[csdvrx]

For long term storage, prefer hard drives (careful about CMR vs SMR)

If you have specific random IO high performance needs, you can either

- get a SLC drive like https://news.solidigm.com/en-WW/230095-introducing-the-solid...

- make one yourself by hacking the firmware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578

Be careful when you use something "exotic", and do not trust drives that are too recent to be fully tested: I learned my lesson for M2 2230 drives https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/17pztue/warning_you_ma... which seems validated by the large numbers of similar experiences like https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793

[vlovich123]

> - make one yourself by hacking the firmware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578 Be careful when you use something "exotic", and do not trust drives that are too recent to be fully tested

Do you realize the irony of cautioning about buying off the shelf hardware but recommending hacking firmware yourself?

[userbinator]

That "firmware hack" is just enabling an option that manufacturers have always had (effectively 100% "SLC cache") but almost always never use for reasons likely to do with planned obsolescence.

[Brian_K_White]

They did not recommend. They listed.

[sitkack]

Tape is extremely cheap now. I booted up a couple laptops that have been sitting unpowered for over 7 years and the sata SSD in one of them has missing sectors. It had zero issues when shutdown.

[seszett]

Is tape actually cheap? Tape drives seem quite expensive to me, unless I don't have the right references.

[CTDOCodebases]

The issue with tape is that you have to store it in a temperature controlled environment.

[matheusmoreira]

Tape sucks unless you've got massive amounts of money to burn. Not only are tape drives expensive, they only read the last two tape generations. It's entirely possible to end up in a future where your tapes are unreadable.

[fpoling]

While the tape is relatively cheap, the tape drives are not. The new ones typically starts at 4K USD, although sometimes for older models the prices can drop below 2K.

[dragontamer]

If you care about long term storage, make a NAS and run ZFS scrub (or equivalent) every 6 months. That will check for errors and fix them as they come up.

All error correction has a limit. If too many errors build up, it becomes unrecoverable errors. But as long as you reread and fix them within the error correction region, it's fine.

[csdvrx]

> run ZFS scrub (or equivalent) every 6 months

zfs in mirror mode offers redundancy at the block level but scrub requires plugging the device

> All error correction has a limit. If too many errors build up, it becomes unrecoverable errors

There are software solutions. You can specify the redundancy you want.

For long term storage, if using a single media that you can't plug and scrub, I recommend par2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive?useskin=vector) over NTFS: there are many NTFS file recovery tools, and it shouldn't be too hard to roll your own solution to use the redundancy when a given sector can't be read

[WalterGR]

What hardware, though? I want to build a NAS / attached storage array but after accidentally purchasing an SMR drive[0] I’m a little hesitant to even confront the project.

A few tens of TBs. Local, not cloud.

[0] Maybe 7 years ago. I don’t know if anything has changed since, e.g. honest, up-front labeling.

[0*] For those unfamiliar, SMR is Shingled Magnetic Recording. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

[ErneX]

I use TrueNAS and it does a weekly scrub IIRC.

[AshamedCaptain]

> (careful about CMR vs SMR)

Given the context of long term storage... why?

[0cf8612b2e1e]

After I was bamboozled with a SMR drive, always great to just make the callout to those who might be unaware. What a piece of garbage to let vendors upsell higher numbers.

(Yes, I know some applications can be agnostic to SMR, but it should never be used in a general purpose drive).

[whoopdedo]

Untested hypothesis, but I would expect the wider spacing between tracks in CMR makes it more resilient against random bit flips. I'm not aware of any experiments to prove this and it may be worth doing. If the HD manufacture can convince us that SMR is just as reliable for archival storage it would help them sell those drives since right now lots of people are avoiding SMR due to poor performance and the infamy of the bait-and-switch that happened a few years back.