I am interested in hearing how to get hard drives to last longer. Should you keep them locked away in the closet? Spin them up occasionally but not too much? Keep them always-on? I understand the less reading and writing, the better.
How does external compare to internal, if at all? Is 3.5" going to last longer than something smaller?
Spinning HDDs will eventually be at risk of failing for purely mechanical reasons, so beyond handling them with care you can't really do all that much. Keeping them always-on may be a viable strategy for drives that are already mostly on, otherwise, just spin them up once in a while, but don't expect this to lower risk significantly. An old drive should simply have its contents transferred to new media, and then be treated as something ephemeral that may fail at any time without warning.
I have found there is really no practical way to predict the bathtub curve for hard drive failures.
The solution is just a lot of redundancy for larger disk arrays whenever practical. I currently have a 15x1TB 7200 RPM zpool in raidz2 I use for "scratch space" for some automation projects. It writes about 500GB-1TB or so a day and has for... over 18 years. I have had exactly one drive fail from that pool, under heavy abuse. That one failed a year or two in. Prior to my personal use it was beat on (mostly reads) as backing storage for uploaded images for a large website where the drives operated at 90% or higher I/O utilization pretty much 24x7.
I have other pools of disks where I have replaced over 50% of them 6 years in, with batches of failures seemingly at random. You start to notice patterns with various drive models - but not until well after the point of purchase where it's far too late to predict based on anything like vendor reputation or whatnot. I've had batches of various WD, Seagate, Toshiba, and HGST all both be incredibly reliable and some incredibly not so. Some of the same model series just different drive sizes have wildly different reliability characteristics.
I don't bother pulling "old" drives out of production preemptively any more. The only thing I do preemptively now is pull drives with very critical SMART prefailure warnings such as a consistently growing number of unrecoverable sector errors. That one and a couple other attributes are worth watching trends for, but the rest are pretty pointless and really do not seem to correlate much. And again, it varies by drive model for which times to pay attention to a particular SMART attribute and which not to.
I simply treat drives as wear items that fail with little to no notice, and just make sure I can survive a number of simultaneous failures at once. Make sure to regularly test your monitoring!
Not power cycling drives is huge as well, as you note. For example these old 1TB spinners:
Yes, I'm grateful I run Linux. You can get quite a bit done with 4GB RAM and a 6th generation (or even earlier) CPU. All 64-bit. I don't think such ancient hardware will be affected by AI demand to the same degree (though I think we'll still see some prices rise if people stop buying new stuff).
The worry is that at some point the older hardware will stop working.
Search the site for other examples of the fun he had with it.
I'd choose Wikipedia over AI, of course, so I'm ultimately grateful it's there. But better than both would be a well-edited traditional encyclopedia, written by experts in a single voice, and possibly peer-reviewed.
I decided to look at why the original block happened.. it's on [0], search for "July 2018", then check out administrator's reply, including the links to recent edits.
I had no opinion either way, but wow, I have to agree with the block here. Peter put words like "This was a ridiculous statement" into wikipedia article, which is as far from wikipedia tone as it can get; and then completely failed to understand administrator's advice on the tone.
If you want to show wikipedia has problems, you might want to choose some other example.
I don't know the details but amongst his views apparently is:
>Hitchens has frequently rejected the scientific consensus that human activity is linked to global warming, stating that “there is no proof that this is so”
I wonder if that relates to one of the appalling biases he tried to fix? I'm ok with a bias towards scientific accuracy myself.
Potentially-ignoramus comment here, apologies in advance, but amazon.com itself appears to be fine right now. Perhaps slower to load pages, by about half a second. Are they not eating (much of) their own dog food?
They are 100% fully on AWS and nothing else. (I’m Ex-Amazon)
It seems like the outage is only effecting one region so AWS is likely falling back to others. I’m sure parts of the site are down but the main sites are resilient
those sentences aren't logically connected - the outage this post is about is mostly confined to `us-east-1`, anyone who wanted to build a reliable system on top of AWS would do so across multiple regions, including Amazon itself.
`us-east-1` is unfortunately special in some ways but not in ways that should affect well-designed serving systems in other regions.
Worth remembering that the Venerable Bede was writing The Ecclesiastical History of the English People two centuries before Athelstan, so clearly there was some notion of unity as early as that.
I recommend "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science" by E.A. Burtt if you're interested in that period. It discusses both the science, and the different philosophies of physics that were informing and perhaps influencing them. The book is a hundred years old but very readable.
O-1 is not enough. For jobs requiring bachelors degree, there is currently plenty of US-born workers looking for jobs. For jobs requiring masters and PhD there is still a need for H-1B visas, and O-1 is too high a bar.
Account managers and sales engineers are the ones I’ve seen laid off. They seem to have kept the licensing specialists they need on calls because nobody understands the convoluted mess they’ve created. So, losing the people we were working with, on top of all the issues with the products themselves, it made going to OpenShift that much easier.
How does external compare to internal, if at all? Is 3.5" going to last longer than something smaller?