No spinning rust here: Supermicro's cold data fridge is FROZEN

Fancy storing data until hell freezes over? Server house Supermicro has a cold storage product aimed at data that must be kept, can't be thrown away but is accessed only rarely: its SuperStorage Server with spun-down disks. According to Supermicro, the product "minimizes power consumption and reduces cooling requirements by …

[jabuzz]

No iron in hard disks

It has been some time since a hard drive had any iron in their platters. They started being made out of aluminium and then even glass many years ago, and the coatings don't contain iron. Why are they referred to as spinning rust?

[Suricou Raven]

Re: No iron in hard disks

Tradition.

[Anonymous Coward]

The active part actually is (usually) rust

While the disk itself is glass, aluminum, etc. there is still a thin layer of metal oxide (usually a variation of ferric oxide) that is magnetized to store data on most disks. In recent drives, it's layered on using techniques borrowed from IC fabrication, but it's still usually an oxide of iron.

So calling it spinning rust is actually pretty accurate!

[Ron 10]

How does system pricing compare to the high capacity tape systems? I view this as their actual long term market. A solid state device would be better, but disk is probably ahead on retention length at the moment.

It is clearly not as easy to pull a tray as a tape cartridge. On the other hand, tape (optical) machine formats and drives tend to go away after a bit as new versions appear or companies go out of business. The formats of the standard hard disk should survive much longer. Or, since they are well known and public, can be easily addressed in the future. Worse comes to worst, you can probably find something to read a current hard disk pretty far into the future.

Let us ignore for this discussion the actual need to keep many of these records forever. Tends to be driven by logically faulty laws.

When I was working, I did document imaging systems for the last 10 years or so of my working life. A really big issue (generally not shared by sales with the customers) is the obsoleting of optical disk formats. Some were proprietary formats or actual proprietary single source hardware. Your system breaks, company has gone out of business or no longer supports this stuff - your store of data to keep forever; ain't there any more.

Micro-(insert name of level of technology) film records are the only things that tend to be immune to format changes. They have some longevity issues; but can be minimized by expensive storage. Generally you can still read a microfiche from the late Roman empire if you can get a viable copy. No hardware or format issues.

This is one of the areas that I do not see being addressed in a rational way. Get past the stupidity of saving much of this stuff forever, there needs to be a way to deal with things that really need to be preserved. We can safely start deleting the building entrance logs from the 20's by now. How many billions of these things are eating trees and some form of electronic storage and accomplishing nothing. Particularly under the normal circumstances of not validating ID. Damn I hate the public perception of pretty much everything (e.g., making you sing in makes everyone so much safer). Particularly those things propagated by the government and large corporations.

[Tom 13]

re: pricing compare to the high capacity tape systems?

Probably not relevant per your observation later: Tends to be driven by logically faulty laws.

It's been years since I ran into the issue. I was working for a small screwdriver shop at the time and our big client was a small local bank chain. In response to a new banking regulation they had to have all transactions from some date forward accessible on the network. The only way they could find to comply was building out a needlessly large array that they planned to increase by half a terrabyte a year. Of course that was back when a terrabyte was an unbelievably large amount of storage. To get the same effect today you'd have to say you were planning to expand your storage by 500 Petabytes a year.

Also, your caveats on optical drive storage apply equally to tapes. Spinning rust doesn't solve the issue as much as it side steps it. Since the data needs to be maintained live, it gets copied whenever you change the underlying storage format.

I would say that the one advantage of paper over microfiche is, properly stored it has about the same life span and it doesn't get those streaky lines from the readers.

[GrumpyOldMan]

I have mixed views

As a passionate amachewer photographer I have negatives and slides going back to the 1970's when I started. Still easily viewable with no special tech. Now I use digital workflow I have amassed a massisve collection of getting on for 100,000 images. I shoot mostly sports and spent the weekend shooting our local Regatta for the rowing club, came away with well over 4000 images. Using a Canon 7D and shooting jpeg is fine but if I shoot RAW it's a CR2 image - and the spec for that changes. So I import into Lightroom and convert to dng. DNG is Adobe's open format supposed to be backward compatible. We'll see in 10 years time, shall we?

I'm about to embark on a project at work that will require a lot of cold storage, and I'm interested in DLT tapes due to the long-long term storage possibilities and backward compatibility. This type of disk storage might be good for medium-long term storage though. I would generally not use solid state for this due to lifetime predictions.

I still have 20MB and 40MB IDE drives from the early 90's that I can still access without any problems. My ancient IBM XT still fires up ok with the MFM drive. Eventually.... ;0) Always amused me that kids in today's IT assume we started with 50GB disks and are horrified by the IDE's. I still have a stack of 5 1/4 drives and disks. Even an unopend Lotus 123 for DOS in it's original packaging.

[phuzz]

Re: I have mixed views

It might be worth checking those 5.25" disks and making a copy of the data before they start to go bad. It might not happen for another ten years, but better safe than sorry.

[MacroRodent]

DVD? ( Re: I have mixed views)

One would assume DVD-R, stored properly would be a good format: because of its popularity, drives capable of reading it should be around for a very long time.

One web page I read recommended making 3 copies on blank media from 3 different manufacturers, just in case. One is kept at hand, the other two go into your long-term storage vault.

By the way, I wonder about the wisdom of storing non-spinning hard drives. After a long inactivity, don't they develop "sticktion" that prevents them from spinning up?

[Bartholomew]

Re: DVD? ( I have mixed views)

>>> By the way, I wonder about the wisdom of storing non-spinning hard drives. After a long inactivity, don't they develop "sticktion" that prevents them from spinning up ?

Ramps have fixed that issue since 1995.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction#Hard_disk_drives

[Bob H]

Re: DVD? ( I have mixed views)

Even DVD is considered fleeting in archive terms, yes lots of them were made but how robust are the discs and how robust are the drives. You don't want to be scratching around in 10 years looking for one which still has a good laser diode or motor drive that hasn't gummed up. The beauty of photographic substrate archiving is that if you can keep the plastic stable you can knock up the apparatus to 'read' it with things you find in a hardware store. If someone invents an industrial archive grade disk drive that can read CD, all DVD formats and WORM discs then we only have to worry about the discs themselves failing!

[MacroRodent]

Re: DVD? ( I have mixed views)

"The beauty of photographic substrate archiving is that if you can keep the plastic stable..."

Unfortunately not just the plastic, there are several ways the image data itself (consisting of silver, or dyes in the case of colour images) can degrade with time. A really serious archival material (one with lifespan measured in thousands of years) should probably work by punching holes or at least clear pits or squigly grooves into an inert metal, such as gold, and cannot use too high information density or complex encoding. There is one example: the disk sent with the Voyager space probes.

(Gold may not be the best choice for terrestrial use, since it might get melted for its intrinsic value during the new Dark Ages, before science arises again).

[Anonymous Coward]

Costing

The benchmark is LTO5 tapes at around £20 for 1.5TB.

Disks are still more expensive, and take a few seconds to spin up, but then give faster random access.

Is there any sense in building a "disk robot" which shuffles drives from a carousel into a SATA slot? Using 2.5" drives you would get quite a lot in a 2U case.