Good quality 2tb SATA hard drives

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

But google isn't about personal computers either, it's a huge server farm.
In fact it's several server farms, highly spread out over the world.

Yes, I just meant that even with huge server farms, tape use isnt universal.

As for Google not using tape drives to backup its data, that maybe true of
its online data servers, as that data is highly redundant anyways, and in
some cases it's too big to backup.

And when you have that sort of massive redundancy so you
can continue to provide a service whatever happens, there
isnt any point in tape backup as well when you have massive
geographical redundancy as well so even historical disaster
type scenarios don't need tape backup to be available.

However we don't know if it's true for Google's internal servers where it
keeps its in-house data such as accounting, CRM, RDBMS, etc.

Once you have the sort of massive redundancy
that is essential for the external servers, there isnt
any point in doing the internal stuff differently.

Most likely it isn't true, and Google does have tape backups of its
in-house data, if for no other reason than regulatory reasons.

There are no 'regulatory reasons' that are applicable.

There's entire businesses, like Iron Mountain, setup specifically for
managing off-site archival tape data.

And there is no point in google using those when it
has to have its own massive geographical redundancy
for other reasons.

These businesses exist because many other businesses require maintenance
of years-old or even decades-old data.

And google has to do its own stuff differently.

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

And since it was *your* example, then by extension your claim can't be
proven either.

I wasn’t the one claiming any proof.

In a business environment that can be justified, based on performance.

We werent discussing business environments, we were discussing
personal computers where performance is very rarely lacking anymore.

The most we see is eejuts who demand very fast boot ups who are
too stupid to use suspend to ram to get much faster restarts again.

The performance/$ is already higher with SSD, that crossed over a long
time ago.

I was clearly talking about $/TB which wont be crossing over any time soon.

Even if capacity/$ isn't fully matching HDD's yet,

No if about it, and it wont happen any time
soon either except with the very smallest drives.

some businesses may be looking at the performance/$ ratio

That isnt what was being discussed.

and saying that the capacity is good enough for certain performance
critical apps.

Yes, but that’s a tiny part of the market.

I'm thinking of HPC environments like science projects (e.g. Large Hadron
Collider) that expect to see data streaming rates in the TB/s range.

Sure, but that’s a microscopic part of the market.

That can be said for flash too.

Nope. It always costs more to have twice as many transistors.

Currently flash is low-priority semiconductors, which is produced on older
process nodes, such as 45nm, if the demand for flash increases, then they
will get produced on the newest process nodes, such as 32nm and 22nm. You
can achieve huge density doublings just by going to the latest process
nodes.

But still have twice as many transistors to double the capacity.

Flash also has the MLC (multi-level cell) feature which allows them to
store two bits per cell currently.

And that comes at a higher cost too.

This is already higher than the 1 bit per cell available on SLC
(single-level cell) flash. Next generation, this can likely be increased
to 3 bits per cell, and then 4 bits, etc. So even without a process node
change, you can still achieve doublings of capacity on flash.

Corse you can, but STILL at a higher cost.

With a single platter hard drive, it doesn’t.

See above, about MLC flash.

Still at a higher cost per transistor.

Well, I don't see that happening yet either,

I doubt it ever will myself.

as the average broadband bandwidth isn't high enough yet,

And it will take quite a while till we see fiber to every home etc.

and people find it difficult to keep storage locations straight in their
minds.

And worry about any operation going bust when so many have done that.

However, videos of grandkids are hardly straining anyone's personal
storage anymore.

They do with the laptops that is all many have anymore.

Again, we're approaching a point of diminishing returns, where capacity is
good enough.

Not with video it isnt.

Many people are finding even a 500GB drive good enough for all of their
needs.

**** all with a PVR find that.

For me, it would never be enough of course, but I'm not typical.

There are hordes with PVRs now.

There arent even that many with grandkids
that don’t have videos of them now.

That's not the market that the cloud storage people are after anyways.

Yes, but it blows a great hole in your claim about
large capacitys at home becoming unnecessary.

It will remain necessary for that reason alone.

They are after more of the Facebook-style crowd, sharing and storing
photos, maybe a few video clips, etc. Usually, they may give upto 10GB for
free on these services.

And 10GB is **** all for videos of the grandkids alone.

If you stretch the definition of cloud a bit, then even the PVR crowd is
accommodated somewhat by services like Netflix.

Only somewhat, particularly in places which
have very decent free to air digital TV systems.

