big drives

You're actually increasing the entropy of the universe by doing so, so probably better not to.

Eventually file sizes will become so large that you'll be able to warm your home in wintertime from the waste heat generated every time you delete a lousy photo.

Hmm each bit will add kT of energy. To get a Joule we'll need ~10^21 bits. Looks like maybe 16 Joules...

(Yeah bits/ bytes.. .but only bits storing information count. I'm guessing most bits in your typical byte are redundant.)

George H.

Absolutely. I only use bits 0 and 2, personally. But I'm thinking of cutting back.

Cheers, James Arthur

Grin... James, no one can every say you aren't doing your bit to save energy.

George h.

James Arthur doesn't process new information. If Bastiat hadn't said it by 1850, it wasn't worth saying.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

An old saying, true from the 70s, until nearly 2000: There are just two types of hard drives, new ones, and full ones.

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win

I estimated the payback of deleting data some time last year. It came in at something like a penny or 2 an hour.

NT

Could be rather higher if the data is incriminating.

--sp

--
Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany

The 15K RPM 600 GB SAS RAID5 array in one of my server farms is so full that it recently grew into a second chassis. That sucks in many ways.

The root problem is a 600 GB limitation on 15K RPM SAS hard drives that has been in force for about a decade now. There's been absolutely no improvement nor innovation in 15K RPM SAS drives over that period of time.

Thank you,

--
Don Kuenz KB7RPU

Bill, I don't read anything you write. If you want to respond with something funny, or informative, that's fine. I like James, we disagree about some political things, but that doesn't bother me.

I detest all the name calling. It is perhaps one of my flaws, that I expect better behavior from my allies vs opponents. (Though opponents is too strong a word.) Of course I'm often disappointed in that regard.

George H.

What is worth some effort is organizing, so you can find stuff.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

My usual supplier has 15K rpm SAS at 0.9 TB, 2.5". It also has 1 GB SSDs that are /much/ faster, and more reliable, at half the price. So the root problem is that you are stuck in outdated technology.

(I fully appreciate at that it can make sense to continue with what you have, rather than change to something new even if it is cheaper, faster, and more readily available. There can be many reasons for that.)

Or if you do regular backups. Backing up terabyte drives is sssschhhhhhlllllooooooooowwwww.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Of if you ever have to use the files you've saved ("where did I put the latest...").

And purging obsolete data so it can't be used inadvertently.

The capacity of 3.5" 15K SAS hard drives has been stalled at an upper limit of 600 GB for about a decade now. It becomes more of a problem in the enterprise space with each passing day.

"Outdated technology" seems like a cop out when brand new PCs with 3.5" hard drives larger than 10 TB are about to ship. The rationalization that users have only themselves to blame for using "outdated technology" reminds me of Dilbert's boss. "It isn't a problem if you can give it to someone else." That's what Dilbert's boss always says.

Thank you,

--
Don Kuenz KB7RPU

Perhaps a rethink of what "needs" to reside on fast spindles?

I reserve my 15K (SCA) drives for those "computations" that need more storage than I can accommodate with fast memory (DRAM) so I only keep 1TB spinning for such uses.

[ISTM, IME that 1TB is a "suitable amount" for any particular *single* workstation; but, I distribute applications across many different workstations so YMMV]

The "bulk" of my secondary (or, do we now call it tertiary?) storage is slow and cheap to replace (commodity multiterabyte drives) so I can provide as much redundancy as a particular "file" might need (instead of relying on *an* array to provide ALL of it). The downside of big spindles being that you risk losing A LOT with a single failure -- and, investing a lot of time to recover/reconstitute it all!

OTOH, there is a disheartening trend towards sluggish 2.5" drives in many machines. Or, fast SSD's -- the whole middle ground has been hollowed out (compromising speed vs. cost) in favor of the extremes.

Part of the problem is that in order to continue to increase the capacity of hard drives, the vendors are having to move to "shingled" recording mode. This allows for narrower tracks, but at a significant cost in performance - the tracks partially overlap, and this limits how you can erase and rewrite sectors.

As the vendor guys explained it to me several years ago: internally, a shingled drive manages its storage in a way that's analogous to the way an SSD manages flash blocks. Disk sector addresses are virtualized. When the host rewrites a sector, the drive writes the data to the next-available unused sector in one of the shingle zones, and then updates its internal directory and marks the sector's old shingle location "unused". Periodically, the drive controller must read and move all of the "still meaningful" sectors in older shingle zones, then erase these zones and use them for new writes (basically a garbage-collection process).

This can and does have a significant impact on performance. Shingled drives are good for storing lots of data - ideally, data which doesn't change too often - but they have a higher performance overhead, and poorer performance predictability than traditional hard drives. Great for DVRs and other media-storage applications, and for archiving; not so great for general-purpose desktop/laptop storage.

Well, the problem is I want physical, off-line backup of important stuff (that's what I've created, not the OS, utilities, etc.) preferably located in a couple places. So, getting rid of excess junk and redundant on-line backups makes some sense, in thaty it makes those CDs, then DVDs, now Blu- Ray backups fit on available media.

jon