Western Digital's 16TB and 18TB drives: EAMR HDDs enter the retail channel

The shucking has gotten harder for sure, I need a lot more force to pry them apart now. So much that I worry about damaging the drive.

Modern USB 3.2 can do 20 Gbps. That's 2500 MB/s.

some enterprise SCSI drives too. This was all back in the late 90's/early 2000's, no idea if it still happens with SATA or SAS drives...

I am also "excited" when I think about how the SSD shards blocks across flash chips and adds erasure codes, then people put the SSDs in RAID to shard blocks across SSDs and add erasure codes, then people put a filesystem on top of that that shards blocks across arrays and adds erasure codes, then put an application on top of that that writes to 3 replicas and writes erasure codes to 2 more. Now your "hello world" text file uses 8 gigabytes of storage, but at least you only lose it if there's one bug in the SSD controller, your RAID software, your filesystem, or your application. Or a tornado hits the SSD. Oh well.

HN often contains articles like "abstraction is bad", but even their contrived examples aren't this scary. I'm still pleasantly surprised when I log into my computer in the morning and still have a .bashrc.

Then bfitz proved in in 2005, and it turns out SCSI drives sometimes do it too: https://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html

Once one vendor decided to screw us, the others had no choice. It was trivial for benchmarks to work around it, too: Just send more data so the cache becomes irrelevant. The whole episode took a few months at most.

I dont remember if they flat-out ignored the flush, or started a flush but didn't wait for completion.

They clearly realized their mistake:

In 2013 researchers used the Kittyhawk project to demonstrate a novel high-performance cloud computing platform by merging a cloud computing environment with a supercomputer.

If you look at that reddit link it's about "every single comment" -- and that's about 1 TB. I'd bet that the pictures from one fairly active if niche sub would exceed that, e.g. r/battlecars or r/breaddit

We had backups and could replay all db transactions up to the minute. Still, the service stopped for more than 24 hours. It took a week to clear the backlog.

It is god damn annoying.

Sure it can. You use mdadm to schedule a monthly full scan of the RAID array, comparing both disks. It's the default in Debian.

You should also use smartmontools to schedule weekly long self tests of the disk, and nightly short self tests. That way you find out about problems when they are still small.

I haven't run into much bit rot yet, at least where it mattered, but I'm guessing I'd see more of it if I went up to bigger drives. For now, my data lives on 4tb.

PhotoStructure sounds neat. Business model may be tough. I wouldn't run a proprietary solution for data management, especially from a small startup. I just wouldn't trust it. I want to know what happens to my data, and to be able to get it out. I understand the claim you'll open source in case of business failure, but there are many other paths (e.g. bought by Oracle, milked for profits, moved to incompetent management, etc).

I would totally would pay for an open solution, if there were a good business model for that, but I'm not sure what that is. I'd pay for integration (a piece of hardware arrives on my doorstep with no futzing, and with automatic security updates, etc. and your competitive edge is trust).

I'd also consider paying for a split model, where the data management used open formats and auditable, documented open source, while there were UI/UX or search functionality on top of that. That may be what you're doing; I'm not sure. I can see some open source stuff, but I'm not sure what's open and what's closed. Or better yet, where there's a cloud model. My data lives at home, but you have low-res versions of my photos which automatically sync to my phone, which can be shared, etc. securely.

Mostly, what I want is a place to reliably be able to dump my files (not just photos), have versioned backups of everything, have an automated way to move to offline storage once a quarter as you recommended, and have some way to manage !@#%^ duplicates (I have several computers, and that makes for all sorts of messes). Ideally, I'd also have some way to securely share with people

First, while RAID isn't a "safeguard", the idea that there is a high probability of raid failure during a rebuild has been repeatedly proven to be false as long as proper data hygiene is maintained. For the most part the chance of a second disk falling out during the rebuild is exactly the same as any other day regardless of capacity.

Put another way, if your scrubbing (or just accessing the data) frequently enough to avoid having silent bad sectors the idea that there is a high probability of a drive loss during the day or two it takes to rebuild an array would also result in drive losses on a nearly daily basis.

So unless your constructing a single RAID5 array out of ten thousand plus disks, if the MTBF numbers are anywhere close to realistic, drives in a single array aren't going to be failing at a rate high enough that the chance of a double fault not caused by something symptomatic across the entire line of drives (say a firmware that wipes the drive after X power on hours, in which case no level of redundancy will save you) is a real worry.

So, the rumor is based on the idea that your increasing the RAID rebuild time from a couple hours to days/weeks on end due to the larger capacity. But this is also false, because as density increases so has the sequential throughput of the drives. AKA comparing a ~ten year old 4TB drive doing ~100MB/sec vs a modern 8TB drive doing 200MB/sec. There are some non-linearities due to the number of platters and the rate of TPI vs BPI increases but generally platter count is somewhat constant and TPI and BPI are both increasing. Now if your hitting internal RAID limits because your running modern drives on old controllers which cannot rebuild at the drives peak throughput that is a different problem.

Bottom line, your doing it wrong if RAID5/6 isn't increasing both actual as well as theoretical availability. The MTBF numbers are published to give a baseline on what the expected failure rates are.

“Should I buy a lawn mower or pay someone to cut my lawn?” You factor in the cost of equipment, maintenance, and your time for both options, then figure out which works for your budget.

If your budget is zero, that also helps make the decisions easier.

a) If I work harder and/or learn more, my salary and career trajectory will go up. There's an integrated increase over the rest of my life.

b) If I do consulting / startups / etc. on the side, what's that worth?

And you want to factor in risk, as well as not having bank account hit zero (even with risk). So if I'm unemployed (broadly speaking -- including planned unemployment like going to school), the expected value of my time hasn't changed, but the risk profile has, so my spending goes to as close to zero as I can bring it until I'm employed again.

Mirroring is for preventing hardware failures.

ZFS Snapshots are one protection against user-error. Backups are another.

Well, it literally says Enterprise Class SATA HDD on the drives.