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Data Storage

Offline Storage for Hard Drives? 47

Posted by Cliff from the where-to-put-your-removable-platters dept.
rrsipov asks: "I work at a small company that processes a good deal of DV (mainly) format video. After trying a number of different technologies we have settled down to using removable hard drives for file storage and backup. When a set of projects are complete, the hard disk they are stored on can be removed and stored offline so that the material is available in for possible future use. The problem is that unlike tapes, etc... we haven't been able to find any good storage cabinet type solutions, and have resorted to a pretty much ad-hoc system of filing the drives. Does Slashdot know of any such system? Ideally we'd like to start with something small, and scale from there if we like the system."
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Offline Storage for Hard Drives? More

Offline Storage for Hard Drives?

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  • Bulk pack boxes (Score:5, Informative)

    by Omega Hacker ( 6676 ) <omega AT omegacs DOT net> on Friday January 20, 2006 @08:43PM (#14523599)
    If you're just storing bare drives, try to get ahold of the shipping boxes that manufacturers send 20-packs in. If you're storing that many drives, they're probably going to be the most efficient and safest way to do it. If you're *buying* drives in that quantity, or can consider doing so in the future, you can probably manage to make sure you'll get the box too. You might be able to scam them off of local computer stores too. You could probably glue a laminated sheet of paper to it with a template and [dry|wet]-erase mark what's in each slot on the outside. Make sure you have plenty of good-condition static bags though.

  • Why not tapes...? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tooth ( 111958 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @08:57PM (#14523664)
    I'd re-evaluate tapes... a HDD depends on both the magnet medium and the conected electronics. With a tape, the medium is seperated from the physical components that make it go (The other advantage is that tapes can be read in by anyone to recover data, where as a HDD would need a clean room). Tapes are slower to read data back from, but if the HDDs are stored offline like you are, then this isn't an issue. By the sounds of it, once it's on your offline HDDs you are removing it from your servers. I'd be pretty nervous about that and recomend that you make at least two copies in case one fails. If you want to be serious about you should use an off-site storage facillity, and a comercial storage facility would probably only deal with tapes.
    • I agree about the tapes. You don't have to worry about mechanical failure of the tapes.

      I'd recommend looking into Exabyte's [exabyte.com] VXA-320 (VXA-3) tapes. They promise 500 writes (as compared to an average of 50 writes with DAT), their "packet technology" provides for error correction and does not depend on a continuous stream of data to efficiently write to tape, and the quality of construction of Exabyte's VXA drives appears to be very high.

      The cost of VXA is very reasonable, especially when compared to technolog
      • The problem with tape drives isn't really the technology, it's the price. The tape drive you're talking about retails for over $1,000 [exabyte.com], and you then have to purchase $85 tapes [exabyte.com] for it.

        If you look on CDW for a 250GB Western Digital hard drive [cdw.com], you'll find them for around $130.

        Taking that into account, you're looking at buying over 50TB of storage capacity before you even come close to breaking even. It just doesn't make sense to go with tape given the cost of disk right now.
        • Ok, look at LTO3. Couple grand for the drive then $120/800GB so about 3 times as cheap per GB once you have paid for the drive. Oh yeah, it's actually made for archiving, which HDD's are NOT. Disk which aren't used are almost as likely to fail as those that are used all the time due to problems with the lubricant.
          • "Disk which aren't used are almost as likely to fail as those that are used all the time due to problems with the lubricant."

            Do you have a link to research that shows that is correct?
            • I don't have a link, but I've witnessed hard drives put into storage for a number of years not spinning up when they were put back into a system for data retrieval. Drives are a semi-complicated piece of equipment, and WILL fail 100% given enough time. They just wear out, or bearings seize from sitting too long.

              Tapes fail too, but it's usually over a much longer timeframe than hard drives. Data stored on tape medium is much more survivable during a mechanical failure than a hard drive.
              • I have seen this too. That's my concern about MAID devices (Massive Array of Idle Disk). Yes, they save on the electrical costs of running large disk farms, but I still worry about spin-ups of long-idle disks.
              • Several years ago, hard drives had a problem called stiction. I understood stiction had been completely cured.

