Posted by giuliomagnifico 4 days ago
I haven't used a DVD+-RW in several years, as wireless file transfer over networks and flash drives handle pretty much all of my needs now, but I sure used the heck out of my DVD writer when I had it. I had no idea these discs could go hundreds of writes before failure, I always got paranoid about reliability and probably never went above 20 writes on a disc.
Edit: at the end of the post the author says, "that’s about 4020 hours across two drives, 5248 burns and both drives are still seemingly operating just fine." What a colossal amount of time.
To be honest, it hurts every time I write to an SSD drive — which is all of the time these days.
Percentage Used: 2%
Data Units Read: 7,173,143 [3.67 TB]
Data Units Written: 22,666,414 [11.6 TB]
LTO-6 drives go for 300-500 EUR refurbished. You need a FC switch or HBA. Each tape holds 2+ TB uncompressed data.
As for NVMe, if you do a lot of writes (e.g. DB's, Docker), go for enterprise. If you do that, grab one with PLP. You'd use it also as a cache for ZFS.
https://www.rlvision.com/blog/how-long-do-writable-cddvd-las...
I don't think I got anywhere near the limits for any of them, as I don't remember getting any faults from them, but they were always cool to me.
I was also one of the happy few who had a DVD-RAM drive for my desktop as a teenager; I never really understood why DVD-RAM never caught on, because it seemed to work fine for me, and it was kind of nice not having to wipe the disk to erase stuff.
Written magnetically (while heated by a laser), read optically (by a much weaker laser), and somehow all of that fit into a pocketable player powered for 10+ hours by a single AA battery!?
Unlike rewritable optical media, opto-magnetic storage also seems to have effectively unlimited rewrite cycles. It's a real shame they never became a popular data storage option, mainly due to Sony's paranoia stemming from also owning a huge music and film division.
When -r disks bought in bulk cost ~20c each, $10 disks are a hard sell.
It's really the one physically possible way to implement it if you think about it.
Doesn't it use a special metal layer, and the laser high-heats the spots to make them amorphous (to write) and then low-heats them to crystallize (to erase)?
It also put a high radial load on the spindle whilst mounted sideways which led to run-out.
And flooding the area with radon (a heavy gas) helped the disc to float a bit, but had unexpected consequences...
Reason for testing so many drives is that when it comes to the real world, a lot of drive manufacturers cut corners and didn't follow standards, so we had a growing list of "work arounds" that we would validate. Every manufacturer would send us their drives to validate, we had a huge closet with shelves floor to ceiling of different drives.
Was a cool internship out of high school an forever thankful that I got it. Even if it's my most boomer skillset.
Couple of main things that post are 100% correct, the brand of media does matter. We actually had specific media we would recommend to the DOD for maximum stability. Second of all faster media always performs worse for archival purposes, and burning faster will result in more errors as well.
For testing we had a specific media for each type we found could be used for 25x tests reliably, but I don't remember the brands/type. We would basically load them once a year since we did a full verification every few weeks.
If you want to stop windows updates, make your internet connection a metered connection. Updates will only be allowed on-demand.
The more you know!
(Also, no hacking is necessary to set up a Windows Pro install with a local account, just tell it you're going to domain join it.)
Regarding updates: you might not even need to think about registry keys! I found these Windows 10 group policy settings to work well for many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157968 - and I'm still using them with Windows 11, near enough, though it seems you now need to go to "Windows Update\Manage end user experience" to find the Configure Automatic Updates setting I mention.
(I've also switched to using option 2 (Notify for download and auto install) rather than 3 (Auto download and notify for install), on the basis that it sounds safer, and I've had no problems from doing that. Not to say that I actually remember having any problems from letting Windows download the updates ahead of time! - but I'm comfortable living dangerously.)
So set it to the max - 14 days if you want some time to apply updates at your leisure, and you are wary of non-critical updates.
Funny how a large company like Microsoft can't figure out QA, but volunteer Linux distros with much less resources can.
(A lot of Windows specific software works in wine these days, Valve's investment into improving it for games have helped for applications too. Not everything, and if you are stuck with such software, yeah that sucks.)
kvm-qemu, windows image, block network access to the windows update servers, problem solved?
Retention issues are a bit worrying.
My understanding is Optane is still unbeaten today when it comes to latency. Has anyone examined its use as a workstation OS volume compared to leading SSD's?
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Memory-chip-company-FMC-keeps-w...