Hard Drives Instead of Tapes?

An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware News weekly news letter has a very interesting article about Dr. Koch of Computertechnik AG who won the contract to build a RAID backup system for the University of Tübingen. Dr. Koch took several standard entry-level servers, such as the dual-Athlon MP, and add modern components and three large-caliber IDE-RAID controllers per computer, and a total of 576 x 160GB Drives."

HDD Tapestream

[termos]

Hard drives are faster
Tapes are expensive, HDDs are cheap in comparison
My C64 uses tapes, I don't even see the competition between these two.

Re:I don't know if that is a good idea

[Alpha_Nerd]

Yeah damn that EMP... If a neutron bomb goes off, I sure as hell don't want to lose my 100+ TB pr0n collection.

Re:I don't know if that is a good idea

[bmongar]

There has to be a better way than relying on anything stored in magnetic format

We could punch into paper tape.

Bad idea.

[Znonymous Coward]

A hard drive is sensitive to vibrations and has too many moving parts. The only reliable backup media is punch cards. Just don't store them near liquids.

Re:Optical isn't necessarily immune to EMP

[Zathrus]

Uh, if you have enough voltage differential to be creating microwave level effects in free space then data backup has ceased to be a concern.

In all likelihood the entire human race has also ceased to be a concern.

tape's still bigger

[raduga]

Let's see...

576 x 160GB
= 92 terabytes
= .092 petabytes
= .00009 exabytes

So... my vintage EXB-8200 beats your puny RAID by a factor of more than ten thousand.

My company

[mrpuffypants]

We have a unique backup method that is solid-state and faster than tapes.

What we do is plug a digital camera into the server, and copy everything to its flash media card inside. When we go on vacation we just take the backup "off-site" to the Bahamas.

And in the event of failure we also have a 256MB backup of the first bit of stuff on the hard drive, and a picture of the server room so we know what to order after it melts in a fire.

Re:Bad idea.

[HermanZA]

What do you do when the punch card battery goes flat? ;-)

Re:I don't know if that is a good idea

[angst_ridden_hipster]

Etched stone seems to have a staying power of approximately 10,000 years, even with some outdoor exposure.

Earthenware tablets, made of clay fired at low temperatures (1816F/991C), seem to do nearly as well, while stoneware tablets, made of clay fired at high temperature (2345F/1284C), last about the same as actual stone. Ceramics have relatively high resistance to moisture and thermal variation. Depending on the clay composition and the application of glazes, there is variable resistance to acid. Ceramics do not handle physical shock particularly well.

Glass can last thousands of years, but is vulnerable to shattering or acid.

None of these, however, are earthquake-resistant. Outside of the immediate blast radius, they're good against nukes.

Etching into stainless steel is good, although in the event of a nuclear attack, this would be succeptible to melting (or self-destruction due to induced current) within a certain area. It handles thermal and moisture extremes pretty well, but doesn't handle acids well.

Stamping into gold foil is expensive, but quite durable. It's immune to some of the chemical risks posed by steel, but is more likely to be stolen. It's also not as hard, thus leading to risk of data corruption or loss via impact.

Parchment, preserved lamb or sheep skin, can last a very long time (on the order of 2,000 years) in the right conditions. It does well with exposure to electromagnetic radiation, but deals badly with moisture or excessive dryness, and is highly vulnerable to acid.

Delay-line broadcast (reflecting your data with a laser off of a distant object, and rebroadcasting ad infinitum) is fairly reliable until occlusion of the data path occurs, or the transceiver is smashed, unplugged, EMPed.

Yeah, data preservation is hard in the long haul.

Re:This would work for limited installations

[operagost]

Everyone, read the parent post in "Dr. Evil's" voice for a chuckle:

----
What we really need are really big ... "LA-ZERS".

With a sufficiently powerful ... "LA-ZER", you could encode the data and beam it off to some distant object- like my Evil Base on the MOON.

Re:I don't know if that is a good idea

[belloc]

Etched stone seems to have a staying power of approximately 10,000 years...

This reminds me of a formal budget proposal submitted by my predecessor many years ago (I run the IT dept. at a small college). He gave a very detailed cost breakdown of several means of replacing our then-current backup and recovery method for our file server's RAID array (we were very small way back then). He had costs for hardware, time, and manpower for just about every option available at the time.

His last option, put forth just as seriously and fully as the rest, included the cost of having a team of monks write out the data by hand onto reams of paper, bit-by-bit. Then for recovery, the monks would re-enter the data back into the computer, bit-by-bit. On the pro side he argued that monks work cheap and are very dedicated to what they do. But the con was the time involved for this method was somewhat prohibitive. ;)

Belloc

Re:Bad idea.

[sharkey]

Just don't store them near liquids.

Put a large fireplace in your card storage room. That should dry up liquids before they can cause any significant harm, right?

Re:Bad idea.

[mfrank]

And as long as you don't have your datacenter in Florida :)

Re:Far more practical

[Tim Doran]

Shyeah, cause Zip drives are so much MORE reliable...

"What's that clicking sound?"