Matrix vs Discrete

[mandrix]

lol. I just had a HDD fail on me recently, got the replacement yesterday. Now copying files...always fun!
Strangely enough, I've seen HDD prices going up some recently. This year I've bought a couple of rebranded MDD drives. I mean there's only what? four companies that actually manufacture drives.
Although the MDD drives I have bought are labeled as "NAS" drives...they are usually Seagate Exos drives. Of course I have Seagate Iron Wolf NAS drives as well but price sometimes dictates purchase for me.
Often so called "refurbished" drives are actually used data center drives. No one is actually disassembling drives and replacing anything as that takes a clean room environment and equipment only the HDD manufacturers have. But they are offered with a 5 year warranty and the few that have failed have been promptly replaced.
Seagate is manufacturing 30 TB drives now with a new technology using glass platters, but as of now I believe they are all going to data centers and not sold to consumers. Seagate has said using that tech they expect to have 50 TB drives in the near future.

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

lol. I just had a HDD fail on me recently, got the replacement yesterday. Now copying files...always fun!

Bummer... What capacity did you buy?

 

[mandrix]

Bummer... What capacity did you buy?

18TB. About all I have buying this year. I have been slowly but surely cycling the smaller drives as storage for BD's.
Right now I have a mix of 4, 6, 10, and 18 TB drives in use on both pc's.

 

[Owen Smith]

18TB. About all I have buying this year. I have been slowly but surely cycling the smaller drives as storage for BD's.
Right now I have a mix of 4, 6, 10, and 18 TB drives in use on both pc's.

I'm way out of date, my biggest drives are 4 TB.

 

[~dave~~wave~]

 

[mandrix]

One or two of my disc players has Dolby Pro Logic II.
Oh yeah, and I have an old AVR with it! That AVR now runs my top 4 speakers. Man they sure don't make 'em like they used to. Never had one problem with it.

 

[mandrix]

If you have something to add to the conversation, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it.

 

[barfle]

BTW I never went the NAS route. But I do use a server daughter card, LSI 93118i and a Lenovo expander card. About to stick a 16i card in if it ever gets here and do away with the expander card.

I’m a bit worried about my NAS, as it’s a drobo and their website has gone poof. It’s working well, and I’m expanding its capacity from time to time. The only issues I ever had were when I put in a “shingled” drive and crashed the hardware. Looking for something similar, but not at the top of my list today.

 

[atrocity]

I think NAS (or RAID) is not needed for our purposes, as we don't need 24x7 availability.

One practical advantage to some NASes is redundancy. While the slogan "RAID isn't backup!" is certainly true, if you've got mirrored drives and one fails, it's just a matter of replacing that drive and letting the NAS handle re-mirroring.

But of course, with that comes a learning curve and more expense, so obviously not everyone will find the tradeoff worth it. I will say that on the occasions when I've had a drive fail, I've found it incredibly convenient.

 

[mandrix]

Yeah what sucks is if in the off chance a catastrophic event happens that takes out all your data you would only be covered with an "off site" backup.
Depends how paranoid you are , I guess, that such an event might happen.
Even though I have UPS's with surge protection, etc. we get a lot of lightning in Florida. Anything is possible....

 

[AYanguas]

One practical advantage to some NASes is redundancy. While the slogan "RAID isn't backup!" is certainly true, if you've got mirrored drives and one fails, it's just a matter of replacing that drive and letting the NAS handle re-mirroring.

But of course, with that comes a learning curve and more expense, so obviously not everyone will find the tradeoff worth it. I will say that on the occasions when I've had a drive fail, I've found it incredibly convenient.

I've been projecting, configuring and managing NAS equipment during my younger days. I know about It. But I prefer at Home to have single separated online and offline drives as a cheap and secure enough way to prevent lose of files.

It's a little tedious to keep in sync, but I have learn to do it quickly while I document the library content.

It's true that when a disk fails, and I have had some failures, you have to wait for the delivery of the new disk and then two or three days while you format and copy to the new disk. But as that happens once every several years, It is aceptable for me.

