Is the new sfp network card the one that comes with the switch bundle? And is there any benefit to this card if you don’t use the taiko switch? Just wondering since it will now be standard.
Taiko Audio SGM Extreme : the Crème de la Crème
- Thread starter CKKeung
- Start date
As someone who has owned compact discs for 37+ years, nothing in my experience bears the durability and longevity of optical storage (other than vinyl records, which have been around for 100+ years). In my long experience, hard drives are just about the worst format for long term storage for music (in whatever format, magnetic disks, floppy disks, Zip disks, SCSI disks, USB drives, SSDs, M.2s and NVMEs). I have a closet full of dead hard drives! You might drool over your latest and greatest hard drive technology. Those of us with long experience will tell you that your storage device is one generation short of technological obsolescence — beware of investing too heavily in the latest and greatest. That keeps changing. You’re on the bleeding edge literally. I speak having burned my hands investing in SCSI technology as a Mac user, and many similar short term technologies, which of course Apple abandoned. Speaking from the San Francisco Bay Area, we design technological obsolescence as a design goal! It’s our mantra. When quantum storage arrives, we will have to throw everything else away. And that’s not too far away now. Except vinyl records. Those will last for an eternity. Exactly what the U.S. Library of Congress concluded as the best format for long term storage: the good old fashioned vinyl record!
I have had many CDs go bad over time as well. Bottom line is that all media needs multiple backups.
But you don’t lose your entire music collection when a single CD goes bad. I’ve had a handful of mine go bad out of more than 6000 over 38 years. Not too bad. Hard drives? I’ve backed up my ripped music collection onto a dozen drives and I still don’t feel secure enough to get rid of my physical digital media. They’re staying. Hard drives go bad just sitting still in a shelf!
Looks like you never heard about glassmasterdisc . Those are good to keep data for 1500 years.
and yes thise were in use by some governments. US as well.
Syylex was doing a glass disc for 150 Euro Each, so not much .
Japanese space probe Ikaros sent to Wenus was carring data on that disc.
Unfortunate Syylex Founded in 2010, it filed for bankruptcy in 2015.
Yes.
There’s a small benefit but it really comes to fruition using it with the switch.
5 weeks, and counting down............
Interesting, David. I have literally thousands of CDs and cannot think of an instance where one of my commercially produced CDs has "gone bad". I don't know if that's because I keep them in clean, dry areas and don't subject them to use in the cars or sliding them in and out of binder-type storage albums or just luck on my part.
Even CDRs I've recorded over the years have had a remarkably low failure rate, and those that did almost all were used in the car and subject to high temps in the summer. My CDRs are mostly to archive more than a thousand Grateful Dead concerts and other recordist-friendly performers, from the old tape-trading days up through the digital file swapping hey-day.
I'm with @godofwealth on this and don't disagree with you either David about multiple back-ups. By far the majority of my failures have been from media such as hard drives and SSDs. Unfortunately, including several laptop computers. At least I had the foresight to make sure that enclosures I bought for drives had both firewire *and* USB, since firewire is scarely a thing anymore. I too have a bunch of zip drive media and orphaned SCSI drives in the junk drawer.
Steve Z
Commercial CDs have been pretty faithful. CD-Rs, not so much. The failure rate isn’t huge but it isn’t zero either.
All my music is on NAS which has 1 disc redundancy and backups of that. My main point was that nothing is safe from failure.
The big problem, at least for those of us whose digital music collection numbers in the tens or more of Terabytes, is the cost per GB for glass optical storage. For critical applications I can see it for business use but not as a hobbyist archival storage medium.
I back up my Extreme D:Music to two different NAS, each configured in RAID5. I also make multiple incremental backups to consumer or small-business grade drives via the Extreme's USB port and go as far as putting copies into the hands of trusted friends for off-site storage, just in case a major catastrophe takes out my Extreme and the NAS (house fire, earthquake, major electrical disturbance, some unforeseen disaster). It's as much about saving the accumulated time over the years ripping and downloading thousands of pieces of music as it is preserving the files themselves.
Steve Z
I back up my Extreme D:Music to two different NAS, each configured in RAID5. I also make multiple incremental backups to consumer or small-business grade drives via the Extreme's USB port and go as far as putting copies into the hands of trusted friends for off-site storage, just in case a major catastrophe takes out my Extreme and the NAS (house fire, earthquake, major electrical disturbance, some unforeseen disaster). It's as much about saving the accumulated time over the years ripping and downloading thousands of pieces of music as it is preserving the files themselves.
Steve Z
Completely agree. My insistence on RAID6 for NAS storage, despite the larger redundancy penalty to total storage space is that RAID6 in the five bay or larger NAS I favor provides 2 drive failure protection. The problem with one drive protection is that if all the drives in the array are the same make, model and age and one fails, the rebuilding process with a new drive subjects the remaining drives to close to 100% duty cycle for as long as it takes to rebuild the RAID. If another of the remaining drives fails at that point with only single drive protection, well you're SOL.
Given the Seagate drive fiasco of some years ago I don't think I'm being overly paranoid. Just normally paranoid.
Steve "Belt and Suspenders" Z
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The issue isn’t the media, it’s the reader hardware. I’ve plenty of 5.25” floppy disks that are probably just fine… I have nothing to read them with.
with hard drives/SSD/NAS/cloud you are constantly moving them around from format to format so they get “refreshed”. I have 3 copies of my master music archive on various ZFS RAIDZ3 hard drive pools with auto scrub to prevent bit rot every week at two different physical locations.
I have the original CDs too but that’s a single copy without redundancy. A cloud copy would perhaps be even more secure. I guess that’s what qobuz or Tidal is, essentially…
with hard drives/SSD/NAS/cloud you are constantly moving them around from format to format so they get “refreshed”. I have 3 copies of my master music archive on various ZFS RAIDZ3 hard drive pools with auto scrub to prevent bit rot every week at two different physical locations.
I have the original CDs too but that’s a single copy without redundancy. A cloud copy would perhaps be even more secure. I guess that’s what qobuz or Tidal is, essentially…
Sorry, RAID 6 -- good catch!
Note: Edited above now to reflect proper RAID6 reference.
Steve Z
Note: Edited above now to reflect proper RAID6 reference.
Steve Z
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FreeNAS/TrueNAS with ZFS is what I use. RAIDZ3 allows you 3 drive failure with no data loss.
The problem with regular raid6 is that there’s no regular scrub to account for bit rot ie random flips of a bit by cosmic rays. As data density goes up this becomes a statistically significant problem.
With ZFS RAIDZ3 you have 3 parity copies plus the original data. Regularly scheduled scrubbing then can correct based on comparisons.
Thank you for that. I'll look into that in more detail. My oldest of three NAS is getting up there in age (Thecus N5200Pro) so when I decide to replace it with something newer and higher capacity, that will get serious consideration.
Up until today I hadn't considered cosmic rays as a high-probability environmental hazard. I'm now thinking about lining my hats with aluminum foil!
Steve Z
you are an audiophile and have not YET lined your hat with foil?
