Hard drives from the last 20 years are now slowly dying.

  • @[email protected]
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    402 months ago

    Isnt the standard preservation system tape drives? They tested the longevity of different storage solutions ages ago to avoid stuff like this.

    • BrikoXOPM
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      2 months ago

      It is. Magnetic tape is still king.

      • Nomecks
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        -312 months ago

        Not really. Disk took over when the clouds started offering cheap archiving. Tape is getting more and more rare.

        • @cm0002
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          352 months 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
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            -82 months 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?

            • Todd Bonzalez
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              32 months ago

              Ultrium media has a lifetime of 30 years after the first write to the cartridge, and that’s assuming you write to it up to the maximum number of full writes (260).

              Assuming you write to your cartridges once, store them (and the drive) in an airtight dustproof box, and don’t expose them to extreme temperature or humidity, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have complete data integrity after the 30 year mark.

              At that point, you can probably transfer all the data into your petascale holographic storage installed at the base of your skull.

        • @Manifish_Destiny
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          112 months ago

          They aren’t talking about availability. This is about data integrity over time.

          • Nomecks
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            -72 months ago

            Which is higher on an active disk pool with auto-healing.

            • @Manifish_Destiny
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              42 months ago

              Sure if we’re powering every drive. For long term shelf stable backups, it’s still tape.

    • Nomecks
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      -162 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        142 months ago

        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.

        • Nomecks
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          -132 months ago

          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.

            • Nomecks
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              2 months ago

              Sure, in the world of social media you can enforce whatever arbitrary terms you wish.

              “Hello Customer CIO, unexposedhazard on Lemmy says you’re using the term Archive wrong, so I’m going to have to ask you to stop.”

          • @[email protected]
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            72 months ago

            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.

      • @cm0002
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        2 months ago

        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

        S3 Glaciers practices are secretive, but it’s almost certainly tape based

        • Nomecks
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          2 months ago

          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.

        • @breakingcups
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          -12 months ago

          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.

          • @cm0002
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            92 months ago

            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.

            • Nomecks
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              -72 months ago

              It’s almost certainly spare space from massive S3 disk pools that’s unused.

        • Nomecks
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          -32 months ago

          How do I get Glacier instant retrieval from a tape?