                I know of no physical principle which would cause hard drives to stick now. It can be expected that the lubrication will migrate, but that should take decades.

                A good cure for stiction was to rotate the drive quickly back and forth around the spindle axis. The inertia would break the spindle free. I've done that successfully.
                • Last time I had drives with frozen bearings was quite a while ago. They were 5-1/4" full-height (stack two CD/DVD-ROM drives on top of each other, about that big) 9GB Seagates, and they'd stick every time you had them powered off for more than a day.

                  Took three smacks with a clawhammer right over (or under) the bearing to get them to spin (with power applied of course). Ran like that for the four years I maintained those machines, never had a bad sector. Love to see someone try that with a modern drive. ;
                • The real cure for stiction was to take the drive out of the machine, set it on a soft surface (like a mousepad) and whack one corner of the drive case with a plastic screwdriver handle in such a way that the drive was rotated (slightly - don't knock it off the table) around the axis of drive rotation.

                  If doing it by hand spun it up, it wasn't stiction.

                  I actually had one 40MB Seizegate RLL disk that I couldn't even free up by whacking it with a screwdriver. I actually took the cover off the drive, spun th

        • Are you familiar with the phrase "false economy?" That sounds very much like what you might be engaged in...

          The real question is not "how much does storage cost per xB," but, "how much am I willing to risk not being able to recover what I need, when I need it?" That's the risk analysis, and then the cost analysis is "how likely is media failure for medium X, how much would it cost me to recover/reproduce the data stored on medium X, and, if that data was neither recoverable nor reproducable, how badly screw
    • If I were you I'd seriously recheck tapes. I worked for a decent sized tape backup company for 3 years that also sold hard drive based solutions. By far we had a lower failure rate from tapes than from Hard Drives. Espeically when not in use for a while. We sold a virtual library system that used drives to look like tapes, but, again it was always highly recommnded to offload to physical tape to avoid the problems associated with hard drives.
      Working In tech support gave a "everything is broken" outlook on

    • Re:Why not tapes...? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheLink ( 130905 )
      " a HDD depends on both the magnet medium and the conected electronics. With a tape, the medium is seperated from the physical components that make it go"

      Uh, isn't that a significant minus for tapes. Especially since tapes aren't much cheaper than HDDs. And tape drives are very expensive.

      If you've bought an LTO3 tape drive, and LTO4 tapes become cheap, you don't get a free LTO4 drive with each LTO4 tape.

      Whereas if you have been using 250GB SATA drives as backup media, when 400GB SATA drives become cheap, yo
      • Electronics can get zapped. I've had hard drives were a chip on the circuit board literally blew a hole out in it. By removing the media from the electronics, you have the ability to use any compatible tape drive with that tape. If the electronics on the hard drive go south, what do you do then? Tapes are also considerably more durable and can survive some bumps and bruises. Hard drives are more shock sensivite, both electronic and vibration.

        • By having the drive with the media, you have the ability to use the "media" with any compatible interface. There are magnitudes more computers with SATA/PATA/SCSI interfaces in the world than there are with LTO or DDS drives.

          If you have a physically risky environment then sure tapes are better.
  • I'm assuming you're using hotswap bays. That means your drives are in handy little cases with handles and all. Why not just build a special shelf with several hundred little slots shaped for the hotswap cases? Pull a drive from a PC, slide it into a slot.
  • Get a bundle of plastic hot swap cases(minus the hardware) and put together a cubby hole structure sized to fit them. Easily organized, and the drives will have at least some amount of protection from handling.

    -Rick
  • If you've got lots of drives to deal with, pick up a standard adjustable bookshelf at IKEA or something, and buy or make a few extra shelves for it since you don't need as much height. You can stick labels on the shelf edges to keep them sorted.
    • Yeah, this was going to be my recomendation too. Back in the days before servers all the video production places I knew of kept their tapes on bookshelves, usually organized by date. There's no reason you couln't store your HDDs the same way. A couple recommendations:

      1) Keep those silver bags the drives come in and put the drives back in them before putting them on the shelf. They protect the drives electronics from damage caused by static electricity (which is a much bigger problem than you probably think)
    • I used to work in a hardware shop with a big, sturdy, shelf of new and second hand drives. One day we had some decoraters come in and ... bang ... they knocked the whole shelf over.
  • If these are hot-swappable drives in cages, then a cardboard box or a milk crate in a cool dry environment should be adequate. You want to avoid dust, so make sure the box or crate is covered. Putting them in a lockable filing cabinet would be a good idea.

