this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
421 points (99.1% liked)

Technology

60091 readers
3252 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org 158 points 1 week ago (5 children)

It never ceases to amaze me how far we can still take a piece of technology that was invented in the 50s.

That's like developing punch cards to the point where the holes are microscopic and can also store terabytes of data. It's almost Steampunk-y.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 55 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Solid state is kinda like a microscopic punch card.

[–] lastunusedusername2@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

More like microscopic fidget bubble poppers.

When the computer wants a bit to be a 1, it pops it down. When it wants it to be a 0, it pops it up.

If it were like a punch card, it couldn’t be rewritten as writing to it would permanently damage the disc. A CD-RW is basically a microscopic punch card though, because the laser actually burns away material to write the data to the CD.

load more comments (2 replies)

That's how most technology is:

  • combustion engines - early 1900s, earlier if you count steam engines
  • missiles - 13th century China, gunpowder was much earlier
  • wind energy - windmills appeared in the 9th century, potentially as early as the 4th

Almost everything we have today is due to incremental improvements from something much older.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] corroded@lemmy.world 94 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I can't wait for datacenters to decommission these so I can actually afford an array of them on the second-hand market.

[–] jeansburger@lemmy.world 39 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Home Petabyte Project here I come (in like 3-5 years 😅)

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] quixotic120@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Exactly, my nas is currently made up of decommissioned 18tb exos. Great deal and I can usually still get them rma’d the handful of times they fail

[–] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Where is a good place to search for decommissioned ones?

[–] quixotic120@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Serverpartdeals has done me well, drives often come new enough that they still have a decent amount of manufacturers warranty remaining (exos is 5yr) and depending on the drive you buy from them spd will rma a drive for 5 years from purchase (but not always, depends on the listing, read the fine print).

I have gotten 2 bad drives from them out of 18 over 5 years or so. Both bad drives were found almost immediately with basic maintenance steps prior to adding to the array (zeroing out the drives, badblocks) and both were rma’d by seagate within 3-5 days because they were still within the mfr warranty.

If you’re running a gigantic raid array like me (288tb and counting!) it would be wise to recognize that rotational hard drives are doomed and you need a robust backup solution that can handle gigantic amounts of data long term. I have a tape drive for that because I got it cheap at an electronics recycler sold as not working (thankfully it was an easy fix) but this is typically a super expensive route. If you only have like 20tb then you can look into stuff like cloud services, bluray, redundant hard drive, etc. or do like I did in the beginning and just accept that your pirated anime collection might go poof one day lol

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] TheRealKuni@lemmy.world 65 points 1 week ago (3 children)

30/32 = 0.938

That’s less than a single terabyte. I have a microSD card bigger than that!

;)

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] ANIMATEK@lemmy.world 57 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] avieshek@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago

sonarr goes brrrrrr…

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 week ago

...dum tss!

[–] hsdkfr734r@feddit.nl 38 points 1 week ago (2 children)

My first HDD had a capacity of 42MB. Still a short way to go until factor 10⁶.

[–] 4grams@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My first HD was a 20mb mfm drive :). Be right back, need some “just for men” for my beard (kidding, I’m proud of it).

[–] I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

So was mine, but the controller thought it was 10mb so had to load a device driver to access the full size.

Was fine until a friend defragged it and the driver moved out of the first 10mb. Thereafter had to keep a 360kb 5¼" drive to boot from.

That was in an XT.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 29 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Great, can't wait to afford one in 2050.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Everybody taking shit about Seagate here. Meanwhile I've never had a hard drive die on me. Eventually the capacity just became too little to keep around and I got bigger ones.

Oldest I'm using right now is a decade old, Seagate. Actually, all the HDDs are Seagate. The SSDs are Samsung. Granted, my OS is on an SSD, as well as my most used things, so the HDDs don't actually get hit all that much.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I've had a Samsung SSD die on me, I've had many WD drives die on me (also the last drive I've had die was a WD drive), I've had many Seagate drives die on me.

Buy enough drives, have them for a long enough time, and they will die.

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 14 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.

Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)

So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh..check your backups I guess?

load more comments (7 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

This is for cold and archival storage right?

I couldn't imagine seek times on any disk that large. Or rebuild times....yikes.

[–] noobface@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

up your block size bro 💪 get them plates stacking 128KB+ a write and watch your throughput gains max out 🏋️ all the ladies will be like🙋‍♀️. Especially if you get those reps sequentially it's like hitting the juice 💉 for your transfer speeds.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 week ago

Definitely not for either of those. Can get way better density from magnetic tape.

They say they got the increased capacity by increasing storage density, so the head shouldn't have to move much further to read data.

You'll get further putting a cache drive in front of your HDD regardless, so it's vaguely moot.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Zacryon@feddit.org 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

Seagate. The company that sold me an HDD which broke down two days after the warranty expired.

No thanks.
laughing in Western Digital HDD running for about 10 years now

[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I had the opposite experience. My Seagates have been running for over a decade now. The one time I went with Western Digital, both drives crapped out in a few years.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)
[–] Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (12 children)

Avoid these like the plague. I made the mistake of buying 2 16 TB Exos drives a couple years ago and have had to RMA them 3 times already.

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Lmao the HDD in the first machine I built in the mid 90s was 1.2GB

[–] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

My dad had a 286 with a 40MB hard drive in it. When it spun up it sounded like a plane taking off. A few years later he had a 486 and got a 2gb Seagate hard drive. It was an unimaginable amount of space at the time.

The computer industry in the 90s (and presumably the 80s, I just don't remember it) we're wild. Hardware would be completely obsolete every other year.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] veeesix@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Just one would be a great backup, but I’m not ready to run a server with 30TB drives.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I thought I read somewhere that larger drives had a higher chance of failure. Quick look around and that seems to be untrue relative to newer drives.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

One problem is that larger drives take longer to rebuild the RAID array when one drive needs replacing. You're sitting there for days hoping that no other drive fails while the process goes. Current SATA and SAS standards are as fast as spinning platters could possibly go; making them go even faster won't help anything.

There was some debate among storage engineers if they even want drives bigger than 20TB. The potential risk of data loss during a rebuild is worth trading off density. That will probably be true until SSDs are closer to the price per TB of spinning platters (not necessarily the same; possibly more like double the price).

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

If you're writing 100 MB/s, it'll still take 300,000 seconds to write 30TB. 300,000 seconds is 5,000 minutes, or 83.3 hours, or about 3.5 days. In some contexts, that can be considered a long time to be exposed to risk of some other hardware failure.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›