The Future of HDD?

[BFG10K]

You can get SSDs much larger than 240GB.

And the price difference for performance drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148975
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148531

HDs only got the slow large storage segment left.

You can get HDDs much larger than 1TB too; several vendors have enterprise rated 4TB versions.

Heck, 1TB VelociRaptors are enterprise rated, and the 'Egg has them for ~$220.

 

[ronbo613]

Maybe the future is neither HDD or SSD, it may be something beyond both of those technologies...

 

[blastingcap]

Cloud still needs something to store it on. I think all that'll happen is a market shift, where some of the HDDs that used to reside in PCs will now reside in cloud data stores. But HDD use will go up because data requirements are going up.

I personally wouldn't trust cloud at all. All it takes is a connection failure at either end and suddenly your data is inaccessible. Streaming sucks too as many people have meter broadband and/or data caps. I'd much rather have a Bluray disc that I can watch whenever I please.

I agree with you re: cloud. Bandwidth speeds and costs, plus security concerns, make me not want to entrust any more than I already do to the cloud--and I do entrust a lot already (kindle, gmail, gdrive for smaller docs). I draw the line at media like my personal photos/music/videos.

 

[exdeath]

GB/s >>>>> $/GB

A million terabytes is useless to me if I can only access it at 90 kilobytes per second and want to hang myself and avoid using my computer any time I need something.

Get with the 21st century already. Nobody accesses data at kilobytes per second anymore. WTF?

My damn wireless phone has a higher transfer than the random access transfer rate of a spinning metal plate.

 

[tweakboy]

For big backup solutions, buying a SSD is pointless because they dont care about speed, it will do it overnight,,,, Grab a couple SATA 3.0 WDC ...... speed doesnt matter so thats what you should do. Grab a couple 3TB drives.... do that. gl

 

[beginner99]

Cloud still needs something to store it on. I think all that'll happen is a market shift, where some of the HDDs that used to reside in PCs will now reside in cloud data stores. But HDD use will go up because data requirements are going up.

I personally wouldn't trust cloud at all. All it takes is a connection failure at either end and suddenly your data is inaccessible. Streaming sucks too as many people have meter broadband and/or data caps. I'd much rather have a Bluray disc that I can watch whenever I please.

exactly. Not to mention that there just is not enough bandwidth for the cloud, not even close. Were I live download is ok but upload is just unusable. Only thing the "cloud" can be used is for backing up documents in the MB range which was possible a decade ago (email storage...) without the need for calling it "the cloud".

And yeah availability will also be a great issue...

 

[Jeff7181]

exactly. Not to mention that there just is not enough bandwidth for the cloud, not even close. Were I live download is ok but upload is just unusable. Only thing the "cloud" can be used is for backing up documents in the MB range which was possible a decade ago (email storage...) without the need for calling it "the cloud".

And yeah availability will also be a great issue...

There's plenty of bandwidth "for the cloud." If your upstream bandwidth sucks it's your ISP's fault - not because "there just is not enough."

I have a couple hundred GB backed up via SpiderOak. The initial upload can be painful if you're doing hundreds of GB to start with, but as your data grows and it gets sent to the cloud in near real time it's quite manageable. Restoring it is fine because I don't need hundreds of GB of my data NOW anyway. I can get a few dozen GB back that I use frequently and grab the rest as I need it or let it trickle over a few days/weeks.

 

[Jeff7181]

GB/s >>>>> $/GB

A million terabytes is useless to me if I can only access it at 90 kilobytes per second and want to hang myself and avoid using my computer any time I need something.

Get with the 21st century already. Nobody accesses data at kilobytes per second anymore. WTF?

My damn wireless phone has a higher transfer than the random access transfer rate of a spinning metal plate.

I'm pointing out the obvious, but you're thinking in terms of a desktop/laptop/workstation, which is only a fraction of the entire storage market. Speaking from experience, 100 platters spinning at 15k RPM will saturate a 4Gbps fibre channel interface, even with random I/O.

 

[Jeff7181]

I agree with you re: cloud. Bandwidth speeds and costs, plus security concerns, make me not want to entrust any more than I already do to the cloud--and I do entrust a lot already (kindle, gmail, gdrive for smaller docs). I draw the line at media like my personal photos/music/videos.

Check out SpiderOak. They're the only online storage/backup vendor (that I've found) in which the client software encrypts your data before it's sent from your computer, and the vendor does not hold a master encryption key to your data. It's better than Google in terms of ensuring your data is safe. Google's free services are best effort - they have no obligation to return your data to you. They keep multiple copies of your data in different locations so that if one or some go down, your data can be retrieved elsewhere, but they make no guarantee. If the right locations go down, your data can be lost.

