Hard drives have longer shelf life than unpowered SSD. HDD are a good middle ground between SSD speeds, tape drive stability, and price they won’t go anywhere. The data world exists in tiers
The flaw with hard drives comes with large pools. The recovery speed is simply too slow when a drive fails, unless you build huge pools. So you need additional drives for more parity.
I don’t know who cares about shelf life. Drives spin all their lives, which is 5-10 years. Use M-Disk or something if you want shelf life.
Right up until an EMP wipes out all our data. I still maintain that we should be storing all our data on vinyl, doing it physically is the only guarantee.
Tape will survive, SSDs will survive. Spinning rust will die
Hard drives have longer shelf life than unpowered SSD. HDD are a good middle ground between SSD speeds, tape drive stability, and price they won’t go anywhere. The data world exists in tiers
The flaw with hard drives comes with large pools. The recovery speed is simply too slow when a drive fails, unless you build huge pools. So you need additional drives for more parity.
I don’t know who cares about shelf life. Drives spin all their lives, which is 5-10 years. Use M-Disk or something if you want shelf life.
Tape is rated to a 30-year shelf life under ideal conditions.
Exactly, if you need shelf life, you use tape. Shelf life isn’t really a consideration for hard drives or SSDs in real life scenarios.
That’s all circumstantial.
Right up until an EMP wipes out all our data. I still maintain that we should be storing all our data on vinyl, doing it physically is the only guarantee.
Microsoft has project Silica where they store data in glass. Being electromagnetic field-proof is one of the stated goals.
That’s a WORM medium though, so really purely for storage. Which is still extremely useful of course.