meteokr

The person I replied to said

I’m uncomfortable storing 16TB worth of data on one drive

as a criticism of using a single 32TB drive.

I argue that a single 32TB drive is less risk than using 2 16TB drives. Am I wrong?

The amount of risk of drives failing is not dependent of your raid config at all. ignoring excessive duty cycling. I believe you are misunderstanding the point I was making in my original reply. I’m claiming that these 32TB drives will reduce your risk of losing data than by raiding 2 16TB drives, given the same failure rate.

I’m uncomfortable storing 16TB worth of data on one drive

Example you have 20TB of data. What is safer?

• 2 16TB drives in raid0
• 1 32TB drive

This is completely irrelevant to your backup solution. You should have backups, of course, but I don’t see how that factors into my point? You have to put the data somewhere, and then back it up, where do you put it? I will always put it on as few physical drives as possible, to minimize the risk of drive failure over time so I don’t have to restore/re-stripe as often.

Is a cis-gendered woman who had a hysterectomy, not a woman?

Is anyone who doesn’t have bottom surgery a woman? Is a man who takes testosterone pills for erectile dysfunction, a woman?

Reducing the number of drives you are running, reduces the risk of losing data. Do you disagree?

A post-menopausal grandmother is not a woman? A flat chested woman, is not a woman? A woman born without a uterus is not a woman?

Which is why you have backups. Doesn’t matter if you have 1 32TB drive or 32 1TB drives, backups are how you recover from failure. Running 1 drive is less risk than running 2 drives for the same storage capacity.

Please define what a woman is, without excluding any cis-gendered women.

Raid0? You mean having two devices stripped across is rather than just one device with no stripping? Raid0 is a risk you take when you care more about performance than downtime to restore a backup.

If I have 20TB of data, it cannot fit on a single 16TB drive. So my options are Raid, or this single drive option. I would always pick the single drive if I could afford it.

If you have 20TB of data to store, a single drive is safer than splitting it across multiple drives. Few point of failure in total.