Should I split a big (8TB) backup disk into more than one partition, or not?

[Karl Auer]

On Sat, 2020-09-19 at 07:07 -0400, Charles M wrote:
> Hoping now that 18TB drives are a thing that the price for 8TB will
> go down again and we'll have a backup for our backup.

I suggest everyone read up on "mean time between failures" and then,
even more importantly, read up on "bit error rates".

A "bit error" is where a bit that was written as 1 (or 0) is
subsequently read as 0 (or 1). The more data a disk (or set of disks)
stores, the more likely a bit error becomes. BER is expressed as the
number of errors that can be expected per number of bits written.
Modern disks have ludicrously low BERs (yay!)- but ludicrously high
storage capacities (uh-oh).

> I filled my 8TB in 7 months and I'm glad I didn't partition it
> further. I compressed the data and saved a tonne of space.

Apropos compression, a bit error on a compressed or encrypted disk or
file is generally a much bigger deal, because it can render all the
data on the disk or in the file unreadable.

So use error correction (like RAID) or have backups. Multiple backups.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer

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