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- Posted on
November 7, 2014, 11:00 pm

Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
---------------------------------------------
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? :)
---------------------------------------------
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? :)

Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?

Learn to use raid - either mdraid or btrfs with raid. Upgrading or
replacing disks then needs only a little effort as you swap drives
(perhaps powering off if you don't have hot swapping) - all the copying
is done in the background, while the system is still working.

Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
David Brown wrote:

Do you mean learn to ditch raid?
Thats the only thing I have learned so far about raid.
Cheaper to back up everything on to a 3TB disk
and file it every month than any other option.
In all these years, I don't know of one situation
where raid saved the day. All that the numerous
installs of raid I have ever seen is make an
already bad situation 1000% worse.

Do you mean learn to ditch raid?
Thats the only thing I have learned so far about raid.
Cheaper to back up everything on to a 3TB disk
and file it every month than any other option.
In all these years, I don't know of one situation
where raid saved the day. All that the numerous
installs of raid I have ever seen is make an
already bad situation 1000% worse.

Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?

The only Raid you are likely to encounter is the can of Raid at the
local fast food joint where you man the deep fry machine, 7 = Joseph
Michael.
I'm certain you are familiar with this Raid:
http://c2.soap.com/images/products/p/asj/asj-004b_1z.jpg
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
flatfish+++ wrote:

Internet trolls like you have no clear comprehension of technology.
Still, you can read the original post again and
weep if you must:

Do you mean learn to ditch raid?
Thats the only thing I have learned so far about raid.
Cheaper to back up everything on to a 3TB disk
and file it every month than any other option.
In all these years, I don't know of one situation
where raid saved the day. All that the numerous
installs of raid I have ever seen is make an
already bad situation 1000% worse.

Internet trolls like you have no clear comprehension of technology.
Still, you can read the original post again and
weep if you must:

Do you mean learn to ditch raid?
Thats the only thing I have learned so far about raid.
Cheaper to back up everything on to a 3TB disk
and file it every month than any other option.
In all these years, I don't know of one situation
where raid saved the day. All that the numerous
installs of raid I have ever seen is make an
already bad situation 1000% worse.

Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?

Copying large amounts of data will take a long time.
Linux has nothing to do with that.

The same is still true of some more crude JBOD setup. What he is whining
about has squat to do with Linux and is simply a limitation of the technology
and the bulk of data he's dealing with.
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?

Yup 100%. I think corporations should start banning large
mechanical drives and ordering up higher speed SSDs as the
default option because we are moving into an era where
a big disk crash is going to take out two days of
someone's time even if Linux backs you all the way.
So a building with 1000 employess gets a power surge,
and you are looking at 40 PCs down may be and while
you might get 20 out the door quickly, The remaining
will take 40 man days to sort out.
I remember them bad days - so we had buffer stock of
30 PCs.
I upgraded a 256GB SSD mail server in 2 hours.
If the future is 2 days for mechanical drives,
I'd rather management invested in more SSDs,

Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
On 11/11/2014 4:16 AM, Desk Rabbit wrote:

Wow, I didn't bother to read his propaganda but was he really suggesting
that hard disks run faster within GNU/Linux?

Wow, I didn't bother to read his propaganda but was he really suggesting
that hard disks run faster within GNU/Linux?
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
On Tue, 11 Nov 2014 08:49:31 -0500, Silver Slimer wrote:

Doesn't everything run faster with Linux?
lol!

Doesn't everything run faster with Linux?
lol!
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
On 11/11/2014 8:51 AM, flatfish+++ wrote:

To be honest, my SSDs run a lot faster within Windows 8 than they did in
Ubuntu or Ubuntu GNOME. It shouldn't be the case as SSDs don't require
any kind of special software to do their thing but reading and writing
was significantly slower in the open-source operating system than in
Windows. It's truly sad. Add to that the fact that the GPU ran terribly
and that the sound card had random pops and cracks and you really have
to call a spade a spade and say that GNU/Linux is shit.
Still, I'd love to see how 7 _PROVES_ that whatever he says is a fact. I
have yet to see any kind of evidence in any of his posts. It's just
random garbage.

To be honest, my SSDs run a lot faster within Windows 8 than they did in
Ubuntu or Ubuntu GNOME. It shouldn't be the case as SSDs don't require
any kind of special software to do their thing but reading and writing
was significantly slower in the open-source operating system than in
Windows. It's truly sad. Add to that the fact that the GPU ran terribly
and that the sound card had random pops and cracks and you really have
to call a spade a spade and say that GNU/Linux is shit.
Still, I'd love to see how 7 _PROVES_ that whatever he says is a fact. I
have yet to see any kind of evidence in any of his posts. It's just
random garbage.
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?

