addicted are you?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Least addicted porn downloader.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

I look forward to a Backblaze analysis in a few years.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wonder what the bit error rates are like at that density in practice.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

They're actually 128TB drives, but everything has to be written four times.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

TL:DR; Bigger drives reduces the risk of data loss overtime. Please backup your data. RAID is not a backup.

As drives get bigger and bigger, the emotionally risk you feel when you fill them up is real. However, that is not the best way to think about it. Drives will inevitably fail, and drives are easily replaced commodities, their failure should be expected, and handled appropriately. RAID is not a backup, and does not reduce your risk of drive failure. RAID creates a safer environment for your data when a drive fails. How you should think about RAID is as if you are replacing a failed drive in advance, not as a reduction of risk of the drive failing.

To illustrate my point, we have Y of data to store. I can either split the data across X number drives, or store it all on a single drive. Which is safer? A single drive is objectively safer, given the same failure rate. So we have two cases for this situation. In both cases, this imaginary drive fails 10% of the time. The exact amount doesn't matter so long as they are reasonably close.

Case A: You have 1 drive holding all your data. There is a 1/10 chance it fails. Your risk is 10%.

Case B: You have X drives holding all your data. Each drive has a 1/10 chance of failing. so a 1−(9/10​)^X chance any of the drives fail. For all of X, your rate of failure is higher than 1/10. For two drives you have 19% chance of failure, three drives is 27%.

In all cases your rate of failure increases the more drives you add to hold your data. Please do not become confused by what RAID does for this illustration. RAID will not prevent drive failures. RAID allows you to, in essence, "pre-fail" a drive in advance. A drive will fail, and some RAID configurations(1,5,6) will replace the functionality of the failed drive until you can replace the "real" failed drive. RAID did not prevent your drive failure, it only moved the time the failure happened to be convenient for the user. A RAID1 array with a failed drive is still a failed drive that needs to be replaced, and still needs to be restored from backup/re-striped.

Let's take the cases of no RAID vs RAID1.

Case A: You have 1 drive holding all your data. When the drives fails, you stop your work, and replace the drive immediately.

Case RAID1: You have 1 drive holding all your data. You continue working because you've been very busy. You replace the drive when you have some downtime a week later.

In Case A, you had lost productivity because the drive failed at an inconvenient time, in the RAID1 case you could schedule the drive replacement for a later date when you had some spare time, huge improvement in the user experience. But wait! I said in the case of RAID1 only one of the drives was holding my data, should I have said 2 drives were? Yes, in a literal sense the RAID1 holds a copy of the data in the second drive. However, RAID is not a backup, it is a system to schedule the time of drive failures. Your backup of the RAID array is what holds a real second copy of your data, not your mirrored drive, because RAID is not a backup. Your second drive was still present in Case A, it was just replaced after the failure occurred, rather than before the first one failed.

Be safe with your data. please make backups, and verify you can restore from them regularly. RAID is not a backup.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Bits of what you wrote are reasonable, but your premise is incorrect.

Consider a scenario with a degraded RAID 1 array comprised of two 1.6 TB disks capable of transferring data at a sustained rate of 6 Gbps: you should be able to recover from a single disk failure in just over half an hour.

Repeat the same scenario with 32 TB members, now we're looking at a twelve hour recovery - twelve hours of intensive activity that could push either of your drives over the edge. Increasing data density actually increases the risk of data loss.

Finally, we say you shouldn't think of RAID as a backup because the entire array could fail, not for the excruciatingly literal reasons you are attempting to convey. If you lose half of a two disk mirror set, you haven't lost any data.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your RAID may fail a disk, but you still have your data on another disk(s). It is not a backup since data is replicated and deletion , means deletion...but raid gives you breathing room to recover from disaster

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's enough for the entire filmography of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in beautiful 1080p (upscaled using world class software), and it would probably still be enough for some of the early shows of Cartoon Network, at least in 480p.

But then it would take ages to load anyway since it's a hard drive and therefore has moving parts, leading to a significantly higher failure rate.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ages is an understatement. This drive uses two new technologies that essentially expand the track momentarily plus smr

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Eons perhaps?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Found the anti-HDD drama queen

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Will raid 6 still be viable at this size or will this require something like raid 10 or even moving beyond raid.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My solution is RAIDZ5 and storing the backup on LTO6 tape with parity/erasure code. I think the fact that scrub times take 24 hours even on 16TB drives is already over the safety margin. If a drive failure happens, the first thing I'll do to run a manual diff backup which should take a fraction of the time and then run the ZFS resilver.

I'm beginning to see why SSD RAID is being considered now. My guess for HDDs in enterprise is that a RAID 15 (I made this up) would be considered. What I mean is data is stored on two identical servers each running RAID5 or 6. Off the shelf solutions like Gluster exist and that seems to be gaining traction at least according to Linus Tech Tips.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

SSD RAID is actually very common outside of home use! And yeah, clustered filesystems help overcome many of these limitations, but tend to be extremely demanding (expensive hardware for comparable performance). Network almost immediately becomes the bottleneck. Even forgetting about latency and other network efficiency concerns, 100 Gbps isn't that fast when you have individual devices approaching 16 Gbps.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

ZFS has triple parity support for RAID-Z (basically RAID-5/RAID-6/RAID-7 with better data safety guarantees), so there's that.

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