Do we still need drive letters...?

arkhi said:

You can't assign drive letters on GPT disks, for one....

Uhh what? I think you are mistaken.

I don't really care what they use as long as it easy to use.
How about this, drive D1 partition, D2 partition, D3 partition.
C1,C2, ect.
26x 3= a lot.

logicearth said:

arkhi said:

You can't assign drive letters on GPT disks, for one....

Uhh what? I think you are mistaken.

oh wait, yeah i'm wrong. i was trying to assign a letter to a protected gpt disk that's why.... never knew gpt can protect themselves >_<

I think, for now, "pool" data store is the most sensible way of managing storage space. This is year 2011, we should not care where we put something, how much free space does a particular storage device has, etc... When we use pool(s), all we need to know is this: "My total storage space is 10TB, free space is 2TB, used 8TB". With S.M.A.R.T and many other sensors we can more of less predicts which storage device in the storage pool that's going to fail in near future, and to use the volume manager to "move" the data off that dying storage device to another, and then remove the said storage device. When we add another storage device, we can add it to an existing pool, or we can make a new pool altogether...

It'd be a lot simpler... :)

zzz2496

zzz2496, That is what RAID does. I have several rack storage slices, put a series of HDDs in, becomes one big glob of space. A drive goes bad, pull it out and put a new one in, without turning the machine off. The data gets reconstructed on the new drive. Automatically.

The best part? It doesn't matter what OS you run. Its all in the hardware.

zzz2496 said:

I think, for now, "pool" data store is the most sensible way of managing storage space. This is year 2011, we should not care where we put something, how much free space does a particular storage device has, etc... When we use pool(s), all we need to know is this: "My total storage space is 10TB, free space is 2TB, used 8TB". With S.M.A.R.T and many other sensors we can more of less predicts which storage device in the storage pool that's going to fail in near future, and to use the volume manager to "move" the data off that dying storage device to another, and then remove the said storage device. When we add another storage device, we can add it to an existing pool, or we can make a new pool altogether...

The problem is that Windows 7 can't even remember where I told it to install to install programs (to be fair I have Indexing turned off).
Every month I have to manually search for a program, because Windows has forgotten the shortcut details!
If I let Windows look for the program, it takes stupendous amounts of time to find it (i.e. I can navigate to the location much faster, unless it is a system file).
The same is true with documents and pictures.

I have a hierarchical file structure (like a library) so I can usually go straight to the file I want.

You seem to be suggesting that a library would be more efficient, if the books were fitted with RFID tags and then strewn about at random.
To find a given book you just enter the RFID code into a scanner and then wander around the library waving it around, until you locate what you want.
I guess it would work if every shelf had a reader.

SMART doesn't provide 100% protection from failure.
Allegedly ~50% of failures are due to controller failures (which also affect SSDs).

"All SSDs do is replace a hard drive’s head disk assembly - the platters and heads - with a lot of flash chips. The rest of the stuff is the same - and that stuff accounts for about half of all drive failures."
SSDs no more reliable than hard drives | ZDNet

"The most common failure cause for the 7200.11 was faulty firmware, which would issue the error code "000000CC." This led the Storelab engineers to coin the term "CC fly" (tsetse fly). Faulty drives would slow down and subsequently die after rebooting."
Typical Failures And Data Losses : Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia

logicearth said:

zzz2496, That is what RAID does. I have several rack storage slices, put a series of HDDs in, becomes one big glob of space. A drive goes bad, pull it out and put a new one in, without turning the machine off. The data gets reconstructed on the new drive. Automatically.

If you are using RAID with data protection (e.g. RAID 5) you have a reasonable chance of getting your data back.

logicearth said:

The best part? It doesn't matter what OS you run. Its all in the hardware.

I still see debates about which is better (hardware or software RAID).

Mystere said:

Funny, but if I want to take stuff with me I certainly care. I can't just "hope" that data appears magically on my USB drive. If I want to access files on a CD-Rom i just put in, I damn well be care because otherwise i won't be able to find the files.

I agree.

Mystere said:

zzz2496, You don't care where stuff is stored?

Funny, but if I want to take stuff with me I certainly care. I can't just "hope" that data appears magically on my USB drive. If I want to access files on a CD-Rom i just put in, I damn well be care because otherwise i won't be able to find the files.

In general, perhaps we shouldn't care.. but there are many cases where you do.

The "3 years ago" me, will care where I store my data. The "right now" me, no... Not really. With the advent of advanced filesystems like ZFS, ext4, and many volume managers, I don't care where my data is stored. If you read my posts on this thread, you should read that the mess I got my self into is because my over micro management of partitions and volumes... I still have 2 MS dynamic disks still running storing several hundred GB of media files...

As for external devices, I'm not saying that those external devices (USB sticks, external DVD/CD/BD ROM) must join the pool... No. For those devices we can always use other means to label them. For me, it's the "mount to an NTFS folder" method, because it doesn't have the twenty some letters limitation.

Volume managers these days when paired with S.M.A.R.T or any other storage device sensors, should be able to predict a failing device. With HDDs ranging in TBs, it should NOT be my business to know what is stored where... As long as my volume managers tells me all is good, then all is good. If one device is failing, it will tell me by blinking the disk's cage indicator, and automagically move the data off that failing disk, complete with reports of what data didn't survive the rescue attempt and what did, along with the recent backup of the said lost data... That would be my ideal system... :)

zzz2496

logicearth said:

zzz2496, That is what RAID does. I have several rack storage slices, put a series of HDDs in, becomes one big glob of space. A drive goes bad, pull it out and put a new one in, without turning the machine off. The data gets reconstructed on the new drive. Automatically.

The best part? It doesn't matter what OS you run. Its all in the hardware.

Hi logicearth, nice to read your posts again :) I haven't been active in the forums lately :)

In the nitty gritty detail, yes, RAID functionality is what I'm aiming for, but without RAID's limitation. If you tried ext4 + LVM + Linux RAID or ZFS, a bulb will light up in your head. RAID is at the block level, this is 2011, no one should worry about block level anymore, there's LVM, there's Veritas, there's ZFS, there are many other volume managers out there... I, especially, doesn't want nor need to manage my data store pools right now, I've off load them to several FreeNAS boxes over iSCSI with 1000BaseT network with teaming, currently pushing at close to 190MB/s sustained throughput. It simplified my data store almost in every level... I've attained SAN flexibility with NAS's price with FreeNAS. In RAID, you can't have a "snapshot", a point in time snapshot of your data. I can do snapshots with ZFS, I can freeze a volume while it's online, make a snapshot out of it, and backup the snapshot. The underlying construct of ZFS is indeed RAID based technology, but on the upper levels, it's all brand spanking new tech (I grin ear to ear when I understand the concept).

zzz2496