SSD drives

[Jerry Feldman]

Don't get me started on tapes. My experience with tapes goes back to my
first paying job after the Army and graduate school. I worked as a
programmer in a bank data processing center. We had an environmentally
controlled tape vault that required just about everything including a
strip search to get a tape from as well as an offsite storage across the
parking lot. First, we were mostly a Burroughs shop and we had the new
high speed tape drives. One day one of the drives started to smoke
setting off the alarm, and the computer operator took the fire
extinguisher and ran out of the building with it :-). We were
essentially a tape shop, and Burroughts had a very fast (but very
expensive) head-per-track disk and a very fast tape dump and restore.
One day I had to restore a few personal trust files from tape to find an
error. First, not all my tapes would read. My research showed that
between two days, apparently a single bit was flipped. Don't know if
there was a software or hardware glitch, but it was definitely a single
bit change. The solution was to roll back to the last good file, and
apply the transactions forward (with the internal bank EDP auditors
checking). Subsequently at Burger King corporation we had different
brand tape drives, but we had a lot of read-write errors until we
disallowed smoking in the computer room.  My personal home experience
was to take periodic backups (even before I ran Linux full time). On a
couple of different ocurrences the tape read failed, and actually ruined
the tape. Fortunately I had a Jaz drive, and I was able to restore. (Jaz
had its problems too). Today, for personal use, I use a HD for backup.=20
In a commercial installation, you've got to save some financial records
for a number of years. At Burger King we actually had to go back 5 years
because a computer operator had mounted the incorrect tape for fixed
assets. Tapes when properly recorded, handled  and stored provide the
best cost per byte. But there are still times when they will fail and
one needs to go back to paper of microfiche records.

On 03/28/2010 09:13 AM, jbk wrote:
> On 03/23/2010 04:14 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>  =20
>> A while back we had a discussion about SSD drives. Today there is an
>> article in Slashdot:
>> http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/03/23/1647239/SSD-Price-Drops-Si=
gnaling-End-of-Spinning-Media?art_pos=3D4
>> This references an article in Gadgetopolis:
>> http://www.gadgetopolis.com/posts/7567/all/1
>> "The Death Watch for Hard Disk Drive Technology Begins Now (Finally!)"=

>>   =20
>>    =20
> At the end of the article it asks the question "why is anybody using=20
> tape backup?"
>
> For the consumer non-tech level user unless they are running windows=20
> they are not using tape backup. Consumer level tape drives that I could=
=20
> find were travan drives accessed by the ide-tape driver. When linux=20
> introduced the libata driver 5 years ago they never integrated the=20
> ide-tape code successfully. Fortunately this occurred at the same time =

> that external usb drives were becoming affordable, they were actually=20
> cheaper per G byte than the travan tapes.
>
>  =20


--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846