Well, all cable/satellite provider's PVR's I've seen so far are limited to
recording upto 2 HD or SD video streams.

Sure, but that’s just the bottom of the PVR market.

Whether that's a limitation of hard disk speed, or network speed, I can't
say for sure.

And I can say for sure that its not the hard disk speed,
because mine does 16 fine with green 5400 RPM hard
drives. And that includes playing one channel as well.

It maybe a network speed limitation then.

Nope, its not. Mine will do 16 channels
fine on a cable or satellite service.

Well, now we're talking about enterprise stuff too.

Sure, but just because you diverged there.

This part has nothing to do with SSD's, we're talking about enterprises
replacing tape backup with hard drive backup instead.

That was just your irrelevant diversion.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

No they don't. Most get replaced because they are too small.

Few actually die.

Even with modern drives, most systems get replaced for
various reasons and the hard drive does not die at all.

That's just plain BS, I've had at least two hard drives suffer full
controller deaths, inside my PC not more than a few years ago: one of
them was out of warranty, and the other was replaced under warranty, one
was a 500GB and the other a 640GB, both cases data unrecoverable. Then
even more recently I had another 500GB that was used in my PVR die off,
this was out of warranty too.

The people who sell off their hard drives after it gets too small for
them, will usually resell it to other people in the used market. So the
drives often have an extended operating life. The used drives will be
closer to their ultimate lifetimes than the new ones, of course. But
then again, I've also had some remarkably long-lived old drives which
outlasted drives bought much after them. I just got rid of a couple of
old Maxtor IDE's that just refused to die.

One of them were showing signs of death early in its life (at least
showing Spin Retry errors), so I had bought some replacement drives &
put them in the system. I also put an IDE-SATA converter on this drive
which somehow cleared up all of its spin-retry problems, and it became
the most reliable drive I had. Some of the replacement drives themselves
died, before this one. And they died suddenly without warning, not even
a SMART error. I just got sick and tired of how slow this one was
compared to the newer drives so I finally resold it. The person who
bought it put it inside a Sony PS/2 game console.

So it's hard to predict which drives will remain reliable for long
periods of time.

Few bother with more than one drive in a system today.

But the ones who actually buy bare hard drives do have more than one
drive in their systems.

Makes a lot more sense to have everything on the much bigger drive.

Usually a drive that has an operating system on it is remarkably busy.
Keeping some data on a separate drive reduces the chances of drive
contention.

Hardly anyone is silly enough to have a
separate physical drive for the OS anymore.

Most don't have the knowledge to do it. In a laptop, you often don't
have a choice but to have just one internal drive.

But that's not a separate physical drive for the OS,

That's a much larger than 200GB drive.

So what? I had a large hard drive housing the operating system, I didn't
need the whole thing for the OS, so I partitioned it into an OS and data
sections. Drives are so large these days that it doesn't make sense to
use the whole thing for the OS. I also had other physical hard drives
which were entirely for data.

That's just plain wrong with modern backup systems.

Oh really, seriously? It takes over 1 hour to backup the 200GB
partition, it takes 5 hours+ to backup a 1TB. The same 200GB data on an
SSD takes 10 minutes or less.

And is nothing like a separate physical drive for the OS anyway.

I have several drives in my system.

It makes absolutely no sense to be buying 240GB drives anymore.

Whatever you say, Rod.

And few were silly enough to have more than one hard drive
and those who cared about performance ensured that they
had enough physical ram so that the pagefile did not get
used enough so that the location of it mattered a damn.

Blah-blah-blah, Rod, you just like to talk. The fact of the matter is no
matter how much RAM you got, you still need a pagefile. Demand paging is
a standard feature of all operating systems these days. It's utter
non-sense to think you can escape the pagefile without some
consequences. Windows allows you to have upto 16 pagefiles/system. I've
now spread my pagefiles to the 5 internal hard drives which acts like an
interleaved pagefile.

And are likely to discover the downsides of SSDs when they do that.

All of the downsides of keeping a pagefile are the same as for an HDD,
namely if the drive is slow or fails during a paging operation, then
you'll have BSOD. The upside of a pagefile on the SSD, is that it's
likely to load much faster.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I have a dish 722k satellite receiver with an OTA (Over The Air)
adapter. It can record two programs off the satellite feed and two
programs off the OTA adapter for a total of four.

