Hard drives from the last 20 years are now slowly dying.
Isnt the standard preservation system tape drives? They tested the longevity of different storage solutions ages ago to avoid stuff like this.
Not really. Disk took over when the clouds started offering cheap archiving. Tape is getting more and more rare.
Not for long term archival they didn’t. HDDs and SSDs suffer from bitrot among other issues when they haven’t been powered and/or refreshed in awhile.
Tape is still king for long term archival, just about every major company uses it for the long term archival of critical data.
They may also use cloud archival services, because when it comes to backups if you don’t have multiple across multiple mediums and multiple places, you don’t have a backup.
They aren’t talking about availability. This is about data integrity over time.
Not really. Disk is king now since S3 storage took the crown when cloud services started offering cheap archiving. Anything still on disk from the 90s is some neglected archive that has been deemed by the company to have no value.
I would assume they’re finding this out now because they’re trying to feed their whole archive to the AI beast.
Yeah no, thats not an “archive” you are talking about thats just a bunch of storage. Archives are for things like historical, government, artistic data. That stuff sits in airtight cases on tape storage in a bunker.
Obviously any drive that is constantly in use to deliver data to customers is gonna die, thats never going to change. But these were actually intended to be used for archiving but failed at doing exactly that.
Archive is whatever companies want it to be. I’ve been told anything that’s not microfilm isn’t an archive, so there you go.
Disk is king when you need lots of active storage.
When it comes to archival Tape is king. I would never trust an HDD to be left unpowered for years like you could a tape cartridge.
And a single LTO9 cartridge can hold 18TBs for dirt cheap compared to the equivalent HDD
S3 Glaciers practices are secretive, but it’s almost certainly tape based
I don’t disagree with you that tape has a different value prop, but I sell backup systems and almost nobody I sell to uses tape anymore. The truth with tape is that it’s a cheap media, but you still need to pay someone to vault it for you, it cannot be accessed easily, it makes physical moves which cause damage and tape drive tech is still one of the most complicated things in the Datacenter.
Most companies I deal with want the data to be “online” in at least some form that can be easily accessed for AI, lawsuits, new research, business continuity, etc. Tape allows none of that, and so the value of it is pretty limited. The truth these days is I can stuff a TB of data into cloud archive, with instant retrieval, for really, really cheap, with like 99.99999999999% data durability guarantees.
No one really knows, and Amazon won’t say. There’s speculation it’s tape, low-rpm drives connected to custom logic boards, Blu ray, etc.