Drum HDDs?

[retina]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Buy a 25 kg bag of sand and use each grain as a bit. That is cheap.

https://xkcd.com/505/

[Mark Rose]

Originally Posted by retina

Why? Just because something is old doesn't mean it is bad. Just because it is new doesn't mean it is good.

My sensitive point is price-per-bit. So HDDs win.

Not always. Small SSDs are cheaper.

I still use spinning rust for archival storage. Though with 8 TB SSDs becoming affordable, it's getting harder to justify the spinning rust.

[retina]

Originally Posted by Mark Rose

Not always. Small SSDs are cheaper.

If large SSDs ever come into price parity or cheaper then I will have to look into failure modes and longevity to see if they can be suitable.

Has the problem of SSDs going into a one-time read-only mode and then unresponsive been solved yet? I read it was a firmware design choice, a designed-in max-lifespan thing, instead of any actual physical failure.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Spinning polished rust only makes sense for long-term storage nowadays.

A robust storage medium with proven longevity uses incised marks on a solid substrate.

The initial implementation had problems with long R/W access times and with low storage density. We can do much better today for archival data storage.

[Xyzzy]

Mel and the drum: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

[Xyzzy]

Originally Posted by retina

Has the problem of SSDs going into a one-time read-only mode and then unresponsive been solved yet? I read it was a firmware design choice, a designed-in max-lifespan thing, instead of any actual physical failure.

Isn't it better to revert to read-only than to lose the data entirely?

[retina]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Isn't it better to revert to read-only than to lose the data entirely?

Yes. But you only get one chance. You power it up, discover it is read-only, and if you don't immediately copy whatever you need NOW then the next time you try it will refuse to respond. I read it was a deliberate firmware programming choice.

Plus the trigger for read-only mode it just a counter. It isn't related to anything the hardware is actually doing.

If such tricks still haven't been "corrected" then it is very concerning IMO.

[M344587487]

Originally Posted by retina

Nonsense. My entire lair has no SSDs, they are too small for the price (and really hard to ensure erasure).

If you're doing a new build and don't use a small M.2 SSD as a boot drive then IMO you're doing it wrong. It sounds dumb but it makes builds so much neater, two fewer wires and no 2.5" drive to situate.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by M344587487

If you're doing a new build and don't use a small M.2 SSD as a boot drive then IMO you're doing it wrong.

Seconded.

My SOP now is to have the root partition on a M.2 SSD, and then bring larger HDDs online after. This requires the human to enter the encrypted file system's passphrase(s) to unlock the storage. If the machine is stolen, nothing leaks.

Also, I've empirically determined that an SSD SWAP partition allows for pretty responsive memory oversubscription.

[kruoli]

Not to mention the absurd real time performance increase!

Old laptops will run like never before when swapping out an HDD even with a ordinary SSD. Usually, that's what you want to upgrade to get a night/day experience in everyday work. I really do not mind the costs per GB for my boot and installation drive. The system has to be snappy. My personal rigs have not had an HDD as boot drive for at least eight years now and so far, I was lucky and never had an SSD fail on me. But multiple HDDs failed on me in the same time.

[ATH]