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A comment on Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL?. Parent comment

Re:Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL? by xyzzy123 on Friday April 25, 2014 @09:58PM (#7650099)
The main problem I see with this is that if you have old disks the last thing you want to be doing is spinning them up and down all the time.

The drives and firmware you want for 24/7 use are not the same as what you want for intermittent use. On big old raid arrays, the scariest thing was powering them down because for sure, some of the disks would not come back again.

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Re:Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL? by alexkiritz on Saturday April 26, 2014 @03:52AM (#7650736)
I was under the impressions that old disks generally fail by getting stuck. If they spin them up a few times a day that would seem to solve that problem.

They could even have them just plugged in to power and laying in racks with custom firmware that triggers drives to automatically spin up ever few hours/days. Then they could just be manually plugging them in to retrieve data when data from a drive is requested.

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