I work in a niche inside a niche. I deal with terabytes of storage, massive servers, a variety of storage tech, and I’ve been in interested in computers in general for… Around 40 years. (Yeah, I’m old.)
I have my own single person company and have worked in 40+ US states, done assignments in the UK, Norway.
AMA.
What is the best filesystem for archive ? BTRFS, ZFS, ReFS?
How will quantum computer affect your field ?
What is the 2023 bottleneck ?
IMHO , it’s permanent storage . I remember in 2005 up to 2010, we all wanted the fastest CPU , more GHz , more cores ,etc. the industry gives us that . Then during the last decade , we all wanted a more powerful GPU, more core ,more memory ,more Mhz. We also craved faster internet connection ,now we have optical fiber with 3.5Gb/sec in home for 120$/month .(impossible to think in 2014)
Nowadays , I have the impression that permanent storage is lagging behind . With the new medias being in 8K, video games storing average 100Gb and what not, we regularly move around dozens of Gb, even as casual users .
I’m only familiar with ZFS, but only in my lab, not in production… ZFS is great because it can self-heal files / re-allocate blocks. I tried it on SMR drives, and it’s terrible, I advise against it. :)
ZFS is very good, but OFFSITE, TESTED BACKUPS are critical. There’s ‘reliable’ storage (storage that can deal with a failure) and then there’s backups. All the parity in the world won’t save your data from a fire.
In my small office, I have about 100TB of data that’s important to me, so I have a local copy, a backup in my office, and a stack of tapes at home about 1km away. Anything that affects both locations is outside my threat model, as I’ll have bigger issues.
Always be ready for the TornaDoS attack.
The irony being, just last week, the city I live in just had its first Tornado warning in nearly 50 years.