The new Dish Hopper system has three tuners. During prime time one
of those tuners can record all four networks (ABC, CBS, FOX and
NBC). So this receiver can record up to six different programs
simultaneously.

How does the one tuner record 4 separate networks? Does that mean that
you can't have separate program timings for each of these networks, they
record all 4 at the same time or nothing at all?

Yousuf Khan

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

That's just plain BS,

Nope, its fact.

I've had at least two hard drives suffer full controller deaths, inside my
PC not more than a few years ago:

Likely killed by the PC, stupid.

one of them was out of warranty, and the other was replaced under
warranty, one was a 500GB and the other a 640GB, both cases data
unrecoverable.

I havent lost even one in the last decade and I have a lot more than you do
too.

Then even more recently I had another 500GB that was used in my PVR die
off, this was out of warranty too.

You buy duds ? Your problem.

The people who sell off their hard drives after it gets too small for
them,

Most don't bother, because they arent worth enough to bother.

will usually resell it to other people in the used market. So the drives
often have an extended operating life.

Most don't get sold off, so they don't.

The used drives will be closer to their ultimate lifetimes than the new
ones, of course.

There is no 'ultimate lifefime' with hard drives,
they mostly end up too small to bother with.

But then again, I've also had some remarkably long-lived old drives which
outlasted drives bought much after them. I just got rid of a couple of old
Maxtor IDE's that just refused to die.

One of them were showing signs of death early in its life (at least
showing Spin Retry errors),

That's not a sign of early death.

so I had bought some replacement drives & put them in the system. I also
put an IDE-SATA converter on this drive which somehow cleared up all of
its spin-retry problems,

So it wasn't in fact a sign of early death at all.

and it became the most reliable drive I had. Some of the replacement
drives themselves died, before this one. And they died suddenly without
warning, not even a SMART error. I just got sick and tired of how slow
this one was compared to the newer drives so I finally resold it. The
person who bought it put it inside a Sony PS/2 game console.

So it's hard to predict which drives will remain reliable for long periods
of time.

And you clearly don't have a clue about reliability.

But the ones who actually buy bare hard drives do have more than one drive
in their systems.

Plenty don't. They often just replace the drive with a bigger
one and there isnt any other possibility with a laptop.

Usually a drive that has an operating system on it is remarkably busy.

Not when you have enough of a clue to have enough physical ram.

Keeping some data on a separate drive reduces the chances of drive
contention.

Not when you have enough of a clue to have enough physical ram.

Most don't have the knowledge to do it.

Most who do know how to do it don't bother anymore.

In a laptop, you often don't have a choice but to have just one internal
drive.

In fact you hardly ever have a choice with
a laptop and plenty only have a laptop now.

So what?

So your line that 200GB is plenty for most is just plain wrong.

I had a large hard drive housing the operating system, I didn't need the
whole thing for the OS, so I partitioned it into an OS and data sections.
Drives are so large these days that it doesn't make sense to use the whole
thing for the OS.

That's just plain wrong with laptops.

I also had other physical hard drives which were entirely for data.

And very few laptops have that. And there arent all that many
desktops with more than one physical hard drive either.

Oh really, seriously?
Yep.

It takes over 1 hour to backup the 200GB partition,

Then you need a better backup system, and the OS drive
doesn't need all that much backing up anyway, just a
backup when you have done a major reconfig etc.

it takes 5 hours+ to backup a 1TB.

Not with a decent backup ute that doesn't
mindlessly backup the entire 1TB drive it doesn't.

The same 200GB data on an SSD takes 10 minutes or less.

Who cares when you hardly ever backup the OS drive
and only a fool sits around while it happens anyway ?

I have several drives in my system.

So do I, but most don't, and that's what matters when discussing
whether SSDs will replace all hard drives any time soon.

Whatever you say, Rod.

Only eejuts buy hard drives that small when
they can get a 1TB drive for the same price.

And for MUCH less with a hard drive instead of an SSD too.

Blah-blah-blah, Rod, you just like to talk.

You never ever could bullshit your way out of a wet paper bag.

The fact of the matter is no matter how much RAM you got, you still need a
pagefile.

But the reality is that it isnt USED when you have enough physical ram.

Demand paging is a standard feature of all operating systems these days.

But the reality is that it isnt USED when you have enough physical ram.

It's utter non-sense to think you can escape the pagefile without some
consequences.

But the reality is that it isnt USED when you have enough physical ram.

