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Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

parsimo2010

I love this and I love seeing that it's from 2026 and someone still took the time to do all this testing- it must have been seriously involved because even at 6x it takes a while to fill up a DVD, and then to repeat that hundreds of times on several discs would be an eternity.

I haven't used a DVD+-RW in several years, as wireless file transfer over networks and flash drives handle pretty much all of my needs now, but I sure used the heck out of my DVD writer when I had it. I had no idea these discs could go hundreds of writes before failure, I always got paranoid about reliability and probably never went above 20 writes on a disc.

Edit: at the end of the post the author says, "that’s about 4020 hours across two drives, 5248 burns and both drives are still seemingly operating just fine." What a colossal amount of time.

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I thought two-three times. Maybe a dozen. I always treated all kinds of writeable CD/DVDs as if they were one-write and done.

To be honest, it hurts every time I write to an SSD drive — which is all of the time these days.

For archiving, DVD is 4 GB and who knows how long the medium will last.

LTO-6 drives go for 300-500 EUR refurbished. You need a FC switch or HBA. Each tape holds 2+ TB uncompressed data.

As for NVMe, if you do a lot of writes (e.g. DB's, Docker), go for enterprise. If you do that, grab one with PLP. You'd use it also as a cache for ZFS.

As overseeing backing up, from various optical media to disk, just don't use the optical stuff!

This was a huge international conglomerate, doing CD backups for decades. Now it turns out these precious backups only worked 96-98% of the time. Terrible stuff.

Actually 96-98% is not great but not terrible if you're employing some kind of parity scheme across multiple discs. It just means 1 in 20 (or 1 in 10 to be safe) extra discs in the mix.

Fibre channel HBAs really cost peanuts. Because there's tons on the second hand market and the only ones who want them are enterprises who don't buy second hand shit without a support contract (they usually dump them when the support is up, that's why there's so many working ones on the market)

So I get €300 cards for €20, it's a joke. Really great though because they're really amazing for tying storage together and they can do point to point just fine. No switch needed.

The one drawback is the convoluted software chain around it, I used to work with SANs but if you don't it might require a little investigation :) The client side is pretty easy, the target side is harder (this is the part that is normally covered by a SAN).

But the biggest problem with LTO drives and home use for me is the terrible noise they make. If 3D printers sound like robots having sex, this is more like robots getting tortured.

I made a mistake in my post. I meant to say FC HBA or SAS HBA. I went with a SAS one which I use with a HBA, but the FC ones were cheaper (both FC LTO drives as well as FC HBAs) but would've still required a FC switch). I already got some fiber through my house though, so it'd have worked well. But I went with SAS which was considerably more expensive. 40 dB ain't fun, indeed. I put my LTO drive in the fuse box.

I just checked using $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0n1

    Percentage Used:                    2%
    Data Units Read:                    7,173,143 [3.67 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 22,666,414 [11.6 TB]

That's after about 2 years of use. I think SSDs can take quite the beating nowadays.

Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 15,235,390 [7.80 TB] Data Units Written: 33,573,616 [17.1 TB] Host Read Commands: 107,051,408 Host Write Commands: 496,391,879 Controller Busy Time: 455 Power Cycles: 938 Power On Hours: 13,189

Not bad ;)

You write 3x more than you read? Seems like a strange access pattern. Maybe something is going haywire with logging?

Could be a log ingestion server or surveillance camera recorder.

7 years of use :D

    Percentage Used:                    3%
    Data Units Read:                    77,182,320 [39.5 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 83,995,559 [43.0 TB]

The oldest NVMe SSD I have at home is a Samsung 950 Pro (the 256 GB version!) which I bought in late 2015 IIRC (and put on a ASUS Z170-A mobo, that already had a NVMe slot) and which has been in use that whole time (but mostly light desktop use):

    Percentage Used:                    27%
    Data Units Read:                    48,801,760 [24.9 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 84,590,914 [43.3 TB]
    Power Cycles:                       228       <-- only 228 power cycles in 11 years, that's about 17 days uptime every time I think
    Power On Hours:                     37,153    <-- not sure about this one, this comes out at about 9 hours / day of uptime

And after 11 years it's still going strong!

Now it's not on my main computer anymore: I'm rocking a WD-SN850X (recommended here on HN when it came out) but the old Samsung 950 Pro is on the desktop computer my wife uses daily (and she WFH).

> I think SSDs can take quite the beating nowadays

For regular use definitely. In my servers I've got ZFS in mirroring though: you never really know when a drive is going to RIP.

They can yes but they do need to be powered at least once a year or they'll lose data too.

    Percentage Used:                    13%
    Data Units Read:                    686,519,123 [351 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 358,581,477 [183 TB]

4 years of gaming :P.

I wrote an article in a similar vein some years ago that might interest you too:

https://www.rlvision.com/blog/how-long-do-writable-cddvd-las...

Thanks, I read your article and my main reaction is that I'm saddened by the loss of data on those few unreadable discs. I hope it wasn't something you'll need to dig up in a few years.

From my personal experience, the article and the comments I read here they seriously undersold the reliability of rewriting. For any other RW medium (audio or video cassettes, even floppies) I remember ad campaigns by Sony, TDK, Philips, … on tv. But not for these.

I feel in general the industry was more conservative making these kind of estimates than it is today. I assume they also benefited from years of CD-RW field experience honing the tech.

Ye, having experienced the "joys" of rewriteable CDs, I completely skipped the DVD RWs, expecting more of the same. Guess it wasn't, but then again, thumb drives became a thing.

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