[LAD] [OT] Richard Stallman warns against ChromeOS

[gene heskett]

On Friday, December 17, 2010 05:15:04 am Philipp Überbacher did opine:
[...]
> I guess it really depends on what you try to achieve. Afaik the average
> life-span of a HD is puny 2 years. 

Some maybe.  I have a 1Gb seacrate hawk I use on a TRS-80 Color Computer 
that is a good 15 years old, and I hooked up an old Quantum P40S beside it 
the other day that must be close to 18 years old.  No bad sectors were 
found when I did a logical verify of the surface.

> From what I heard the magnetic tapes
> used by for example ESA a long time ago have a life-span of 80 years. If
> 'store it good and forget' is what you're after then tape seems like a
> good idea.

That seems to be a recipe for disaster.  Will there be a working tape drive 
to read those old tapes in even 40 years?  Here, I use 4 1Tb drives as 
individual drives, 3 of which have individual installs on them, and the 4th 
is for amanda, doing nightly backups of whatever install I am running this 
year.  With smartd running, I have been told far enough in advance of an 
impending drive failure that my email corpus has not been lost since early 
2002.
 
> As for my university, as far as I know they use some RAID system for
> everyday and tapes for sensitive data. And they already had their whole
> RAID fail at the same time.

So have I observed. Twice that I know of at my former, and occasionally 
still, employers.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't,
and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.