Now I really want an open source version of this, that sounds awesome.
Does this also carry over to U.2? I thought I’d seen servers with NVMe removable drive bays.
Heh heh, read that as Niche user 
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I don’t know about u.2… I know they don’t hot swap those nvme servers, so it’s more of an accessibility feature than anything. Makes it so you don’t have to unrack the server to pull the drives.
OMGG!!! WHAT HAVE I DONE? I’ve opened a discussion thread that took off like a rocket. Thanks for all the input everyone. This has been a good read and there is lots of really useful info on this thread too! Yeah, I guess I’ll still be using hard drives as backups but I can’t see much more use for them except maybe storage. Even servers work better, faster, and more stable without klunk drives today. Admittedly this discussion has restored some of my confidence in hard drives but I have a feeling that the age of mechanical drives is fading fast. Thanks again.
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I’m not sure I believe that; as I see it the hierarchy for storage is:
- SSD - arbitrary random access
- HDD - delayed random access
- Tape - entirely impractical random access
and I don’t see a system for storage functioning well without that middle layer yet.
If I remember correctly, the write times for tape data can be a multiple of hours, and I don’t think seek times are much better. If that’s the case, the potential for using up more costly SSD resources while Tapes are written to or cached sounds prohibitive.
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The sauce could be loaded with all sorts of microbes by now. Then again some prefer moldy cheese. Who knows, it may even have anti-biotic properties at that age. I wouldn’t count on it being impervious to viruses tho. On the other hand it might all depend on one’s propensity for used sauce.
You may have a point – commercially, that is. I doubt there will be much use for klunk drives at the domestic level for long. I mean, who uses tape drives now anyway? lol (Says the guy who still uses floppies).
I’m between laughter and confusion. Lol?
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Anyone who has dozens of TB to back up.
I recently purchased 48TB of spinning rust for my NAS. Convince me that was a poor decision.
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You may have a point – commercially, that is. I doubt there will be much use for klunk drives at the domestic level for long. I mean, who uses tape drives now anyway? lol (Says the guy who still uses floppies).
Yup. That would def apply to commercial users.
Except I’m not a commercial user.
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I’ll let you convince yourself instead. I wouldn’t personally have use for that many mechanical drives unless I were selling them. My SSDs have already given me years of enjoyment. But you bring something else to mind. Could it be that the quality of the newer mechanical drives just aren’t what they once were?
Is anyone else experiencing this?
I don’t know which “once were” you’re referring to.
Back in the day, you’d have read errors that were not detected, so you could have bad data sent back to the OS.
Not to mention the old platter warp of the 15k drives or bearing failure. Or head crashes or controller failure.
All of these things are really distant memories now.
I’d say that if anything, HDDs have gotten better.
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I’ve had dozens of brand new hard drives fail on me in the last few years. These were purchased brand new. I have other hard drives 10 and 8 years old still running smoothly and reliably. Brand names seem to make little difference. Lately I’ve had terrible results with brand new hard drives and now I try to avoid buying them altogether. Think I’ll make it a personal New Years resolution: No more Klunk drives! 
Used sauce
I suspect there are in fact two distinct consumer/domestic tiers:
- non-ZFS - uses cloud backup or a single consumer tier drive or no backup at all
- ZFS (or NAS user) - has an array of drives of some kind
Group 2 I see as sticking with HDD for the time being unless as a splurge (L2ARC doesn’t count)
Group 1 though, will they buy an SSD “external backup drive”?
When you are using tunnelled SCSI over USB, is solid state that much of a concern? Possibly if you are worried about it falling off your desk.
Thank you for this.
I need to put it on my agenda to start saving for a RAID 10 backup using 1 TB SSDs. Now that sounds solid. Currently only using little guys from Western Digital in RAID 10 on LSI but probably the most stable RAID I’ve ever used.
RAID is not a backup
Backblazes tests show some differences; mainly I’ve just used it to convince myself to avoid Seagate:
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RAID is backup when you backup your RAID.
I see myself feeding my data hording with HD’s for 5 more years 
Flash has aways to go before its cheaper per TB. I dont care about speed, response time or IOPS.
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