Not really. Disk is king now since S3 storage took the crown when cloud services started offering cheap archiving. Anything still on disk from the 90s is some neglected archive that has been deemed by the company to have no value.
I would assume they're finding this out now because they're trying to feed their whole archive to the AI beast.
Yeah no, thats not an "archive" you are talking about thats just a bunch of storage.
Archives are for things like historical, government, artistic data. That stuff sits in airtight cases on tape storage in a bunker.
Obviously any drive that is constantly in use to deliver data to customers is gonna die, thats never going to change.
But these were actually intended to be used for archiving but failed at doing exactly that.
I have a crate of old hard drives going back to the late nineties. Am I the only person that migrates the data to new drives regularly? At this point it is a yearly tradition for me to pick up larger drives during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales. Why rely on old 4tb drives when you can move them all to fresh 14tb drives?
What I meant by drives are NAS. I buy the drives on sale spin up a new array, migrate the data, and redirect the mount point.
I use to cold store until I realized that unless I have access to it, it might as well not exist. Now I keep everything live, even backups going back to 1997.
The only data I have "lost" are copies of my old warez CDs from eastern Europe because I have no idea where I have stashed them, and a pack of Zip Disks because I have no functioning Zip Drive.
I’m the opposite: I migrated 2 4TB drives from my first NAS into the actual one. The drives are going strong and nearing ten years (!) of run time. Two out of eight drives died in this server since 2017. Both were newer. I’m not going to change a single disk before it dies. Most value for money in my opinion.
But I can afford this „risk“: My server has a redundancy of 2 disks. It has a local USB backup, is mirrored to two remote servers in different locations with local backups as well.
One reason why I love btrfs is the ability to add (and remove) arbitrarily sized drives to the disk array while maintaining multiple redundant copies of my files.
Drive failure in the 00s was really common. I lost 2 or 3 separate drives from different mfg over the course of a couple years. Newer drives are better but even in modern nas setups, I planned on losing at least 1 drive per year on a 4 drive nas even fresh out of the box.
Always keep data your care about in at least 3 places and in at least 2 different mediums with one preferably offsite. I like to have one drive in use, one backup that sync's daily, and one that I keep in cold storage unplugged. Then swap the sync drve and cold storage drive every so often.
So far over a span of maybe 40 years of computing I've only lost two HDDs. A number of 5 1/4 floppies back then but that was typical. Both drives I was able to pull most of the info off to a new drive, so yay for the mechanical drive, where a SSD you're left with either a miracle, or looking for the experts to retrieve something. I'm no power user, so perhaps that's part of the reason, but ever since we got into the giga and tera range of storage my first thought is always...wow, that's a lot to lose at one time.