Comment on Twenty percent of hard drives used for long-term music storage in the 90s have failed
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days ago
Isnt the standard preservation system tape drives? They tested the longevity of different storage solutions ages ago to avoid stuff like this.
Not really. Disk is king now since S3 storage took the crown when cloud services started offering cheap archiving. Anything still on disk from the 90s is some neglected archive that has been deemed by the company to have no value.
I would assume they’re finding this out now because they’re trying to feed their whole archive to the AI beast.
Yeah no, thats not an “archive” you are talking about thats just a bunch of storage. Archives are for things like historical, government, artistic data. That stuff sits in airtight cases on tape storage in a bunker.
Obviously any drive that is constantly in use to deliver data to customers is gonna die, thats never going to change. But these were actually intended to be used for archiving but failed at doing exactly that.
Archive is whatever companies want it to be. I’ve been told anything that’s not microfilm isn’t an archive, so there you go.
Words have meaning, doesnt matter what some company says.
You’re currently having a conversation on an article about cold storage. The comment you replied to was about this article, and hence also about cold storage. It makes absolutely no sense to come into this conversation saying that they’re wrong about how cold storage works because your experience with hot storage doesn’t line up.
Disk is king when you need lots of active storage.
When it comes to archival Tape is king. I would never trust an HDD to be left unpowered for years like you could a tape cartridge.
And a single LTO9 cartridge can hold 18TBs for dirt cheap compared to the equivalent HDD
I don’t disagree with you that tape has a different value prop, but I sell backup systems and almost nobody I sell to uses tape anymore. The truth with tape is that it’s a cheap media, but you still need to pay someone to vault it for you, it cannot be accessed easily, it makes physical moves which cause damage and tape drive tech is still one of the most complicated things in the Datacenter.
Most companies I deal with want the data to be “online” in at least some form that can be easily accessed for AI, lawsuits, new research, business continuity, etc. Tape allows none of that, and so the value of it is pretty limited. The truth these days is I can stuff a TB of data into cloud archive, with instant retrieval, for really, really cheap, with like 99.99999999999% data durability guarantees, for dollars a month.
S3 archive is on glacier which is all tape
How do I get Glacier instant retrieval from a tape?
No one really knows, and Amazon won’t say. There’s speculation it’s tape, low-rpm drives connected to custom logic boards, Blu ray, etc.
It’s almost certainly tape, a single LTO9 cartridge can hold 18TBs of data for cheap compared to the equivalent drive.
Blu-ray is unlikely, only quad layer BR have a decent capacity at 125GB each and quality ones are hard to find these days. Sony has even stopped making their blu ray based Optical Disk Archival system thing.
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
It is. Magnetic type is still king.
Nomecks@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Not really. Disk took over when the clouds started offering cheap archiving. Tape is getting more and more rare.
cm0002@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Not for long term archival they didn’t. HDDs and SSDs suffer from bitrot among other issues when they haven’t been powered and/or refreshed in awhile.
Tape is still king for long term archival, just about every major company uses it for the long term archival of critical data.
They may also use cloud archival services, because when it comes to backups if you don’t have multiple across multiple mediums and multiple places, you don’t have a backup.
Nomecks@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Tape suffers from bit rot too. Radiation doesn’t target just HDDs and SSDs. Look, I don’t know what to tell you. I deal with a lot of large companies and I lived through tape’s hayday. The cost to archive data on disk is not high and companies don’t have issues doing it. Having it on disk prevents bit rot, because the pools are massive and are auto-healing. Also, the only way that your archive is not going to be long term is if humaity ends. Seriously, what do you think it would take to destroy a multi-AZ glacier archive?
Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world 6 days ago
They aren’t talking about availability. This is about data integrity over time.
Nomecks@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Which is higher on an active disk pool with auto-healing.