Windows allows you to have upto 16 pagefiles/system.

But the reality is that it isnt USED when you have enough physical ram.

I've now spread my pagefiles to the 5 internal hard drives which acts like
an interleaved pagefile.

And if you had a clue you'd have enough physical ram so it isnt USED.

All of the downsides of keeping a pagefile are the same as for an HDD,

Wrong. Having the page file on an SSD wears it out much faster,
particularly if you are stupid enough to not have enough physical ram.

namely if the drive is slow or fails during a paging operation, then
you'll have BSOD.

You don't get a BSOD when the page file is
slow and on the only hard drive in the system.

And a hard drive is MUCH less likely
to fail during a paging operation too.

The upside of a pagefile on the SSD, is that it's likely to load much
faster.

And anyone with even half a clue has enough physical
ram so that the page file isnt used at all except in the
boot phase which if you have even half a clue only
happens every few months even with Win.

 

[Rod Speed]

Daniel Prince wrote

How does the one tuner record 4 separate networks?

He never said one tuner did.

Does that mean that you can't have separate program
timings for each of these networks, they record all 4 at
the same time or nothing at all?

Nope. Even when there are dozens of channels on one
mux, any decent system can have the record times
specified for each of the channels on a particular mux.

And my quad card had 4 tuners and I can have as many
of those cards in the system as I like. I don't because we
only have 4 transmitters here.

 

[Daniel Prince]

How does the one tuner record 4 separate networks?

I do not really know. This is what I have read in Message-ID:
<[email protected]>

As I understand it, local big-4 networks for a given area
are on the same sat and transponder. Through a combination
of hardware and software, this unit uses one tuner to
capture and record all 4 network signals at one time, but
only during the prime time period. Other times of the day
and night, the 3 tuners work with only channel each. So
during prime time hours, you can get up to 6 recordings (the
big-4 plus 2 more) simultaneously - other times, only 3.

Does that mean that
you can't have separate program timings for each of these networks, they
record all 4 at the same time or nothing at all?

Yousuf Khan

Since I decided to buy a 722k instead of the Hopper, I did not learn
everything about the Hopper. I think it has a mode in which it
automatically records everything on the four networks but that it
can also record just what the user wants it to record.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I do not really know. This is what I have read in Message-ID:
<[email protected]>

As I understand it, local big-4 networks for a given area
are on the same sat and transponder. Through a combination
of hardware and software, this unit uses one tuner to
capture and record all 4 network signals at one time, but
only during the prime time period. Other times of the day
and night, the 3 tuners work with only channel each. So
during prime time hours, you can get up to 6 recordings (the
big-4 plus 2 more) simultaneously - other times, only 3.

Ah, okay, I'm most familiar with the cabled HD PVR's (i.e. both
cablevision and satellite), not the over-the-air types. The cabled PVR's
are most limited to two channels simultaneously per settop box. You
might be allowed upto 3 or 4 settop boxes in a house, so that might work
out to upto 8 independent channels simultaneously, but spread over
several boxes. Since this seems to be a standard limit with most
providers, I assumed it was hardware limitation, likely a network
bandwidth issue. You have a lot more flexibility in the over-the-air
receivers, as there is no maximum bandwidth in over-the-air broadcasts,
you just need to add more frequencies.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Rod Speed]

Daniel Prince wrote

Ah, okay, I'm most familiar with the cabled HD PVR's (i.e. both
cablevision and satellite), not the over-the-air types. The cabled PVR's
are most limited to two channels simultaneously per settop box. You might
be allowed upto 3 or 4 settop boxes in a house, so that might work out to
upto 8 independent channels simultaneously, but spread over several boxes.
Since this seems to be a standard limit with most providers, I assumed it
was hardware limitation, likely a network bandwidth issue.

Fraid not. You get all the channels you have paid to be
able to view live, so there is no technical reason why
you cant record them all if you want to bandwidth wise.

The settop boxes don't order the channels you want
to watch when you select the channels you are
watching except with pay per view movies etc

Same with satellite and cable.

You have a lot more flexibility in the over-the-air receivers,

Nope. In fact they are LESS flexible because there is no pay per view
movies.

as there is no maximum bandwidth in over-the-air broadcasts,

The bandwidth is in fact MUCH bigger with cable than over the air.

you just need to add more frequencies.

In fact there are more frequencys with cable because
you arent sharing the spectrum with anyone else.