Iron Mountain: It's Time to Talk About Hard Drives

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Tape vs. Hard Drives for Archival

  • Many argue LTO tape “wins” for large-scale, long-term archival due to cheaper media, higher reliability, and clearer vendor roadmaps.
  • Others note tapes are effectively dead for home/very small-office use: drives are expensive, availability is poor, and consumer-friendly options vanished.
  • Critiques of HDD archival: powered‑down disks suffer mechanical failures (stiction, bearings), magnetic remanence loss, and interface/format obsolescence; 1990s disks are often unreadable.

Practical LTO Implementation

  • Several detailed posts describe DIY Linux/FreeBSD LTO setups:
    • Use LTO‑9 tabletop drives or autoloaders with SAS HBAs; watch connector and SAS‑generation compatibility.
    • Ensure end‑to‑end throughput to avoid “shoe‑shining” (underflowing the drive), e.g., via 10GbE and RAM disks/mbuffer.
    • Prefer simple tools (mt, dd, rsync) plus your own scripts over proprietary backup software; maintain a separate metadata/index database with hashes and possibly erasure codes (par2).
  • Autoloaders are recommended when staff time/remote data centers make manual tape swaps impractical; costs around mid‑four to low‑five figures are cited.

Media Longevity & Migration

  • Strong consensus: no medium is “store and forget.” All magnetic, optical, and solid-state media degrade or become unreadable due to:
    • Physical decay (bit rot, sticky‑shed, warped optical discs, SSD charge loss).
    • Obsolete drives, interfaces, and file formats/software dependencies.
  • Recommended approach: periodic verification (checksums/fixity checks) and remigration to newer media and formats every X years.
  • Some distrust of using HDDs powered off for years; others report success with disciplined rotation, ZFS/Btrfs scrubs, and regular checksum validation.

Cloud vs. Self-Hosted Archival

  • One camp: major cloud providers are the most practical long‑term option; they continuously replace failing disks and verify data, and multi‑cloud storage reduces risk.
  • Counterpoints:
    • SLAs are aggregate; they don’t guarantee safety of any specific dataset.
    • Legal/political/account-termination risks make sole reliance on cloud risky.
    • Costs (e.g., per‑TB per‑month cold storage) can exceed DIY HDD/tape for large archives.

Iron Mountain and Industry Practices

  • Iron Mountain is criticized for merely warehousing obsolete hard drives without active migration, leading to high unreadability rates.
  • Some defend it as historically a “vault for media” rather than a managed archive; recent pivots toward full data archiving/e‑discovery are noted.
  • Broader theme: archives are treated as cost centers, so many industries underinvest in proper processes despite cultural and legal importance.