 

[blastingcap]

Check out SpiderOak. They're the only online storage/backup vendor (that I've found) in which the client software encrypts your data before it's sent from your computer, and the vendor does not hold a master encryption key to your data. It's better than Google in terms of ensuring your data is safe. Google's free services are best effort - they have no obligation to return your data to you. They keep multiple copies of your data in different locations so that if one or some go down, your data can be retrieved elsewhere, but they make no guarantee. If the right locations go down, your data can be lost.

I vaguely recall hearing about SpiderOak, thanks for the elaboration. What do you think of Crashplan and Backblaze?

Yeah I keep my tax records, high-importance documents, etc. off the cloud.

 

[BFG10K]

I have a couple hundred GB backed up via SpiderOak. The initial upload can be painful if you're doing hundreds of GB to start with, but as your data grows and it gets sent to the cloud in near real time it's quite manageable. Restoring it is fine because I don't need hundreds of GB of my data NOW anyway. I can get a few dozen GB back that I use frequently and grab the rest as I need it or let it trickle over a few days/weeks.

This is absolutely unacceptable! Cloud simply creates another bottleneck and another point of failure. Instead of just worrying about your own disks, you now have to worry about your internet connection and someone else’s server uptime.

I’m amazed that people here won’t tolerate local 12ms access times for their desktops but are happy to go cloud and endure dozens of ms latencies, and transfer rates slower than thumbdrives. I download 1.5 MB/sec on a good day – my cheapest Flash drives are about 10-15 times faster and give me 1ms access times.

A few examples:

I recently had the displeasure of downloading Rage from Steam. This 22 GB download took me days with on and off downloading. If I’d gotten the DVD version it would have been installed in ~20 minutes.

I read on another forum that a guy was playing Bioshock 2 and because his internet connection had an issue, he couldn’t continue playing his game because GFWL had saved his games on cloud. It’s similar with Steam where offline mode decides to randomly fail, or Steam’s servers are too busy to handle your request.

Then all we need is another Dotcom fiasco and you can kiss your data goodbye. Did legitimate Megaupload users ever get their data back? If so, how many months did it take?

Cloud is a liability.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

If there are any good cloud backup services, I'd love to hear about them.

I've had Carbonite for a while as a "belt and suspenders" to supplement my regular backups. The problem is that they claim "unlimited" backup but unofficially impose a limit by severely restricting how many files you can upload each day. Since I do a lot of photography and photo editing, I basically never get caught up.

Fine as a secondary but no substitute for real storage.

 

[zuffy]

Cloud is nothing more than a backup. I would hate to lose access to my data when I need it most and my internet connection is down. Also, at the mercy of the broadband speed.

 

[Jeff7181]

This is absolutely unacceptable! Cloud simply creates another bottleneck and another point of failure. Instead of just worrying about your own disks, you now have to worry about your internet connection and someone else’s server uptime.

I’m amazed that people here won’t tolerate local 12ms access times for their desktops but are happy to go cloud and endure dozens of ms latencies, and transfer rates slower than thumbdrives. I download 1.5 MB/sec on a good day – my cheapest Flash drives are about 10-15 times faster and give me 1ms access times.

A few examples:

I recently had the displeasure of downloading Rage from Steam. This 22 GB download took me days with on and off downloading. If I’d gotten the DVD version it would have been installed in ~20 minutes.

I read on another forum that a guy was playing Bioshock 2 and because his internet connection had an issue, he couldn’t continue playing his game because GFWL had saved his games on cloud. It’s similar with Steam where offline mode decides to randomly fail, or Steam’s servers are too busy to handle your request.

Then all we need is another Dotcom fiasco and you can kiss your data goodbye. Did legitimate Megaupload users ever get their data back? If so, how many months did it take?

Cloud is a liability.

By that logic, you should keep only one copy of your data because additional locations/copies will be another point of failure and thus, a liability. Keeping a single copy of data you care about is always a bad idea, and I realize that's not what you're suggesting, but that's the logic you're using against cloud backup.

Cloud storage has it's purpose, and it's not for storing multiple TB of data that you frequently need access to. It's to create yet another copy of your data in the event that it is destroyed in all other locations.

I back up to external hard drives and the cloud. If I had a house fire, a dozen external drives with my backup data on it wouldn't help if they were all in my house. I back up all my stuff to external drives, and then stuff I can't afford to lose to the cloud.

