Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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Death-of-the-disk stories usually have to deal with price. But, if you drive the density north far enough, at the price per GB level I think this may no longer be an issue.

Simplistic price (bought price) vs power budget, speed, retention time/replacement time, all gets very complicated.

I haven't had a (company) laptop in three rounds with spinning disk. I replaced my @home with an SSD in the last pre-tax-claim spend cycle. I still buy commodity USB drives to be the disks for rPI small devices, but I am beginning to wonder how long that will sustain?

The floppy->semi-floppy->USBdrive story had a longish arc, but at a lower level of penetration. Once the hardshell floppy appeared, the larger units died out pretty quickly, and once USB bootable became ubiquitious, boot floppies ceased to inform my life pretty quickly, and now with RAC and iDRAC cards, I barely touch boot media either (admittedly, the RAC card has an SD and I write "images" to it in ISO format but I keep wondering how long boot media will depend on emulating a spinning CD/DVD drive.

TL;DR This feels like right size, right time. If the spec for the backplane is good, I'd like to see this baked and shipped in other vendors. Goodbye spinning metal?

Only if cost isn't a big factor vs. space/power reqs for the specific application. For example, in my home NAS I have 5x spinning disks in a RAID 5 configuration and don't see myself switching to SSDs any time soon because doing so would be a huge cost increase for very little performance gain (network speed is the limiting factor).

I think spinning metal will be around for a while yet as a low-cost alternative when performance isn't critical. Remember, tape backups are still widely used and those things are ancient by tech standards.

At some point the lines on the graph will cross. It just keeps not happening.

> I write "images" to it in ISO format but I keep wondering how long boot media will depend on emulating a spinning CD/DVD drive.

Could UEFI HTTP Boot [1][2] replace the need to boot from ISOs?

[1] https://firmwaresecurity.com/2015/05/09/new-uefi-http-boot-s...

[2] http://ipxe.org/appnote/uefihttp

Most UEFI systems nowadays can boot directly from VFAT partitions on USB drives and memory cards. Some even ExFAT. You can put your bootloader and FS drivers there.

Not for backup and long term storage. Spinning rust is far more dependable than flash when sitting on a shelf, and much less sensitive to temperature.

I know where I'm archiving my data.

How much longer do you believe this will be true? I too hold a RAID grid of 3.5" 4TB drives, which is stored offline, but every time I plug in, I think about how exposed I am to mechanical and electrical failure modes.

The smaller form factor USB drives I get for ongoing TM backup appear to have an effective life as a sealed unit of around 2-3 years max.

Until we switch away from NAND to something else (phase change etc. Every new NAND generation halves write durability.

So you use tapes?

Seriously tapes are way more dependable than disks. Less moving parts and less chance internal eletral mechanical break down. And check all the other boxes you mention.

Updated with more detail and maybe fewer typos:

I certainly considered tape and used it in the past, but there are two huge upsides to hard disks:

1. Obviously access and transfer time is much better.

2. I can access hard disks from 30+ years ago. My oldest drives use SCSI and IDE, but even SATA has been around for ages. My tapes however can only be read of the particular branch of tape drives and there are an infinitude of standards/models around so I'd have to store the tape drive along with it. I'm not sure I'd be able to restore my father old backups as the tape drive was some weird PC thing.

A few years ago I finally transferred my tapes to my FreeNAS box and breathed a sigh of relief as I don't know when I'd be able to run my DAT changer again.

So, no thanks, I'll stay with hard drives (mind you, drives _will_ die as well so you still need redundancy).

PS: I want to emphasize that I was talking about shelf life. For data sitting in a good NAS, like ZFS based FreeNAS, I have little worries as there's redundancy and weekly scrubbing (and I do have a backup of that as well). I do worry a great deal about any data that might sit on a USBKey or an SSD in the closet.

Tapes cost a lot to get going. Most tapedrives cost about 1k$ and those are the cheap ones.

And you still need a tape library, maybe with a swap robot if you want to get serious about it (or swap tapes via meat robot works too)

There is some upramp where HDDs might be cheaper.

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