• Sparky@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    Sigh…

    A couple of years ago there were discussions on how stupid 20+tb harddrives were, mainly because they are so slow that the time it takes for files to transfer to a spinning disk was too long.

    Let’s say you have a good 20tb drive and it can transfer files at 200MB/s. To fill that drive, it’ll take 1 day and 8 hours of continuous transfer. If it’s failing, and you’re trying to get as much off of it you’re screwed.

    Now let’s think about that micro SD card. It’s 4tb, and let’s be gracious and give it a v90 speed class. That’s 90MB/s. Looking at a calculation for the time it takes to fill it up, we’re sitting at about 14h and 14 minutes. Worst part is that SD cards don’t have SMART, meaning you don’t know when they’ll die.

    From my experience, even good SD cards die in my raspberry pi running pihole, and the cards runs idle almost all the time.

    Also there’s this thing that the higher capacity a storage device gets, the more valueable the data stored on it becomes, not directly because it’s high capacity, but because it’s more trusted by the user.

    Guys, gals and anyone in between, please get a proper storage solution, something that won’t fail spontaneously. If you need that kind of capacity, go for a Nas with spare drives, or at least get an ssd.

    /end rant

    • AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      Not all use-cases require a high speed:capacity ratio.

      I mean, I have an 18TB USB hard drive, which sustains transfer at about 50MB/sec in practice. It is nearly full, and its level of performance has never been a show-stopping problem.

      It’s hard to imagine a use case where a NAS would be a viable alternative to an SD card.