Comment on RIP obsolete tech

• droans@midwest.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  So much equipment.

  First you have to buy the DVD writer and then you also have to get yourself blank DVDs.

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• dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  We definitely did not gave up on discs. They may no longer be mass consumer oriented. But bluray for backup, archiving and data transfer are still a thing. Nothing beats the bandwidth of a plane filled with hard drives. The media itself is not relevant, magnetic tape is still available and used to this day. The first time I held more than a terabyte in my hand was in a data tape cartridge. Consumer hard drives hadn’t gotten there yet. Even today, new optical media is being researched. There are fascinating breakthroughs on laser engraved crystal storage.

  Anyways, I just wanted to remember that wasteful mass consumption media is not representative of humanity as a whole.

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  • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Aren’t SD cards higher data capacity than HDDs at this point? Sure maybe not per unit or cost but for the volume of space I am pretty sure HDDs lost a while ago.

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    • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      High capacity SD have a miserably failure rate with regular use. In PI’s and dashcams many only get a couple of years before they start having errors. USB thumb drives do better but they have heat problems. neither are great for backups unless you just do a lot of write once and store

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      • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Could just have more than 1 backup though, then it doesn’t really matter much if the storage is less reliable as its very unlikely for multiple to fail at the same time

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    • dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Today? Of course. But until recently that wasn’t the case. Longevity though.

      We got prediction of sector failure rates on HDDs and magnetic tapes down to a science. Makes archiving really easy as you know with statistical significance how often to test, copy and move data, to preserve it virtually forever (as long as there is someone maintaining the archive).

      Solid state memory can be extraordinarily dense, but the denser it gets, the more it’s prone to corruption and failure. Worse still, when solid state fails, the whole storage unit becomes obsolete, and data gets nightmarishly hard to extract, maybe even gone forever. Only with very rare and specialized workshops that have the equipment to do it. On the other hand, I’ve seen technicians recover data from tapes that were literally in a fire, right there on the field with bog standard equipment.

      When you factor in that the average cost of a terabyte of magnetic storage is less than half of the average cost of a terabyte of solid state, then a few cubic centimeters of space per unit become practically irrelevant. Corporate settings actually prefer more smaller storage units than larger, as they cause less trouble when they fail. Redundancy is a numbers game.

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• hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I just use a USB Blu-ray burner.

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• HugeNerd@lemmy.ca ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Polished mineral? Like a silicon wafer? um??

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