XPost: comp.os.linux.advocacy, comp.os.linux.misc   
   From: tnp@invalid.invalid   
      
   On 29/09/2024 22:18, Paul wrote:   
   > I would say that 6TB air-breathing drives (state on the lid   
   > "do not cover this hole), those are archival material. I   
   > would expect to power one up 20 years from now, and it will work.   
      
   Well my 2TB drives only lasted about 6 years *powered on*.   
      
   I am not sanguine about the lifetime of any magnetic media.   
      
   There are hard drives from back in the 1980s that are still booted up   
   after years in storage. Some boot, some don't, and some are just   
   partially corrupted.   
      
   Magnetic fields are no more permanent than electric fields in SSDs.   
      
   SSDS are simply too new to have any reliable long term statistics under   
   real working conditions.   
      
   The short answer is that we are pissing in the wind when it comes to any   
   long term digital storage.   
      
   We know paper and ink lasts, we have the dead sea scrolls..   
      
   We know that selenium treated photographs last at least 160 years, We   
   know that first generation colour prints are seriously degraded after   
   only 50...   
      
   We know that some spinning rust 40 years on is still data recoverable ,   
   we know that a lot is not.   
      
   Often for other reasons than magnetic corruption - corrosion on drive   
   spindles etc. Dead capacitors in the onboard electronics   
      
   A decent cosmic ray knifing through any modern electronics will fuck the   
   DRAM up  to the point where the machine may crash.   
      
   No problem. Reboot it...   
      
   There are no perfect solutions All data is to an extent written in   
   'vanishing ink'   
      
   But my current best guess is that a rolling replacement of mirrored   
   disks (rust or SSD) as they show error counts in  a 24x7 powered machine   
   is probably as good as it gets, and the smaller and slower the storage   
   is, probably the less stressed it will be. Looking at SSD current draws,   
   it is the cheaper slower ones that seem to draw less and run cooler.   
      
   The best news is that we have SMART. And failing but not yet failed   
   drives due to ageing show up in terms of parity errors. On a 24x7 system.   
      
   No one knows till they power up a 40 year old drive whether or not the   
   data is either still there, or is recoverable.   
      
      
   So my wet finger is moving towards permanently on, lower power, larger,   
   slow SSDS. From permanently on spinning rust.   
      
   My personal server was first built in 2000 or thereabouts. Debian Linux.   
   It's on its 4th motherboard and its third set  of hard drives, and its   
   umpteenth OS upgrade. but the data is still there from 2000 or so.   
      
   I am constructing, slowly, a replacement based on a Raspberry PI and   
   twin mirrored SSDs,   
      
   When its shown to be reliable, I may switch off the *86 based one   
      
   I have had another thought, and that is why we 'archive' in the first   
   place. That goes back to the days when  *working* storage was small, but   
   the need was for stuff to be available for occasional use from slower   
   media like tape.   
      
   Today, with SSDs, our *working* storage can be enormous. And fast. We no   
   longer need traditional data archives. Just leave it all on the running   
   machine, and mirror it.   
      
   If you must have 'offsite storage', rsynch another portable  drive every   
   so often and take it away to somewhere safe.   
      
      
      
   --   
   Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.   
     – Will Durant   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)