Didier Kryn said on Tue, 5 Dec 2023 10:12:01 +0100


> but not many people can afford disks 100 time
>bigger than their storage need.

Maybe not 100 times, but I can afford to buy a 1TB NVMe for about a
hundred dollars, and use 60GB of it. That's a disk 16 times bigger than
the part that's used. I think that's good enough for a very long life.
Writes have plenty of room to roam.

The way I accomplish this is to put /usr, /etc and a few other
mostly-read directories on my NVME, and mount everything else on a 12TB
7200rpm spinning rust.

>You also talk about the noise of a monster spinning disk used for
>backup, but the recommendation for a backup disk is to *not* let it
>powered all the time.

This is very good information. My spinning rust backup disks sit around
a lot, sometimes weeks or months in a bank vault. They always read and
write perfectly when finally use.

The guy who has most influenced my computer use said maybe 15 years ago
that spinning rust that sits around for a long time risks not spinning
up, and I believed him. But my experience shows differently, so I now
find your assertion more believable than his. Thanks!

>I've read that a spinning disk used rarely is
>considered the most resilient backup storage, in contradiction with
>SSDs which loose data if they aren' t periodically powered.

I didn't know that SSDs lose data if unused for long periods. I'll keep
that in mind.

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21