Just a reminder: These massive drives are really more a “budget” version of a proper tape backup system. The fundamental physics of a spinning disc mean that these aren’t a good solution for rapid seeking of specific sectors to read and write and so forth.
So a decent choice for the big machine you backup all your VMs to in a corporate environment. Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.
Not sure if the general advice has changed, but you are still looking for a sweet spot in the 8-12 TB range for a home NAS where you expect to regularly access and update a large number of small files rather than a few massive ones.
Because people are thinking through specific niche use cases coupled with “Well it works for me and I never do anything ‘wrong’”.
I’ll definitely admit that I made the mistake of trying to have a bit of fun when talking about something that triggers the dunning kruger effect. But people SHOULD be aware of how different use patterns impacts performance, how that performance impacts users, and generally how different use patterns impact wear and tear of the drive.
Not sure what you’re going on about here. Even these discs have plenty of performance for read/wrote ops for rarely written data like media. They have the same ability to be used by error checking filesystems like zfs or btrfs, and can be used in raid arrays, which add redundancy for disc failure.
The only negatives of large drives in home media arrays is the cost, slightly higher idle power usage, and the resilvering time on replacing a bad disc in an array. Your 8-12TB recommendation already has most of these negatives. Adding more space per disc is just scaling them linearly.
Additionally, most media is read in a contiguous scan. Streaming media is very much not random access.
Your typical access pattern is going to be seeking to a chunk, reading a few megabytes of data in a row for the streaming application to buffer, and then moving on. The ~10ms of access time at the start are next to irrelevant. Particularly when you consider that the OS has likely observed that you have unutilized RAM and loads the entire file into the memory cache to bypass the hard drive entirely.
HDD read rates are way faster than media playback rates, and seek times are just about irrelevant in that use case. Spinning rust is fine for media storage. It’s boot drives, VM/container storage, etc, that you would want to have on an SSD instead of the big HDD.
Just a reminder: These massive drives are really more a “budget” version of a proper tape backup system. The fundamental physics of a spinning disc mean that these aren’t a good solution for rapid seeking of specific sectors to read and write and so forth.
So a decent choice for the big machine you backup all your VMs to in a corporate environment. Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.
Not sure if the general advice has changed, but you are still looking for a sweet spot in the 8-12 TB range for a home NAS where you expect to regularly access and update a large number of small files rather than a few massive ones.
So I’m guessing you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
honestly curious, why the hell was this downvoted? I work in this space and I thought this was still the generally accepted advice?
Because people are thinking through specific niche use cases coupled with “Well it works for me and I never do anything ‘wrong’”.
I’ll definitely admit that I made the mistake of trying to have a bit of fun when talking about something that triggers the dunning kruger effect. But people SHOULD be aware of how different use patterns impacts performance, how that performance impacts users, and generally how different use patterns impact wear and tear of the drive.
Not sure what you’re going on about here. Even these discs have plenty of performance for read/wrote ops for rarely written data like media. They have the same ability to be used by error checking filesystems like zfs or btrfs, and can be used in raid arrays, which add redundancy for disc failure.
The only negatives of large drives in home media arrays is the cost, slightly higher idle power usage, and the resilvering time on replacing a bad disc in an array. Your 8-12TB recommendation already has most of these negatives. Adding more space per disc is just scaling them linearly.
Additionally, most media is read in a contiguous scan. Streaming media is very much not random access.
Your typical access pattern is going to be seeking to a chunk, reading a few megabytes of data in a row for the streaming application to buffer, and then moving on. The ~10ms of access time at the start are next to irrelevant. Particularly when you consider that the OS has likely observed that you have unutilized RAM and loads the entire file into the memory cache to bypass the hard drive entirely.
HDD read rates are way faster than media playback rates, and seek times are just about irrelevant in that use case. Spinning rust is fine for media storage. It’s boot drives, VM/container storage, etc, that you would want to have on an SSD instead of the big HDD.