You seem to be confusing business and personal use scenarios. You talk about your home Internet connection and downloading a game from Steam... then you talk about server uptime and how critical it is to be able to access your backups. Well, you're not going to get five 9's uptime guaranteed with your residential Internet service or cloud storage service. If you want five 9's, you're going to have to fork over a ton of cash. At some point, you have to concede to something reasonable... for me, it's perfectly acceptable to have to spend days downloading data I can't afford to lose after a house fire in which everything I own was destroyed.

Also, you're talking about downloading data from Steam, which is absolutely not in the same league as cloud storage vendors in terms of the availability of "your" data and thus is not even worth mentioning in relation to this topic.

 

[Jeff7181]

I vaguely recall hearing about SpiderOak, thanks for the elaboration. What do you think of Crashplan and Backblaze?

Yeah I keep my tax records, high-importance documents, etc. off the cloud.

I keep that stuff with SpiderOak now. Another cool thing that SpiderOak allows you to do is keep a local copy of your encrypted data. Point it at an external drive or network location and it'll copy the same encrypted blocks that it sends to SpiderOak's cloud to that location and then you can restore from a local source rather than via the Internet.

I didn't look into those two offerings very closely. I basically stopped at SpiderOak when I learned of the encryption and local backup features.

 

[Blain]

Hold on a little longer, holographic storage is on the way.

 

[Silenus]

I keep that stuff with SpiderOak now. Another cool thing that SpiderOak allows you to do is keep a local copy of your encrypted data. Point it at an external drive or network location and it'll copy the same encrypted blocks that it sends to SpiderOak's cloud to that location and then you can restore from a local source rather than via the Internet.

I didn't look into those two offerings very closely. I basically stopped at SpiderOak when I learned of the encryption and local backup features.

This is what Crashplan does as well. And you have options to make it even more secure than the default setup. IE, you can generate your own 448 bit encryption key which is not stored with crashplan servers.

 

[Jeff7181]

This is what Crashplan does as well. And you have options to make it even more secure than the default setup. IE, you can generate your own 448 bit encryption key which is not stored with crashplan servers.

Does it have the option to store a copy of the backup locally as well, and can it back up a network share? That was another deciding factor in choosing SpiderOak - some backup solutions will not allow me to back up data that's on a network share, only local disks.

 

[ShintaiDK]

This is absolutely unacceptable! Cloud simply creates another bottleneck and another point of failure. Instead of just worrying about your own disks, you now have to worry about your internet connection and someone else’s server uptime.

I’m amazed that people here won’t tolerate local 12ms access times for their desktops but are happy to go cloud and endure dozens of ms latencies, and transfer rates slower than thumbdrives. I download 1.5 MB/sec on a good day – my cheapest Flash drives are about 10-15 times faster and give me 1ms access times.

A few examples:

I recently had the displeasure of downloading Rage from Steam. This 22 GB download took me days with on and off downloading. If I’d gotten the DVD version it would have been installed in ~20 minutes.

I read on another forum that a guy was playing Bioshock 2 and because his internet connection had an issue, he couldn’t continue playing his game because GFWL had saved his games on cloud. It’s similar with Steam where offline mode decides to randomly fail, or Steam’s servers are too busy to handle your request.

Then all we need is another Dotcom fiasco and you can kiss your data goodbye. Did legitimate Megaupload users ever get their data back? If so, how many months did it take?

Cloud is a liability.

You mean something like this?

"Netflix blames the Christmas eve outage that blacked out streaming movie sevice in most of the US and Canada on the failure of an Amazon Cloud server farm in VA. Conveniently for Amazon, none of its own streaming services were affected"

 

[Jeff7181]

You mean something like this?

"Netflix blames the Christmas eve outage that blacked out streaming movie sevice in most of the US and Canada on the failure of an Amazon Cloud server farm in VA. Conveniently for Amazon, none of its own streaming services were affected"

First, is it any surprise that Amazon's own streaming services don't share the same hardware and network as their hosted services? That's typical of any company that offers hosted services of any kind.

Second, if Amazon's streaming services went down, would the 14 people who use it even notice?

 

[georgec84]

Hold on a little longer, holographic storage is on the way.

I like the sound of that.

 

[Silenus]

Does it have the option to store a copy of the backup locally as well, and can it back up a network share? That was another deciding factor in choosing SpiderOak - some backup solutions will not allow me to back up data that's on a network share, only local disks.

Yes it can do local backups to attached drives. And one of the neat things it does is allow backup to a friends computer (also running Crashplan client) across the internet. I use this a lot. It does not natively allow backup to a network drive...however, that can be easily be worked around by creating a symbolic link to your network drive and mounting it to a local folder. There are are multiple articles online showing how to do this. And remember you only have to pay for Crashplan if you want to use their cloud storage as a destination (or you need some of the other features like backup sets ect). All the local and friend backups you can do for free.

