this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 hours ago

Great, can't wait to afford one in 2050.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (3 children)

Everybody taking shit about Seagate here. Meanwhile I've never had a hard drive die on me. Eventually the capacity just became too little to keep around and I got bigger ones.

Oldest I'm using right now is a decade old, Seagate. Actually, all the HDDs are Seagate. The SSDs are Samsung. Granted, my OS is on an SSD, as well as my most used things, so the HDDs don't actually get hit all that much.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Yeah, same. I switched to seagate after 3 WD drives failed in less then 3 years. Never had problems since.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I've had a Samsung SSD die on me, I've had many WD drives die on me (also the last drive I've had die was a WD drive), I've had many Seagate drives die on me.

Buy enough drives, have them for a long enough time, and they will die.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.

Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)

So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh..check your backups I guess?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

That decade old one is 3TB. 😅

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, I have about 10 dead 3TB drives sitting around in my closet. I took the sacrifice so you don't have to :-)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

Thanks. 👍

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

That's good, really good news, to see that HDDs are still being manufactured and being thought of. Because I'm having a serious problem trying to find a new 2.5" HDD for my old laptop here in Brazil. I can quickly find SSDs across the Brazilian online marketplaces, and they're not much expensive, but I'm intending on purchasing a mechanical one because SSDs won't hold data for much longer compared to HDDs, but there are so few HDD for sale, and those I could find aren't brand-new.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

SSDs won’t hold data for much longer compared to HDDs

Realistically this is not a good reason to select SSD over HDD. If your data is important it's being backed up (and if it's not backed up it's not important. Yada yada 3.2.1 backups and all. I'll happily give real backup advise if you need it)

In my anecdotal experience across both my family's various computers and computers I've seen bite the dust at work, I've not observed any longevity difference between HDDs and SSDs (in fact I've only seen 2 fail and those were front desk PCs that were effectively always on 24/7 with heavy use during all lobby hours, and that was after multiple years of that usecase) and I've never observed bit rot in the real world on anything other than crappy flashdrives and SD cards (literally the lowest quality flash you can get)

Honestly best way to look at it is to select based on your usecase. Always have your boot device be an SSD, and if you don't need more storage on that computer than you feel like buying an SSD to match, don't even worry about a HDD for that device. HDDs have one usecase only these days: bulk storage for comparatively low cost per GB

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

I replaced my laptop's DVD drive with a HDD caddy adapter, so it supports two drives instead of just one. Then, I installed a 120G SSD alongside with a 500G HDD, with the HDD being connected through the caddy adapter. The entire Linux installation on this laptop was done in 2019 and, since then, I never reinstalled nor replaced the drives.

But sometimes I hear what seems to be a "coil whine" (a short high pitched sound) coming from where the SSD is, so I guess that its end is near. I have another SSD (240G) I bought a few years ago, waiting to be installed but I'm waiting to get another HDD (1TB or 2TB) in order to make another installation, because the HDD was reused from another laptop I had (therefore, it's really old by now, although I had no I/O errors nor "coil whinings" yet).

Back when I installed the current Linux, I mistakenly placed /var and /home (and consequently, /home/me/.cache and /home/me/.config, both folders of which have high write rates because I use KDE Plasma) on the SSD. As the years passed by, I realized it was a mistake but I never had the courage to relocate things, so I did some "creative solutions" ("gambiarra") such as creating a symlinked folder for .cache and .config, pointing them to another folder within the HDD.

As for backup, while I have three old spare HDDs holding the same old data (so it's a redundant backup), there are so many (hundreds of GBs) new things I both produced and downloaded that I'd need lots of room to better organize all the files, finding out what is not needed anymore and renewing my backups. That's why I was looking for either 1TB or 2TB HDDs, as brand-new as possible (also, I'm intending to tinker more with things such as data science after a fresh new installation of Linux). It's not a thing that I'm really in a hurry to do, though.

