was just made aware of this Toshiba product. Maybe Santa will find a sale around the holidays.

 

Personally, no. I'd rather have a 4TB SSD than a 16TB HDD

 

If you mirror it. Think about it. ALL your libraries on it, and it crashes. I'd rather spread my stuff over several disks than have "all my eggs in one basket". That saying has meaning. 16TB is a lot to lose.

 

I keep everything on 14x 2 TB drives, I have twice as many disks for backup, 16TB is risky because if it fails you will lose everything, If I were you, I would make two backup copies of that amount of data, I know it costs money, but we don't play games

 

i understand redundancies, I have backups of backups etc.
This post is just to make people aware of the rising size of HDD for long term storage. the Terrabyte barriers if you will.

Large data stores require large backups, this has always been the way. but its a way to have your own local cloud, without big brother and big hacker being guests at your party.

SSD and HDD are diverging technologies that exist for different purposes, people should realize that and plan accordingly. But i'd still rather have a 16tb hdd than a 4 tb ssd. especially since you need to leave a lot of empty slack space on SSD to accomodate failing memory cells as they die at the end of their write cycles..

 

the amount of storage space does not define the "risk" 16tb is not inherently more "risky" than 8Tb, the amount of data lost may be larger, but that doesn't equate to the risk. One does not need a 2nd 16tb drive to backup a 16tb drive, until one has 16tb of data on that drive.

for instance you can use an 8tb drive to backup a 40% full 16tb drive.

Risk is based on reliability of the hardware and environment.

I usually upgrade large drives every 2 years, I copy the old drive to the new one after testing it. I keep the old drive as a backup of the data and note the date it was taken out of service. This provides one more level of redundancy and only requires a modest amount of physical storage space.

But yeah, don't get cheap with your data, if you are gonna acquire,make and collect data, do the work to keep it safe and available for the life of the project or the owner...

 

Using ssd for pure backup purposes is pretty much a waste of money. Until you need to restore a large amount of data from a hdd backup. Then you will wish it was all on SSD. Copying a full 4tb hdd to another can take many hours; the better part of a workday; especially when it is all little files like samples and midi files.

 

Last edited: Oct 6, 2024

but when a HDD fails, it usually fails slowly providing ample warning and often all the data can be recovered. SSD tend to commit suicide rapidly and leaving nothing behind but tears..

 

4tb is the golden zone for HDDs in my opinion.

 

I just make sure all my drives are backed up properly 1-2-3 style, and while I prefer to use SSD's for music production obviously, they are frequently cloned in partitions in whatnot on 16-18-20TB drives etc as well as my system pretty much daily.

Doesn't take much time at all, and if an SSD dies, or an install goes bad, roll back, recover, or whatnot.

Yes, it costs more money, but I try and budget that in, and we are obviously getting some fairly good discounts on certain things.

 

Here's how I go about it on PC:

m2 SSDs - system drive, kontakt / UVI / Steinberg / Superior Drummer / Omnisphere samples. Also projects drive.
with limited PCI lanes (unless you are running Threadripper), you get 4 m2 drives, so buy them as large as you can.
if you do not need a dedicated video card, you can eiter add another SSD or a m2 SSD expansion card (asus) that can hold another 4 ssd.
but you won't be playing Cyberpunk after producing, and that would be a shame.

2.5 SSDs - Other libraries like Nexus, Lethal, etc.
you are limited by sata ports.
I run a single 4tb.

Regular HDDs - with 2.5 gb LAN you can run sata HDDs at maximum speed on your home network, around 220 mb/s.
RAID is your best choice.
I use an external 4hdd x 4tb second hand Icy Box enclosure with second hand hgst drives on RAID5 - 12 tb usable, if one drive fails, the data is not lost.
hdd sentinel running non stop, 1000+ days of life.
cost: around 200 dollars.

