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Toshiba exec claims hard drives are 7X cheaper than SSDs and will continually evolve for large datacenters
(www.tomshardware.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I mean, with stuff like ZFS, it's a little hard to justify the outlay for all solid-state disk storage when I can build out a large storage array using HDD's and use one mid-size SSD for ZIL and then L2ARC to provide read/write speedups. Who actually cares what the underlying storage mechanism is as long as the dataset is backed up and the performance is good?
This is my thing. I have about 122TB of spinning metal (with the same as an offsite backup) with SSDs as ZIL and L2ARC. And it's awesome. HDDs I think will genuinely be important for for the foreseeable future.
Power consumption, noise, durability...
There is a lot of power to waste for the savings you made, when not buying expensive SSDs (20€ a year is not much). Where we use HDDs, we don't care about noise. Durability? We use huge RAID systems with lots of redundancy.
I personally like to swap new drives after 5 years to avoid failures. So when you find a 16 TB SSD for 350€, you send me a message.
My 4 bay HDD NAS uses around 45W, 50W with some light load, 70W spinning up. That's about 1kWh per day, or 150 EUR per year.
I use it in my room, so I very much care about noise.
More durability = less redundancy (less cost) + less frequent swaps (less cost). My anecdotal evidence is 1 failed SSD in 15 years (160GB Intel, basically first Gen). Every other SSD is still working. I have a drawer full of failed HDDs.
Plus more performance.
Geez power is expensive for you folks.
In Vancouver we pay 0.14 CAD per kWh (.096 EUR) for usage beyond 675kWh in a month. (0.0975CAD, 0.068 EUR, before the threshold)
Yep, we pay something around 40 cents, depending on your contract. In 2022 it even went above 60 cents for a few months :(
I have my own nas in my living room too and it's super rare that I hear the disks over the fans.
I have the opposite, fans are silent (mix of noctua and silent wings), disk activity can be heard quite clearly if the room is silent.
My HDDs run 24/7 without spin up btw. I'm just talking about the costs. My drives don't fail that much as yours. The recent drives that failed were WD Blue that were very old and only used for backups. And yes, all backups were still readable, even the drive was reported as failed. Compare it to SSDs that often fail "spectacularly".
With the SSD's I can afford, there are what you might call "net negative savings" when I save maybe a couple dollars in power a month but have to replace them every few months. We can't all afford EVO's.
As a newb I hope one day in my journey, I can look back at this and say "I finally understand this." Til then thank you, magic man
Don't let your dreams be dreams, I didn't know Jack shit about nas and just built my own with an old pc, I tried truenas but ended up paying for unraid, it was just easier for my needs.