StorageMojo

Excellent. I generate lots and lots of communications every day and find that being misread is a way to score my effectiveness. Paul Graham points out that his essays can't really have pages of footnotes to cover all the possible interpretations of the writing and he is correct. We strive to make it understandable to the widest possible audience and go from there.

I suggest you really closely examine this thought :

"The reality is they are working for a company that desires to increase their bottom line just like any other business-- as they should. My point is because of this, the ecosystem is click driven. Which means a much greater frequency of startups will be covered. Which means even if a startup is doing nothing new and the technology is rather unimpressive, the brand attached to it means clicks ($$) so it gets coverage."

There is a whole lot of assumption going on in there, and while you do have to assume some things [1] its not true that you can assume all things. To check yourself you can try to reason your way from first principles to the conclusion that you expressed above.

You can stipulate that businesses want to be profitable. Some will argue with that saying some businesses are non-profits but the point is sufficiently accepted that you can get away with just stipulating it. Then you claim based on that one stipulation that the desire for profit makes the business "click driven." That bit of reasoning is weak, on what basis can you claim that the only…

It all depends on what your definition of "high-volume" is, and just how "archival" your access patterns really are.

Amazon Glacier runs on BDXL disc libraries (like a tape library). There's nothing truly expensive about producing BDXL media, there just isn't enough volume in the consumer market to make it worthwhile. If you contract directly with suppliers for a few million discs at a time, that's not an issue (you did say high-volume, right?).

https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/

For medium-scale users, tape libraries are still the way to go. You can have petabytes of near-line storage in a rack. Storage conditions are not really a concern in a datacenter, which is where they should live.

(CERN has about 200 petabytes of tapes for their long-term storage.)

https://home.cern/about/updates/2017/07/cern-data-centre-passes-200-petabyte-milestone

If you mean "high-volume for a small business", probably also tapes, or BD discs with 20% parity encoding to guard against bitrot.

Small users should also consider dumping it in Glacier as a fallback - make it Amazon's problem. If you have a significant stream of data it'll get expensive over time, but if it's business-critical data then you don't really have a choice, do you?

Cold storage is probably safe. I've seen the assertion that it's tape from someone who I wouldn't have thought would get it wrong but I'd now bet against it whether or not Amazon's denial seals the deal.

Robin Harris has argued in favor of BDXL but he's speculated about a number of things. http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/

My money would be on the simplest: cold disk. Some support here: http://mjtsai.com/blog/2014/04/27/how-is-amazon-glacier-implemented/ but it's all speculative and anecdotal. I don't have a problem with the thought that Amazon is getting out ahead of the drive economics, especially given that I'm not sure how widely used Glacier is today.

I do find it interesting that this has been apparently kept under wraps from anyone who would share more widely.

Some have theorized that this is what's behind Amazon Glacier, and that they want to keep it to themselves: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/

I also crave for such cheap storage, perfect for archival/backups, especially when combined with modern snapshotting.

HVDs never really materialized, despite being promising, and actually on the market at some point, IIRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

A lot of other medium were developped, never commercialized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage

A new optical storage medium is long overdue. This time, it will probably be without support from the media industry.

In my opinion, Excel is not a good platform for documenting research because it is very time consuming to audit and try to reproduce the results since there is no standard way for inputting data.

There is a long list of cases where companies and governments have made huge decisions that were based on Excel spreadsheets where the models had fundamental flaws [0][1][2].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/13/microsofts-excel-might-be-the-most-dangerous-software-on-the-planet/#504efded633d

[1] https://storagemojo.com/2016/08/26/excel-may-be-dangerous-to-your-health-and-your-nation/

[2] http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/business/Excel-is-dangerous-_19130803

> 1) Macs do tend to run hotter than PCs, and this could decrease HDD lifespan.

Google found that temperature didn't much matter according to their published research: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

> In the lower and middle temperature ranges, higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates. This is a fairly surprising result, which could indicate that data center or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment that contains disk drives.

Non-PDF summary/discussion: http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/