PS- Sorry...I just realized you were talking about backing up a network share, not using a network share as a destination. For clarification....you can backup TO a network share (using mklinks) as a backup destination.....but it does not allow you to backup a network share, only local drives. Sorry!

 

[Jeff7181]

Yes it can do local backups to attached drives. And one of the neat things it does is allow backup to a friends computer (also running Crashplan client) across the internet. I use this a lot. It does not natively allow backup to a network drive...however, that can be easily be worked around by creating a symbolic link to your network drive and mounting it to a local folder. There are are multiple articles online showing how to do this. And remember you only have to pay for Crashplan if you want to use their cloud storage as a destination (or you need some of the other features like backup sets ect). All the local and friend backups you can do for free.

PS- Sorry...I just realized you were talking about backing up a network share, not using a network share as a destination. For clarification....you can backup TO a network share (using mklinks) as a backup destination.....but it does not allow you to backup a network share, only local drives. Sorry!

Yep, see that's another deciding factor for me. I'd rather not mess with iSCSI to get it to back up remote files and I don't want to run the SpiderOak client software on my server(s).

 

[BFG10K]

By that logic, you should keep only one copy of your data because additional locations/copies will be another point of failure and thus, a liability. Keeping a single copy of data you care about is always a bad idea, and I realize that's not what you're suggesting, but that's the logic you're using against cloud backup.

The cloud backup isn't the point of failure, it's the restrictions to get to it (i.e. your ISP, their ISP, their server uptimes, bandwidth/latency between the two, etc.).

Cloud is akin to taking an offsite HDD and setting it up so only an internet connection can reach it. Suddenly a whole bunch of things become issues that weren’t present before.

Cloud storage has it's purpose, and it's not for storing multiple TB of data that you frequently need access to. It's to create yet another copy of your data in the event that it is destroyed in all other locations.

I back up to external hard drives and the cloud. If I had a house fire, a dozen external drives with my backup data on it wouldn't help if they were all in my house. I back up all my stuff to external drives, and then stuff I can't afford to lose to the cloud.

An offsite HDD does exactly the same thing without any of cloud’s points of failures. If I’m at home it takes me ~15 minutes to retrieve an offsite backup, and around 1 hour to extract the ~500GB on it.

How long did it take Megaupload users to get their data back?
How long to download 500GB at 1.5GB/sec on an internet connection?

You seem to be confusing business and personal use scenarios. You talk about your home Internet connection and downloading a game from Steam... then you talk about server uptime and how critical it is to be able to access your backups. Well, you're not going to get five 9's uptime guaranteed with your residential Internet service or cloud storage service. If you want five 9's, you're going to have to fork over a ton of cash. At some point, you have to concede to something reasonable... for me, it's perfectly acceptable to have to spend days downloading data I can't afford to lose after a house fire in which everything I own was destroyed.

Why the distinction between business and personal use? It's my data and I need to get to it, regardless of the classification.

You seem to be saying “because it’s not business data, it’s okay if cloud fails you”. Well it’s not okay. My games are just as important as my source code.

Also, you're talking about downloading data from Steam, which is absolutely not in the same league as cloud storage vendors in terms of the availability of "your" data and thus is not even worth mentioning in relation to this topic.

It's very much relevant because it highlights the constant and real problems of cloud storage. Cloud based DRM is a subset of the bigger picture.

If Steam (or other cloud vendor) or my ISP has a problem, I’m cut off from my cloud data. That simple failure is all it takes.

OTOH to lose my non-cloud data, I’d have to have my house and work building burn down at the same time, or all four of my HDDs concurrently fail. Statistically both scenarios are almost impossible (and have never happened), while ISP/Steam failures have already happened multiple times.

 

[blastingcap]

Yes it can do local backups to attached drives. And one of the neat things it does is allow backup to a friends computer (also running Crashplan client) across the internet. I use this a lot. It does not natively allow backup to a network drive...however, that can be easily be worked around by creating a symbolic link to your network drive and mounting it to a local folder. There are are multiple articles online showing how to do this. And remember you only have to pay for Crashplan if you want to use their cloud storage as a destination (or you need some of the other features like backup sets ect). All the local and friend backups you can do for free.

PS- Sorry...I just realized you were talking about backing up a network share, not using a network share as a destination. For clarification....you can backup TO a network share (using mklinks) as a backup destination.....but it does not allow you to backup a network share, only local drives. Sorry!

This is not entirely true, as there is a workaround for backing up a NAS over on Crashplan.

http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/recipe/back_up_windows_mapped_drives