On Mon, Dec 08, 2025 at 11:29:09PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > Only if it's a single drive. > > I don't build SOHO servers anymore with single drives. Nowadays I use 2 > drives and Ubuntu Server than during the setup configure BIOS to set the > disks as just a bunch of dumb drives, and then during OS installation turn > on drive mirroring.
Keep in mind that power supplies can fail as well, often killing what is connected to them. Usually failure is to zero volts output, but a particularly nasty form of failure is the output electrolytic capacitors going open circuit, often resulting in damaging power pulses well above the normal DC design average. Integrated ircuits can draw VASTLY more current when power voltages exceed design limits. The motor and interface silicon chips are low mass and heat FAST. Ted's "doubled drives" will increase reliability for mechanical drive failures (in my experience, mostly head crashes and plowed oxide on the disk platter, followed by spindle motor failure). A good idea ... before 2020. However, as a chip engineer, I prefer to leave the motors in the fab, moving wafers and attaching chips to packages long before they leave the factory and enter my door. I have problems enough with cooling fan failures. Still ... oxide on a platter can store "magnetic pixels" as densely as a microscopic read head can find them, so the same lithography techniques that make small transistors can alos make very small read heads and very uniform oxide platters. I presume disk drives will continue to pack more bits onto a square millimeter, enabling more bits per platter and drive. Above 4 terabytes or so, disks win cost per bit (perhaps not cost-per-bit-YEAR or bits-per-WATT), so they have a place in many computer systems. But not for long. Moore's Law continues to chew up legacy systems and digest them into microchips. --- As for me, I use big magnetic platter disks for system backups, hundreds of soft-linked rsync images. For now. I will do this until somebody invents a "write once" optical tape backup drive using inexpensive, indelible optical tape, solid-state-steerable UV lasers, and submicron "bit pixels". A 5μm thick, 5mm wide, 200 meter length optical tape spool/cartridge with 1μm hex-grid pixels and 2x redundant coding might store 5 terabytes of backups in a plastic cassette the size of an audio tape cassette, with similar prices. A few pennies more for a megabyte flash "index" chip in the optical tape cassette, with RFID-style encrypted readout, so you can scan a drawer of optical tape cartridge indexes to find the data you want. Platter drives will eventually follow DOS into history's dust bin. * Keith L. * (my hands first wrote "dust bunny", which is apropos of my sloppy information management processes). -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected]