Random garbage is also a good description of GNU/Linux/FOSS in
general.
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
On 11/11/2014 9:46 AM, flatfish+++ wrote:

Absolutely. You can give the system and its software a chance a dozen
times or so but you'll just come back with an overwhelming feeling of
disappointment a dozen times as well.

Absolutely. You can give the system and its software a chance a dozen
times or so but you'll just come back with an overwhelming feeling of
disappointment a dozen times as well.
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
On Tue, 11 Nov 2014 10:30:59 -0500, Silver Slimer wrote:

That's exactly what happens.
Each time I try Linux, a different distribution, a new release and so
forth I approach it from the perspective that maybe things have
improved since the last time I tried Linux.
And each time I walk away frustrated and disappointed.
It's not that portions of Linux haven't improved over the years but
more so that Windows and OSX have not exactly been sitting idle but
have improved as well.
The truth is that desktop Linux is a poor choice for most people.
Even chrisv knows that because he and his family are Windows users.

That's exactly what happens.
Each time I try Linux, a different distribution, a new release and so
forth I approach it from the perspective that maybe things have
improved since the last time I tried Linux.
And each time I walk away frustrated and disappointed.
It's not that portions of Linux haven't improved over the years but
more so that Windows and OSX have not exactly been sitting idle but
have improved as well.
The truth is that desktop Linux is a poor choice for most people.
Even chrisv knows that because he and his family are Windows users.
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Linux: The Operating System That Put The City Of Munich Out Of
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?

*Most* of these "advocates" can't even convince their own family to use
desktop Linux. If they can't get their own family to use it then why would
the Average Joe use it?
All the FOSS apps people are likely to want also run on Windows/Mac. This
gives them the best of both worlds... the proprietary apps they already know
and like plus the FOSS apps they may be interested in. With Win/Mac they can
run both and with Linux they can't.
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
On Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:04:52 -0500, Ezekiel wrote:

Average Joe won't.
Just like the advocates family members balk at Linux.

The best FOSS applications do indeed run on other platforms.
Gimp, OpenOffice etc.

Average Joe won't.
Just like the advocates family members balk at Linux.

The best FOSS applications do indeed run on other platforms.
Gimp, OpenOffice etc.
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
On 11/11/2014 11:37 AM, flatfish+++ wrote:

Exactly. To be honest, *ONLY* the best open-source software runs on
other platforms and that is usually because there is a strong demand for
it. A certain Windows user has been exposed to something really great in
GNU/Linux and then makes an effort to bring it into his operating system
of choice. In GNU/Linux's ecosystem, every distribution makes it very
easy to get a hold of ANY software produced for the operating system
whether it is good or ridiculously awful. The result is that the
ecosystem is overwhelmed by absolute shit and you often have to go
through 7 or 8 really terrible programs before you find a half-decent
one that actually does what you want.

Exactly. To be honest, *ONLY* the best open-source software runs on
other platforms and that is usually because there is a strong demand for
it. A certain Windows user has been exposed to something really great in
GNU/Linux and then makes an effort to bring it into his operating system
of choice. In GNU/Linux's ecosystem, every distribution makes it very
easy to get a hold of ANY software produced for the operating system
whether it is good or ridiculously awful. The result is that the
ecosystem is overwhelmed by absolute shit and you often have to go
through 7 or 8 really terrible programs before you find a half-decent
one that actually does what you want.
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
On Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:46:35 -0500, Silver Slimer wrote:

And that's the problem with Linux distributions.
Couple it with programs that have idiotic names and you end up
spending a lot of time researching things.

And that's the problem with Linux distributions.
Couple it with programs that have idiotic names and you end up
spending a lot of time researching things.
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
On 11/11/2014 12:24 PM, flatfish+++ wrote:

I wonder how people were supposed to know that Asunder was the name of a
CD-ripping program. Meanwhile, it's the very best GNU/Linux has to
offer. The developers seem to be big fans of keeping things cryptic.

I wonder how people were supposed to know that Asunder was the name of a
CD-ripping program. Meanwhile, it's the very best GNU/Linux has to
offer. The developers seem to be big fans of keeping things cryptic.
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Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
On 11/11/2014 10:49 AM, flatfish+++ wrote:

I wouldn't trust anything that comes out of chrisv's mouth either way.
If he says that he has a family, I don't immediately believe him. If he
says that he has a job, I don't believe him there either. He has become
way too comfortable in calling others liars without ever producing any
kind of evidence to counter the idea that _HE_ is one.

I wouldn't trust anything that comes out of chrisv's mouth either way.
If he says that he has a family, I don't immediately believe him. If he
says that he has a job, I don't believe him there either. He has become
way too comfortable in calling others liars without ever producing any
kind of evidence to counter the idea that _HE_ is one.
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