Edit: and those old spare HDDs are 3.5" so they wouldn't fit the laptop.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

I doubt the high pitched whine that you're hearing is the SSD failing. The sheer amount of writes to fully wear out an SSD is...honestly difficult to achieve in the real world. I've got decade old budget SSDs in some of my computers that are still going strong!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, cool and all, but call me when sata or m2 ssds are 10TB for $250, then we'll talk.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

Not sure whether we'll arrive there the tech is definitely entering the taper-out phase of the sigmoid. Capacity might very well still become cheaper, also 3x cheaper, but don't, in any way, expect them to simultaneously keep up with write performance that ship has long since sailed. The more bits they're trying to squeeze into a single cell the slower it's going to get and the price per cell isn't going to change much, any more, as silicon has hit a price wall, it's been a while since the newest, smallest node was also the cheapest.

OTOH how often do you write a terabyte in one go at full tilt.

[–] gravitas_deficiency 11 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Lmao the HDD in the first machine I built in the mid 90s was 1.2GB

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

My dad had a 286 with a 40MB hard drive in it. When it spun up it sounded like a plane taking off. A few years later he had a 486 and got a 2gb Seagate hard drive. It was an unimaginable amount of space at the time.

The computer industry in the 90s (and presumably the 80s, I just don't remember it) we're wild. Hardware would be completely obsolete every other year.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

It really was doubling in speed about every 18 months.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

My 286er had 2MB RAM and no hard drive, just two 5.25" floppy drives. One to boot the OS from, the other for storage and software.

I upgrade it to 4 MB RAM and bought a 20 MB hard drive, moved EVERY piece of software I had onto it, and it was like 20% full. I sincerely thought that should last forever.

Today I casually send my wife a 10 sec video from the supermarket to choose which yoghurt she wants and that takes up about 25 MB.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I had 128KB of RAM and I loaded my games from tape. And most of those only used 48KB of it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

Yeah we still had an old 8086 with tape drive and all from my dad's university times around, but I never acutely used that one.

[–] explodicle 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Back then that was very impressive!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Yup. My grandpa had 10 MB in his DOS machine back then.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Avoid these like the plague. I made the mistake of buying 2 16 TB Exos drives a couple years ago and have had to RMA them 3 times already.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (4 children)

I stopped buying seagates when I had 4 of their 2TB barracuda drives die within 6 months... constantly was RMAing them. Finally got pissed and sold them and bought WD reds, still got 2 of the reds in my Nas Playing hot backups with nearly 8 years of power time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

They seem to be real hit or miss. I also have 2 6TB barracudas that have 70,000 power on hours (8 yrs) that are still going fine.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I recently had to send back a Barracuda drive as well. I'm seeing if the Ironwolf drive fares any better.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

I have heard good things about their ironwolf drives, but that's a enterprise solution drive, so hopefully it's worth it

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[–] [email protected] 136 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

It never ceases to amaze me how far we can still take a piece of technology that was invented in the 50s.

That's like developing punch cards to the point where the holes are microscopic and can also store terabytes of data. It's almost Steampunk-y.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 11 points 10 hours ago

That's how most technology is:

  • combustion engines - early 1900s, earlier if you count steam engines
  • missiles - 13th century China, gunpowder was much earlier
  • wind energy - windmills appeared in the 9th century, potentially as early as the 4th

Almost everything we have today is due to incremental improvements from something much older.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Solid state is kinda like a microscopic punch card.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

More like microscopic fidget bubble poppers.

When the computer wants a bit to be a 1, it pops it down. When it wants it to be a 0, it pops it up.

If it were like a punch card, it couldn’t be rewritten as writing to it would permanently damage the disc. A CD-RW is basically a microscopic punch card though, because the laser actually burns away material to write the data to the CD.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

They work through electron tunneling through a semiconductor, so something does go through them like an old punch card reader

[–] lastunusedusername2 21 points 15 hours ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

These things are unreliable, I had 3 seagate HDDs in a row fail on me. Never had an issue with SSDs and never looked back.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

Seagate in general are unreliable in my own anecdotal experience. Every Seagate I've owned has died in less than five years. I couldn't give you an estimate on the average failure age of my WD drives because it never happened before they were retired due to obsolescence. It was over a decade regularly though.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

30/32 = 0.938

That’s less than a single terabyte. I have a microSD card bigger than that!

;)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago

Can't even put it into simplest form.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Now now, no self-shaming about the size of your card. It's how you use it!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

Some IOT perverts are into microSD

[–] [email protected] 79 points 19 hours ago (11 children)

I can't wait for datacenters to decommission these so I can actually afford an array of them on the second-hand market.

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