Could be better controllers, or better driver firmware, or something.

Just curious where in the chain the improvements come from.

Likewise with SSDs. Given their slightly more write intensive than ordinary desktop workloads, I'm reasonably confident that the capacitors in my 10-year-old enterprise SSDs (HGST SAS with Intel flash) will fail before the flash.

I think for the folks in the US this was a site that works: https://www.goharddrive.com/default.php

Whereas for those in the EU there's this: https://datablocks.dev/

For the second link, you'll have to ignore the horribly tasteless AI slop image for the site background (someone should e-mail them about it or something), the site itself is legit, bought some drives from them: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablo...

I usually don't spite people or companies but in this case I hope all these AI slop bullshit machines fail & fail hard.

So that we can get hardware at sane prices for actually useful thing. And to serve as a warning to never ever do such a stupidly disruptive shit ever again.

Yeah I'd prefer it to be even cheaper but the prices for HDDs aren't too bad.

I keep my important stuff with ZFS raidz2.

It doesn't matter much to me if the overall process of replacing a dead drive can be done in 40 minutes or if it drags out to 40 hours. The storage system is still alive, still available for reading and writing, and still redundant for that entire time. It can take as long as it takes.

My break-glass-in-case-of-emergency offsite backups are done with restic over the network, so I only had to send 1 initial copy. That first copy took quite a long time. But restic is pretty clever about how it handles things; all subsequent daily backups are what might best be described as incremental-ish. They contain only recent changes and are pretty small with the usual churn rate on this particular pile of data.

(This matters because it keeps the cost of keeping it running quite low, which means that backups actually happen instead of being just a good idea. :) )

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I'd probably pick different methods if I had a real budget for this stuff, but even then: Why would I be motivated to care about how long it takes to replace a hard drive?

As for speed it's mainly tied to rpm and the market decided no one wants higher failure rates / lower mtbf for marginal speed gains.

If you need speed and capacity, throw an ssd or two in front of a raid disk array for caching with primocache or whatever.

Especially now that the same 4TB NVMe SSDs I was buying for $300 are now selling for over $1,000.

In my case, the source of the data is S3, so there's no need for redundancy, as the hard drive is effectively a local cache for cloud storage and the work isn't nearly so time-critical that an occasional failure would be more than a mild annoyance to a customer, if that.

Same for archival backups. Faster recovery time than Glacier Deep Archive, less cost over a period of years, simpler and less expensive than tape for modest volume.

In bigger applications, you have enough redundancy to allow one or two nodes to go down for a while. If a company had terabytes upon terabytes of critical data, having a multi-tiered storage would make sense, even of a full backup restore would take a days.on some tiers.