    I haven't seen any IKEA-esque prefab shelving meant for HD cages. Of course, if you have the budget for it, many custom furniture contractors will build you a filing cabinet with shelves or pigeon holes that fit the dimensions of the HD cages. Not too
    • Make sure they're protected well from the elements.

      If you pack them in salt, the cured drives could last for several years. A little spice, and the data will have just the right flavor when the drives are finally used.

      The ancient Egyptians used ceremonial drives prepared in special enbalming fluids to accompany their kings on the journey to the afterlife. Little wooden server rooms on the ceremonial boats gave hope to the SysAdmin^H^H^H^H^H^HScribes of everlasting employment. If the drive wieghed more than
  • I agree with the other guys. Disk drives that are unused have a shelf life of about 5 years. The medium does need to be read read once in a while. And yes the electronics can go bad.

    For tapes, the secret is to make and test multiple copies of the tape. I suggest 3. And pay a company that specializes is tape archives to store the tape.

    Make sure you understand how to maintain your tape drive. Mostly make sure you use the cleaning tape to clean the heads on a very regular basis.
    If you can afford it, get 2 dri
    • I'm guessing there's a fair ammount of data here (?How much?) - if you're worried about a drive dying whilst in storage, archive it to 3 Disks in a RAID 5 (Just one choice of many).

      You could do a periodic spin-up of a volume and check they're still alive, say one volume a week?
      • You now have 3 disks sitting on a shelf.

        Again if there is a multi year retension requirement of this data, then as they finish each project, the raid 5 will wind up being some 6 figure Netapp or EMC to hold all the old projects.

        You still want to do an offsite archive of the data.
    • How about a citation? Hard drives are a magnetic storage media. I have cassette tapes that are ten years old and know people who have reel to reel tapes that are five times that old - the music hasn't magically disappeared from those tapes and they've been sitting in paper boxes on bookshelves. Here we have media created in a cleanroom and stored in a sealed chamber and you're saying it "expires" in just a few years?

      I call bullshit. Let's see some objective studies to back up this assertion.

      • For years hard-drives have relied on Partial Response / Maximum Likelyhood
        reading of data from the magnetic "bits"
        ( I think there are 20+ bits with the ECC, for every "byte" given to the outside world,
        but don't know if that's before filesystem or not ), and

        magnetic bits do oppose each other ( or pull each-other ), &
        aren't immutable, & if you've ever tried reading data from old data-tapes
        or old diskettes/floppies, then you know that bit-rot exists.
        ( also lost data in cheap CDRs/DVD-Rs -

  • Your greybeard mainframe elders have been dealing with this problem for 50 years.

    http://www.uptime4u.com/media.php [uptime4u.com]
    http://205.234.135.191/v-web/gallery/data_storage/ media_data_ner [205.234.135.191]
    http://205.234.135.191/v-web/gallery/data_storage/ media_data_dasco [205.234.135.191]

    Of course, with all that data sitting in 12' of floor space, a little fire could do a whole lot of damage. Get off-site storage!!!
  • I would take a look at what Unitrends is doing. They have backup systems with a removable Hard Drive component and aluminum cases for thier hard drives. SATA drives I think. You can google them up and talk with a sales guy.
  • Really, use it. HDD's are really unreliable. They have too many bits that can break, the drive electronics can go bad, which you can sometimes solve by replacing a logic board from another identical HDD, but would you want to? Then there's the disks themselves that can go bad or fail to spin up because they've been lying on a shelf for a long time. Correctly stored tapes can last 30 years and when I say correctly, I mean in a vault of an offsite tape storage company which maintains proper humidity and tempe

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