Google Drive - projects and important files are mirrored there.

oldest hard disk I have that runs flawlessly is a Toshiba 300gb drive. probably 15 years old.

only hard drives I had fail on me recently are 8tb Seagate barracuda, the newer models.

ran another 4tb icy box enclosure for 10+ years (downloading and torrenting), with dual wd drives on e-sata... the good old days

hope this helps someone somehow

 

SSDs was created for extensive use. They can fail when stay unused for a long time. HDDs are appropriate for backups. We don't need to restore our disks every day, we make it once in several years usually, and that's why slow copying is tolerable.

Don't use SSDs for backups.

 

Here's a scary article from mixonline.com about the issues with hard drive audio archive longevity.

New York, NY (August 19, 2024)—A few years ago, archiving specialist Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services did a survey of its vaults and discovered an alarming trend: Of the thousands and thousands of archived hard disk drives from the 1990s that clients ask the company to work on, around one-fifth are unreadable. Iron Mountain has a broad customer base, but if you focus strictly on the music business, says Robert Koszela, Global Director Studio Growth and Strategic Initiatives, “That means there are historic sessions from the early to mid-’90s that are dying.”

“It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” Koszela says. “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”

https://www.mixonline.com/business/inside-iron-mountain-its-time-to-talk-about-hard-drives

 

FWIW, I have 3 Toshiba P300 3TB drives that I've had running for maybe 10 years, never any problems so far. For the last few years my drives get replaced because they're too small, not because they broke.

 

Is the photo a reflection of the actual storage space they are using? It's no surprise drives are failing, probably mould growth. I see no ventilation or low flow heating. Basements are the worst places, especially damp through the walls in older buildings. The film industry has been discovering a similar problem with digital backups (HDDs and SSDs) and are now in the process of re-recording everything including digital films, back onto negative film (with new emulsions created by Kodak) because it is the only medium that will last 100 years. It's likely we could be going back to tape for backups and archival material. Lifespan 30 years. Tape is a good option for large volumes of data. LTO (Linear Tape Open) system can store 18TB uncompressed (45TB compressed). A newer expected upgrade this year will provide 36TB uncompressed (90TB compressed).
More details here searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/definition/Linear-Tape-Open-LTO
Not widely known is DOTS (Digital Optical Technology System) developed as a purely digital archiving system where data is written as a text file onto a metal alloy tape made of titanium; a thin layer of metal containing binary information so it can be recreated. For more details see group47.com

 

From my own experience, I would stay away from Toshiba at all costs..

For quality HDD get a UltraStar, (somewhat ex-Hitachi)
statistically they fail a little bit less than regular WD, Seagate or Toshiba.

And they're surprisingly fast too

 

Last edited: Oct 7, 2024

I have several Toshiba hard drives. Never had a problem with any of them. One is over 20 years old. The only manufacturer I've had fail are Seagate drives. I have 20TB of storage on my music creation PC and I have two sets of duplicate backups for each drive! If I ever had a drive fail I could just swap it out with a back up and then back up the back up!

 

Well they are 30 odd years old, if its worth storing, its worth spinning them up once a decade and recopying the data to refresh the bits. Its just magnetic charges on platters of iron oxide covered aluminum, its not magic, time will degrade everything. Its not like this is an unsolveable problem.

 

i have owned or worked on drives from every manufacturer. They all fail eventually, BUT some have much better track records than others. There is a cycle of failures in the storage industry, one brand puts out a line that has a higher MTBF gets scorned, they improve and somebody else fucks up, and so it goes.

there was period when the Hitachi Ultrastar was known as the DeathStar for its ability to fail suddenly, Seagate made some shitty drives. Western Digital had some dodgy firmware versions that fucked up data fast. etc etc.

I'm currently using a 15tb seagate for archiving of many data collections. it replaced a 10gb seagate which replaced a 7gb western digital.
I have an assortment of 2,3,5 tb toshiba 2.5" drives that are daily drivers for data transfer of sample libraries etc.

I haven't noticed any quality problems in the last 10 years or so, so maybe they've gotten all the little quality assurance bugs worked out for now. but any electro mechanical device is going to have many points of failure. its why we make backups, shit wears out and fails.

 

The facility appears to be a cavern in a salt mine from the looks of the walls and ceiling. Salt mines are frequently used for underground storage as the salt absorbs any ambient moisture making mold growth difficult.