Re: KDE is now broken (Fwd: Heads-up: KDE4 hitting testing tonight (UTC) )
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 10:08:00AM -0500, lee wrote:
> On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 09:42:57AM -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> > As far as I know, the only digital media that is designed to last that
> > long on the shelf without data loss is tape. Since tape technology
> > moves apace, you should probably archive a couple of tape drives along
> > with the data.
>
> Well, I used to have some tape drives when the disks were smaller, but
> I haven't looked into them for years. I always bought them used, and
> they were still rather expensive.
>
> Can you get a reliable tape drive, incl. some tapes, that stores at
> least 1TB per tape, for max. $200 now?
No. You can get used LTO-3 drives for about $250 on ebay. Tapes, of
whatever capacity, end up costing about $50 each (I suppose unless you
buy in great volume). You have to do the math once you determine your
data set size to know whether its cheaper to have a lower-capacity drive
with more tapes or a higher-capacity drive with fewer tapes.
I just went through the math for my 12 GB data-set size and compared
tape to USB sticks (not for archive, but for off-site backup). The
break-even point was 72GB: less than that and USB sticks (16 GB) were
cheaper; more than that and a used LTO-3 tape changer was cheaper.
> > > Who would keep all the old hardware? And for what? And it's nothing
> > > you could rely on.
> >
> > Actually, I need old hardware. Newer hardware gives my wife headaches.
>
> Why is that? It limits her to very slow hardware which could be a
> problem sooner or later because the old hardware isn't up to the task
> anymore. It depends on what she wants to do, of course ...
Whether it limits her (actually me) or not is not the issue. If it
gives her a headache then I can't use it at all, which is very limiting.
Other than web-browsing (e.g. firefox/iceweasel), I can do everything on
my 486 if I have enough drives.
> > controller. What I really need is an old 100 MHz or slower SMP server
> > with scsi. Or, at least, an ISA scsi card.
>
> You can still get that --- but for how long?
>
>
> > > How do you maintain 15 or 30 year old hardware?
> >
> > Carefully. Memory is still available for my 486. The biggest problem
> > for me is hard drives; they die and aren't made small anymore. Scsi
> > fixes that (since there are no bios issues with scsi).
>
> Yeah, SCSI is great, but it's not affordable anymore. What's the price
> for a 1TB SCSI disk now? Like $1500? And I'd need two because I don't
> put data on disks that aren't at least RAID1. I've seen too many disks
> failing for that.
Look at the sweet-spot price point for used scsi drives, then get a used
hardware raid card. My HP NetServer LPr (dual P-II-450) came with 1 GB
ram, two 36 GB scsi drives, and a HP NetRaid 1si card for $65 (and all
cables, terminators, etc). You can get the raid cards cheap if used.
Get a 14-bay external scsi hot-swap enclosure to hook up to it (another
$50) and load it up with the scsi drives (of whatever size).
Of course, if you have to pay for power, I guess at some point its
cheaper to buy two 1TB drives.
> And look at the cables and terminators. You end up paying about $100
> just to connect a few SCSI disks. I still have the controller and
> disks, but the cables got lost when moving. They'd be nice to have,
> though rather loud, but I didn't want to spend all the money on
> cables. You can get 1TB SATA disks for the price of the SCSI cables
> and the terminators ...
And forgo the reliability. You really comparing SATA to SCSI? SAS to
SCSI sure; SATA to IDE sure.
Check ebay for the cables and terminators. There are lots of computer
recyclers that only sell through ebay.
> In your case, you could have the computer for your wife boot over the
> network and run it without any disks. Put the sever for that at some
> place where it doesn't bother her.
That would be about 500 feet away. First, I'd have to buy a lot that's
big enough, then build a data centre 500 feet away...
> > Also, do you really need the data to sit on a shelf for 30 years, or can
> > it be cycled to new media every 5 years?
>
> I keep it on the disks. I don't have a solution for making backups
> anymore. I'm going to need new disks soon, and I'm also going to need
> a second set for backups (still better than none) --- but I don't have
> the money for that atm.
>
> > There's something to be said for tarring to a raw disk partition (so
> > there's no filesystem to be corrupted), and putting the same data to
> > three different drives. Then using some data comparision utility
> > (there's a deb available, I forget the name) to choose the correct block
> > for every block of the data. This is far more reliable given three
> > partially corrupted data sets than e.g. raid where if a certain number
> > of blocks fail, the whole disk is marked bad.
>
> You want to buy 8 sets of 3 disks each for your dayly and monthly
> backups and an SATA controller that can do hotplug? That's about
> $2500 --- maybe you can get a tape drive for that kind of money.
Check out addonics for drive cubes; they hold a few drives and hook up
with either USB or eSATA; there's your hot-swap.
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