[Discuss] NAS: lots of bays vs. lots of boxes

[Mike Small]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 02:23:55PM -0400, John Abreau wrote:
> Based on the statistics they gathered, they recommended a policy of
> replacing drives every three years regardless of whether they're failing
> yet. The idea is that disks are cheap these days, and the cost of losing
> data far outweighs the cost of replacing drives before they fail.

True enough perhaps for professional use and for those who really
care about what's on their harddrives but that's not everyone.
For instance myself other than my son's photographs I'm not all
that concerned about data loss. His photographs I back up (along
with most other stuff going along for the ride in point of fact)
to a usb drive and a remote location each time I store new ones.
So I'm ready for my old laptop drives, which were older than three
years when I got them, to go at any moment. I keep two machines at
home instead of one so I won't be without a computer for very long
when one goes.

For my own case I don't ascribe to the disks are cheap argument,
or buy new hardware at all, mostly for environmental reasons. That
would be the first and second Rs I suppose, which David Suzuki used
to say were much more important than the 3rd. Beyond that $50 is
a significant donation to some charities. Or if I keep it that's
more money than I rate the value of the state of my nethack session
or latest feeble attempt at getting nvidia drivers working on
openbsd or whatever. I have a music collection but it's all songs
I've heard too many times anyway.  You can stream such good stuff
from university stations and what not it almost seems a kind of
hoarding to bother keeping music on your computer. Okay that may
be overstating things.

Finally there's the hardware you can't get new drives for. Some
people like to keep and run some really interesting old machines:
http://www.prumpleffer.de/~miod/machineroom/inventory.html I think

I guess my point is people shouldn't be slavish to that advice. It
would be good if there were some to take up the detritus from those
companies and enthusiasts who are churning through all this junk
every couple years. Oh, and it would be nice if people would be a
little less paranoid and not figure harddrives need to have holes
drilled through them before turning them loose (not meaning to
dredge up that debate again). I don't have an electron scanning
microscope, scout's honour.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at sdf.org           SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.org