Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
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I did 4TB upgrade to 6TB and the whole process of backing up and fixing partitions took best part of half a day with Linux.
Never heard of such things.
But I remember back in May I did a 3TB to 4TB upgrade and it took best part of half a day with Linux as well.
So these numbers seem to be real.
(With windoops, you may as well reserve one or two weeks to do same feat ;) )
That was all done with dd and gparted. The dd alone took 30,000 seconds with 150MB/sec transfer rate.
These numbers are going back to the bad old days of windopws when whole working days can be lost from a minor disk mishap.
With these sorts of bottleneck delays hitting Linux, there is potential to loose 2 working days with a disk mishap. Thats several thousand dollars per incident minimum.
Time now me thinks to ditch mechanical hard drives and go full on with SSDs for big storage.
The only thing standing in the way is high price SSD storage. Also the effort to make larger commercial SSDs a little weak.
Samsung and Sandisk aiming for 3 and 4 TB disks soon but what the market needs is 6 and 8 TB disks as commodity item.
China has ramped its production from commodity quantity 16GB SSDs to 64GB for same price in under 1 year. If they keep the momentum, the 256GB SSD would become available for similar price next year. That would then be the signal to produce 6 to 8 TB drives at affordable prices.
Their speeds also has to improve with faster sustained throughput using more parallel channel based interfaces custom built by some Linux fans familiar with FPGAs and Linux drivers. The controllers also need improving. May be they need to become big ARM chips running full blow Linux to manage these TB flash memory chips? :)