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[1922.18 --> 1927.18] And there's just so much shenanigans going on in the hard drive market.
[1927.50 --> 1933.40] I did not really fully appreciate how bad it has gotten until I read through all of this.
[1934.04 --> 1939.42] And honestly, it just seems like outside of two years, things just really start to get pretty shaky.
[1939.58 --> 1941.52] I mean, there's definitely some models that last longer.
[1941.92 --> 1944.24] But beyond two years, and I'm just like, yikes.
[1944.44 --> 1952.58] And I've got several, oh, I don't know, 20-ish drives that are probably about four or five years old that I'm relying on right now.
[1953.08 --> 1955.64] Ooh, that's getting to the danger zone, bro.
[1955.86 --> 1957.64] And they just have a lot of data, right?
[1957.68 --> 1958.86] They've got a ton of disks.
[1958.92 --> 1960.12] They've got years of data.
[1960.70 --> 1961.12] They do.
[1961.12 --> 1968.84] And they're putting consumer-grade drives through what are ostensibly enterprise-grade workloads.
[1969.34 --> 1973.06] They're in data centers full of lots of other drives, full of lots of other vibrations.
[1973.94 --> 1980.22] Yes, you could argue that the temperature controls and maintenance schedules might be a bit better than your average home user.
[1980.22 --> 1989.60] But, you know, the other environmental conditions, like the vibrations I mentioned, probably balance it out so that it's a fairly average picture of what's going on.
[1989.66 --> 1993.94] And I don't know of anybody else that publishes data on the scale that Backblaze does.
[1994.60 --> 1996.60] Certainly not for drives that I can buy.
[1996.60 --> 2002.52] You know, I'm sure AWS buy specific white-label drives that are just for Amazon because they buy at such volume.
[2003.08 --> 2008.14] Whereas Backblaze will buy model numbers that you and I, mere mortals, can go ahead and buy, which is lovely.
[2008.90 --> 2019.36] For me, I'm looking at this data and I see that, you know, like you say, two or three years after that kind of lifespan, I'm going to want to start thinking about rotating my drives.
[2019.36 --> 2027.58] Maybe not all at once because the bathtub curve and, you know, the sheer cost of buying multiple hard drives all at once.
[2027.78 --> 2040.86] But it just goes to show you that, you know, probably every year you should be replacing 20% of your hard drive so that within a five-year span you are replacing the entire lot completely.
[2041.46 --> 2043.28] There's lots of things you can do with old hard drives.
[2043.40 --> 2045.44] You can put them in backup servers.
[2045.56 --> 2047.60] You can make clocks out of them.
[2047.60 --> 2048.42] You can make coasters.
[2048.62 --> 2049.52] You could do all sorts of other things.
[2049.52 --> 2050.68] You could sell them if you want to.
[2051.58 --> 2053.42] So it's not like they go completely to waste.
[2054.00 --> 2065.18] And, you know, if you think about the kind of storage increases that we see every five years as well, you might go from a four-terabyte drive to a 16-terabyte drive in the same slot.
[2065.70 --> 2072.90] And then suddenly you don't need as many drives anymore and your five-year 20% become, I don't know, there's a lot to consider.
[2072.90 --> 2072.94] Yeah.
[2073.34 --> 2082.44] I'm looking at it thinking, okay, if you're really serious about data integrity, you're probably looking at after about two years, you're going to want to start rotating those disks to a different job at least.
[2082.56 --> 2088.08] Maybe they're not done, but maybe whatever you're like really critical data is newer disks go in.
[2088.08 --> 2089.72] And I don't practice that.
[2089.80 --> 2090.66] I really don't.
[2091.24 --> 2098.64] But, geez, I think at some point what I've got to do is I've got to figure out a budget for just rolling disk replacements.
[2099.44 --> 2103.28] And, you know, we've had these ups and downs in the pricing market for these drives.
[2103.34 --> 2106.72] That's something the Backblaze article touches on as well.
[2106.72 --> 2113.82] And so it sort of wrecked my ability to kind of just incrementally buy because there was periods where it was super cheap, so you wanted to buy a lot.
[2113.90 --> 2116.02] And there's periods where it was super expensive, so I didn't want to buy any.
[2116.38 --> 2125.44] And what we really need is just hard drive price stability in a way where I can just, okay, you know, every year we're going to buy 10 disks or something like that.
[2125.48 --> 2127.54] You know, we're going to buy it throughout the year or whatever.
[2128.20 --> 2132.92] Well, you talk about dollar averaging with Bitcoin in other aspects of your life.
[2132.96 --> 2134.84] You should do dollar averaging with hard drives.
[2134.84 --> 2135.92] Yeah, disk averaging.
[2136.22 --> 2136.38] Yeah.
[2136.72 --> 2137.50] Like once a month.
