I have some questions:
What read/write speeds?
Is it even writeable in a reasonable way? (CD/DVD burners blast your disk with a laser and "cook" darker patches that are your data)
How long does it live on this disk?
yeah that's why I never get excited about this news. That's awesome they're working on it, but it's in a lab, in a controlled environment, with each one costing more than I make in a year probably.
When I get excited is when they have manufacturing down and they want to start making them en masse. Something like this in a lab? Eh a decade away. They're talking about it at their marking reviews and it's in manufacturing? Now I'm excited
I don't really feel like I'm much the wiser, having read this, on how exactly this works. It's storing data in 3 dimensions in layers and uses 2 lasers in both write and the read process. Why multiple layers in 3 dimensions over a single layer as in traditional optical media would yield better storage density is intuitive but the way they're able to do this is not that well explained. I don't understand the relationship between having 2 lasers and being able to store data in many layers. The fact that one laser disables the effect of the other both in read and in write is confusing, one would think "switching off" the writing process done by... not writing anymore, rather than having a second laser which somehow disables the first but in any case the effect of this is said to allow "spots" (are they like pits?) smaller than the wavelength of the light used to create them which is presumably very small and again makes intuitive sense as to how that would allow increased density and thus storage capacity but doesn't help explain the 3 dimensionality. Also, how does firing a laser at a material presumably burn it away to produce a "spot" (pit?) but firing a second laser at it stops this from happening? Similarly, with reading, how does firing a laser at a spot cause it to fluoresce, yet firing a second laser at it somehow causes it to stop doing that? How bizarre.
On an even more basic level, how do layers work? How does the outer most layer of the readable surface of the disc not block or interfere with the ability to read or write the next layer beneath it and so on?
The spot size is the size of the point the laser focuses on. It seems with the material they've used that there is some kind of interference between the two lasers they use to make a pit smaller than you would expect. There's not a whole lot of information in the article to understand the details. Also, I'm just a guy who works on lasers, getting C's in my optics class currently so take it with a massive dose of salt
I have the impression that they're recommending this drive just because of the affiliate link money.
They link to a review that they made SIX years ago and at that time it was the fastest drive. Six years it's a geologic era for this kind of stuff. That review is outdated and invalid if compared to modern hardware.
IMHO it doesn't make sense in 2024 to buy a server PCIe 3.0 drive at enterprise prices when you can get a much faster seagate ironwolf pcie 4.0 nvme drive for half the price and in 2TB configuration.
Update: I found a partial solution using Nitter and the Link Gopher Firefox extension.
Using a public Nitter instance, one can visit an account page, jump to the bottom, click "Load more", and use Link Gopher's "Extract Links by Filter" tool to extract all links of the form https://nitter.freedit.eu/SpaceX/status/. This method allows one to collect 20 links at a time. It's still a bit more work than I would ideally like, but better than trying to find and copy each tweet URL manually. Also not sure how much longer this method will work given that public Nitter instances will likely stop working soon.
If you're on linux or bsd, look into ZFS. Insanely easy to set up and admin, fs-level volume management, compression and encryption, levels of RAID if you want them, and recently they even added phe option to expand your data pools with new drives. All of that completely userspace, without having to fiddle with expensive RAID cards or motherboard firmware.
Huh? ZFS is not 100% userspace. You’re right that ZFS doesn’t need hardware RAID (in fact, it’s incompatible), but the standard OpenZFS implementation (unless you’re referring to the experimental FUSE-based one) does use kernelspace on both FreeBSD and Linux.
I can't really tell you what to use, but from my personal experience - stay away from glusterfs and drbd. both have caused me serious trouble when trying to run them in a production setup. ceph seems to be pretty solid, though.
I get what you’re proposing but I’d respectfully suggest looking into unRAID on basically any hardware that can boot an OS.
It won’t necessarily be small and cute (though you can accomplish that if you wish), but you can make it do just about anything. I bought old enterprise hardware to run my main and backup servers on. I feel really comfortable with my data safety.
FYI you probably shouldn't be saying you feel really comfortable with your data safety while suggesting unraid. The way unraid handles it's storage will lead to data loss at some point. Unraid only locks down an array and protects it when smart starts issuing warnings that a drive has failed. Smart isn't magic though and when a drive starts to die it might start writing garbage data for days if not weeks before smart catches on. If a drive writes garbage for long enough there's nothing you can do to fix it due to that way unraid handles arrays. This is why ZFS is such a popular option as it treats hard drive with a level of skepticism and verifies the data was actually written correctly along with verifying the data from time to time.
That's not even mentioning unraid is charging for what other software does for free.
Sorta... If the array was built with hybrid ZFS within unraid which is what the majority of unraid users go with as it allows for better mixing of various sized drives and easier expansion of the array in the future (in other words the main selling points of unraid) then you do not get any of the safety nets ZFS provides as what unraid is essentially doing is making a single drive zfs vdev for each drive in the array. In unraid's own words "ZFS-formatted disks in Unraid's array do not offer inherent self-healing protection.".
Unraid natively supports full ZFS arrays in addition to unraid arrays since the last major release. Can mix and match both types on the same system as necessary.
All of my (easily replaceable) Plex media is native unraid arrays while my documents are all on a ZFS array on the same system with snapshots and such. It’s the perfect solution.
There is really no point in changing a video from mp4 to mkv oder webm. It's just the container. If the video doesn't play on some devides its because of the codec. If you want it to play on as many devices as possible, You want your videos h264 encoded. For more modern devices you can use HEVC/h265 and safe some space on file size.
Thanks, it's more for the sake of having it playing comfortably on as many devices as possible without the user having to do anything, even in weird cases, so I guess I'll convert with ffmpeg.
I agree h264 is probably the most compatible nowadays and most efficient in storage/processing. h265 requires more processing both to convert and to play, which makes older hardware struggle in high resolutions besides is not present in all devices.
You say the sound comes from the power supply and the HDD is not plugged into the computer.
My diagnistic: the power-supply makes a noise when it operates at very low load (almost 0mA of current), it is probaly making the cyclic noise because of some blinking LED or another very small variation of the loaf somewhere.
This is a very common symptom of cheap power-supplies, but it doesn't necessarly mean it isn't working normally, just an annoyance.
No, it’s nothing to worry about, it’ll be just a handful of super cheap parts in the power supply.
Essentially when the power supply converts ac to dc, it has a bunch of standard parts, and if you cheap out on them, sometimes they make high pitched noises. The noises can vary in pitch too.
It's not the bridge rectifier, but it's an artifact of the operation of the switchmode power supply. Similar effects are often described as 'coil whine '.
The switching operation varies in duty cycle and frequency depending on load, and isn't absolutely stable so oscillates a little bit. This switching supply is often in the audio range; typically between about 5kHz and 200kHz depending on design and load.
Changing current and magnetic field causes the physical components (particularly transformers/inductors) to change size and shape, and this vibration causes audible noise. At some conditions, it will resonate at an audible frequency and be loud. At other conditions, it might not resonate and/or the frequency is outside the audible range, so it's silent.
Mains transformers do the same, causing the characteristic 50/60Hz hum. You'll also hear the same out of cellphone chargers.
Thank you for that! I've gotten into the habit of unplugging both cables (power + data) when I'm done with it, which is probably better anyways...but at least now I don't have to fret if I forget one.
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