OK it is a little out there. By storing data in DNA Harvard Scientists George Church and Sri Kosuri have stored 700TB in 1 gram of material (70 Billion copies of a book). Which makes us wonder how long it will be before there is a High-Rely DNA backup drive. The medium is very dense,…
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Suppose you were to run a burn in test on a brand new Seagate 3TB SATA drive, writing 3TB and then reading it back to confirm the data. Our standards are such that if a drive fails during 5 cycles we won’t ship it. Luckily, all 20 of 20 drives we tested last night passed. In fact, most of the 3TB drives we test every week passed this test. Why is that a big deal? Because there is a calculation floating around out there that shows when reading a full 3TB drive there is a 21.3% chance of getting an unrecoverable read error. Clearly the commonly used probability equation isn’t modeling reality. To me this raises red flags on previous work discussing the viability of both stand alone SATA drives and large RAID arrays.
Backing up to the cloud makes a lot of sense. There are a broad spectrum of vendors and prices and we always like to encourage people to do both local and cloud backup (hybrid cloud). I think the cloud vendors are different in different countries and it makes sense to pick one nearby (but not…
Industry visionaries are concerned about storing everything in the cloud. Besides the numerous outages we’ve seen over the last few years concern is growing about the liability and ownership issues. In this article Apple Co-founder Wozniak says “I really worry about everything going to the cloud,” he said. “I think it’s going to be horrendous. I…
Sage software, a leading provider of business management software recently determined that 60% of small businesses don’t “offsite” their data. The study, discussed here says that while nearly all U.S. small businesses back up critical financial data, 6 in 10 don’t get it off site. Removable disk backup systems can help overcome the high cost of moving…