[2137.86 --> 2146.84] And the way I look at it is every Black Friday, I spend anywhere between 200 and 250 is my kind of sweet spot in air quotes per drive.
[2147.44 --> 2148.52] Dollars I'm talking about.
[2148.96 --> 2154.74] The best terabytes per dollar that I can get in that price range is typically what I'll buy every Black Friday.
[2155.34 --> 2157.86] And there were some decent deals around Prime Day this year.
[2157.86 --> 2174.52] If you look on Shucks.top, so Shucks.top, you can get a good idea of the overall kind of shucking kind of hard drive pricing scene with a snapshot of, you know, what the drive fluctuations have been and when the last historical low was and all that kind of stuff.
[2174.52 --> 2181.04] And generally speaking, you'll find that $200 to $250 range is at the moment.
[2181.04 --> 2187.38] I think there are about 14 or 16 terabyte drives in that price range, which is, I think, I think it's pretty decent.
[2187.72 --> 2188.56] Oh, man.
[2189.04 --> 2189.70] All right.
[2189.70 --> 2191.48] I needed to hear this.
[2191.92 --> 2192.92] This is good for me.
[2192.98 --> 2195.40] I just I hate the actions I'm going to have to take as a result.
[2195.40 --> 2199.38] I appreciate the backblaze continues to put that data out.
[2199.42 --> 2201.40] Of course, we'll have the whole write up linked in the show notes.
[2201.48 --> 2202.52] There's some really good graphs.
[2203.20 --> 2204.50] And I don't know.
[2204.54 --> 2205.88] Tell me if you see something in there.
[2205.94 --> 2212.00] But to me, it looks like looks like the smaller drives tend to be a little more reliable.
[2212.56 --> 2213.80] I'd like to know your take on it.
[2214.74 --> 2220.30] So, Alex, we got some feedback from a listener about leak detectors from DeckBot.
[2220.58 --> 2222.40] We did from DeckBot, who's in the Discord.
[2222.60 --> 2223.18] Hello, DeckBot.
[2223.24 --> 2224.38] I hope you're having a nice day.
[2224.38 --> 2224.98] Yeah.
[2225.16 --> 2226.02] Thanks for joining us live.
[2226.46 --> 2226.96] Hey, Chris and Alex.
[2227.10 --> 2229.54] In episode 75, you were discussing leak detectors.
[2229.88 --> 2238.14] In a previous job, we used leak detector tape to detect flooding on the water fittings in semiconductor LP-CVD furnaces.
[2238.76 --> 2240.40] I have no idea what that means.
[2240.60 --> 2243.04] Liquid propane, I'm guessing, but I don't know after that.
[2243.28 --> 2244.46] Commercial, maybe?
[2245.28 --> 2245.88] Probably.
[2246.26 --> 2246.48] Yeah.
[2246.94 --> 2251.52] These were about 10 feet of cloth tape with two wires running on the outside edge.
[2251.52 --> 2260.74] Any liquid or heavy feet on the tape would cause the electrical circuit between the two wires to short and trigger the water leak error in the PLC.
[2261.82 --> 2263.58] And this would also power down the equipment.
[2263.58 --> 2269.50] These tapes were a few meters long, and we'd also make the tape snake across the floor in three-inch strips.
[2269.94 --> 2277.10] I like these much more than typical flood sensors, since you can draw a box around a leak-prone device like a water heater or sink,
[2277.10 --> 2283.22] rather than waiting for the compartment holding the faulty devices to fill up enough to trigger a flood sensor.
[2284.16 --> 2291.76] While in my professional life, they were a bane as any drop of water or isopropyl alcohol misplaced on the tape powered off the furnace,
[2292.40 --> 2299.68] I wish I had the few extra bucks to add a few of these to my home assistant to watch for failed sump pumps and rusted-out water heaters.
[2300.16 --> 2304.30] There'll be a link in the show notes to Deckbot's recommendation of these water leak detectors.
[2304.46 --> 2306.46] But you went a different route this week, Chris, no?
[2307.14 --> 2307.54] I did.
[2307.64 --> 2313.34] I mean, this does look really great, because the whole rope, right, is essentially a sensor, and that does seem pretty clever.
[2313.54 --> 2317.76] But I actually decided to go with a recommendation that we got into the show.
[2317.88 --> 2319.82] I got a Shelly flood sensor here.
[2320.36 --> 2326.90] And these Shelly flood sensors are Wi-Fi sensors that have little contacts on the bottom of them that detect water.
[2327.34 --> 2330.28] And they also have a temperature sensor in them.
[2330.40 --> 2335.86] And they're reasonably priced, somewhere around 30 U.S. bucks, no hub required.
[2336.46 --> 2339.64] When it arrives, it produces its own Wi-Fi network.
[2340.14 --> 2341.52] You join that Wi-Fi network.