[geeks] Disks: recommendations?

[Mouse]

> SSD is, as I understand it, all about speed and (physical) size.

Well...for most uses.  There are uses where things such as physical
shock resistance are important.  And, while my experience is limited,
in my experience they also give off substantially less heat.

> Do you have speed issues?  Are your backups taking too long?

> Are you wanting to store more data in a physically smaller format, or
> are you looking for incrementally larger storage in the same physical
> cabinet?

The last of those.  My backups don't take time in the usual sense; I
don't have "backup runs".  Each time I swap drives, there's copy time
and then resync time, which add up to a day or two, but that time is
relatively unimportant; after that it copies all changes live, and, to
a first approximation, I can pull the drive anytime - the backup drive
is always up-to-the-moment.  (Or almost always; it can be flooded with
changes and need to catch up.  But that's relatively rare and almost
always quite quick.)

The primary pressure to do this comes from the size issue.  My backup
partition is at 99%; the last few filesystems I've added to it have
meant throwing away some other machine's (idle) backup to make room.
So far that's been relatively easy, but it's getting more difficult.
I figured drive sizes had probably come down to where it wouldn't be
too expensive to jump to larger drives.  Based on the prices I was
quoted, I was right in that guess.

> SSDs are great and solve several problems users face, but they may
> not address your concerns best.

Yeah, that's why I was asking.  There are lots of tradeoffs and, while
to a certain extent any drive of the right size will do, I'd rather
find one that's tuned for these particular tradeoffs, if I can.
Non-streaming speed (seek time), heat, bytes per cubic centimetre,
physical shock resistance, very low acoustic noise - all the places
where SSDs shine - are quite low on my priority list.  Ideally, I'd
like something inexpensive, and I can accept slow, physically large,
and a bit power-hungry, but I want excellent long-term cold-storage
reliability.  Acoustic noise matters some; this is next to my main
desk, and, while there are fans enough it's not really quiet, something
like the whine that some (now quite old) SCSI drives in the 1G-2G days
(Seagates, I think, but that memory could be bitrotted) made would
definitely be a problem.

That doesn't seem to be a target anyone aims at as far as I could find.
Too small a niche, maybe.

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