 

[MidiMagic]

Where are you getting the Dolby Atmos recordings? I haven't seen them in stores.

 

[Mr. Afternoon]

Where are you getting the Dolby Atmos recordings? I haven't seen them in stores.

Most Atmos recordings on Blu-ray are bought through online retailers for shipping to the door but I have seen some Atmos mixes like R.E.M.'s Adventures in Hi-Fi in the local B&N shops. There's also lossy Atmos streaming on Apple Music.

I'll be damned to see any surround in stores most of the time...because the general public isn't interested.

 

[MidiMagic]

Hmmm... Operating systems have nothing to do with transferring data from old storage mediums (ie: tape drives, floppy disk, CD's etc) to newer ones...

It has plenty to do with being able to READ that old data. If the software you made the data file on won't run on the new operating system, you can't read the file anymore.

It's also when the software that made the files goes away. In the case of Lotus 123, Excel could read their files for the first three versions after Lotus disappeared. Then Microsoft did not want to spend money on supporting it and deprecated it.

Also, the OS has to have a driver that can operate the kind of drive the information is stored on. Microsoft has deprecated some of those drivers.

 

[furui_suterioo]

I like having discrete multichannel formats available but I would also be interested in high quality remastered matrix encoded files just to compare to the discrete and evaluate the performance of decoders. Alas, I still cannot part with 2ch formats because I like playing and collecting old records on old equipment.

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

It has plenty to do with being able to READ that old data. If the software you made the data file on won't run on the new operating system, you can't read the file anymore.

I was not referring to 'reading' data only 'storing' data. As I mentioned before, there's no excuse storing data on old types of media!

 

[mandrix]

I still find it mind blowing that parts of the Japanese government are still using floppy disks. They are transitioning away from it but evidently for some it's a nostalgic media.
As for complaining about files created on DOS versions of Lotus 123, I mean, come on. At General Electric we had a lot of data created with that program and it was all transitioned to Windows based Excel. I don't remember the particulars as that was decades ago.
With software you have to roll with the flow, way it is. I was pissed that Creative quit updating their app to play DVDA discs on a pc optical drive.
In fact just authoring a DVDA disc with commercial software beyond a very basic one, you need a machine running on XP. I mean discWelder still works for me on Win 11 but it's not exactly as capable as Sonic.

With music media we've always had to deal with the formats being hard to copy until some enterprising person(s) figured out a way around it. That's part of the reason why I store as much (decrypted) music as possible in .iso format. Even Windows will mount an .iso image.

 

[mandrix]

I’m a bit worried about my NAS, as it’s a drobo and their website has gone poof. It’s working well, and I’m expanding its capacity from time to time. The only issues I ever had were when I put in a “shingled” drive and crashed the hardware. Looking for something similar, but not at the top of my list today.

I don't buy shingled, or SMR drives, such as the Seagate Barracuda 8TB anymore. I mean they are alright for the price, but I pretty much stick with CMR.

 

[barfle]

I don't buy shingled, or SMR drives, such as the Seagate Barracuda 8TB anymore. I mean they are alright for the price, but I pretty much stick with CMR.

I had the drive in question replaced, and it's currently residing in my tower as one of the named drives. It's 6TB, and doing fine there.

I have a couple of 18TB drives in my drobo, which also has three smaller drives that are being upgraded from time to time.

 

[mandrix]

I had the drive in question replaced, and it's currently residing in my tower as one of the named drives. It's 6TB, and doing fine there.

I have a couple of 18TB drives in my drobo, which also has three smaller drives that are being upgraded from time to time.

I had a couple of 8TB shingled drives that lasted for years. But now they are full of surround BD's and sit on the shelf with the other archive drives.
I also had one fail. Well I've had brand new Iron Wolf Pro drives that wouldn't even spin up for that matter. I once was shipped one where all the plastic was broken off the power connector and laying in pieces in the anti static bag. lol. It was replaced though.