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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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Awesome for archival
At 10MB/s it'd take you 416 days if constant writes to fill it up.
EXTREMELY slow archival.
At least for now, till it gets better
Good for write once read many applications with the 200 MB/s read speed though. Things like research data or torrents that gets recorded once and not changed again. Then again that's the upper limit and the lower limit of 50 MB/s is pretty shit even for that.
Though 10 MB/s is literally 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi speeds so it might still be too slow to be practical for such a large drive.
If you're not creating more than 800GB a day of new data you can just let it run with a faster drive as a buffer in front of it.
Or get 10 of them and run them in parallel. Maybe get 11 and throw in a bit of parity, just in case bitrot surfaces after the first 1000 years or something.
This is also assuming that reading and writing are mutually exclusive.
The places where this level of storage density and longevity are valuable are places that are generating terabytes or tens of terabytes a day. Especially scientific research.
It is definitely an interesting development, and the lack of bit rot makes it incredibly useful as an archival system. However, I am curious if the surrounding hardware necessary to actually successfully read from it is going to be as long-lived. Similar to magnetic hard drives, I am sure the plates that are being written to need to exist in an extremely sterile and particle-free environment in order to be read and written to.
Let's say I want to preserve my computer disks when I do a major change (i.e. 10TB worth of NAS or just 4TB worth of workstation) or when I sell it or just throw it away. What do I do? Time is not essential. Or as others said, store photos and other large files. It's for archival, not for backup purposes.
@Mihies @douglasg14b
Stick the drive in a USB caddy and keep it?
If it's an array, buy a big one and then repeat from step 1...
That'd work only if I throw the computer away.
@Mihies I honestly don't see why, no, not at all. If you want to keep the data then you plug the drive into anything else with a USB interface. If you don't want to keep the data, what's the problem? Just format it and donate it, whole.
If I do the former, then I need a new disk for the computer if I were to sell it or otherwise keep it functional, don't I? And disks, especially these days, are not cheap. Plus it doesn't make much (financial) sense to keep the standard disk just for archival purposes. You are also missing an major upgrade scenario - shall I buy a new disk each time I do an upgrade?