[ale] Which large capacity drives are you having the best luck with?

[Pat Regan]

On Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:20:50 -0500
Ron Frazier <atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com> wrote:

> That's why I thrash my new ones to death for about 200 hours.  If they
> survive the torture, then I use them.  It's not feasible for me to
> burn them in for 3 months though.

It also probably wouldn't be a good idea to thrash a drive for 3 months
before you start using it.  You'd only be taking away more of its
possibly short life span :)

> An SSD is essentially a memory stick / card on steroids, with some
> glue logic thrown in.  Their long term reliability and quirks are
> unproven. I've had several memory sticks or cards go bad.  When I was
> teaching at Lanier Tech for a while, I always told the students to
> never store their work on a single memory stick alone, and to not
> trust the devices.

We have lots of long term reliability data for various types of flash
memory.  People have been using CF for a pretty long time now.

I have a different kind of trust in flash than I do in platters.  I once
accidentally had one of my CF run through the laundry, washer and
dryer.  I was still able to pull the data off of it.

I've killed one or two microsd cards in my phone, though.  I suspect
their wear leveling is pretty craptacular.  

> I'd keep doing those backups you like (which I agree with), probably

You won't see me stop running backups :).  I've been particularly
paranoid since I've been running btrfs exclusively on my SSD for the
last few months.

I'm running daily backups to an ext4 partition on an old school platter
drive in my laptops second bay just in case btrfs decides to corrupt
itself.

> to a type of magnetic media.  One thing that concerns me with SSD's,
> particularly when the design features are on the 45 nM scale, is that
> something like cosmic rays or geomagnetic storms, not to mention the
> EMP from a tactical nuclear weapon, could totally wipe out the data.
> Granted, if a nuclear weapon goes off, we might have bigger problems,
> but if it's an isolated terrorist attack with a small device, we might

I'm not particularly worried about either one.  Our RAM is supposedly
getting bits flipped all the time.  Our SSDs have ECC just like our old
platter drives do.

> still be having to continue with our daily lives.  I don't spend huge
> amounts of time worrying about that.  Anyway, it's taken 25 years for
> magnetic hard drives to go from 80 MB to 2000 MB, and we're still
> concerned and confused about how to make them more reliable and
> usable. I predict that the dynamics and implications of SSD's will
> take a similar amount of time.

We aren't confused about how to make hard drives reliable.  We aren't
paying for reliability.  We are paying for huge amounts of space at a
failure rate everyone will tolerate.

I imagine they'll find ways to cut corners on SSDs as well :)

> 3 copies of any data, on 2 separate media types, with at least 1 off
> site.

Number two is the most difficult in some instances.  

> I sort of do a 3 - 1 - 1 when I get around to it, which is anywhere
> from 2 weeks to 2 months.  I image the drive to an external HDD, copy
> that image to another external HDD, disconnect both HDD's, and have
> Jungledisk backing up data to Amazon S3 servers every 6 hours.  If the
> house burned down, or we had a flood or theft, I might lose the local
> copies.  I could get almost all the important data back from Amazon,
> but it wouldn't be a pretty process.  Backing up 3 computers for
> myself (with Linux and Windows), 1 for my Son, and 1 for my Dad is
> very challenging, and I'm always behind.  I'd like to find a better
> solution.

Android phones are awesome.  One of my backups is an rsync to my
phone.  I always have it with me when I leave the house :)

Pat