LOL it’s a twitter expression from like 10 years ago:
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The lasermarking, I was hoping would block enough of the laser to allow it to stick to the metal, which it did, but it was ‘less then stellar’
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I know about that for sure. I generally repurpose server hard drives that have a lot of hours on them, but are still in fine working order. Then I use them to archive a bunch of stuff all at once from a staging area I keep on one of my NAS boxes. Then I immediately copy it again to LTO5 tape. Then the drive goes on the shelf with a healthy dose of crossed fingers. I rarely have to go get something from one of those drives but they should be good if I need to do so. If not, I have the tapes to fall back on which have a 20+ year shelf life.
That said… we have old HPUX boxes still in service with their original MFM hard drives that are 30+ years old still chugging along. Then again… it’s HIGHLY recommended that those machines never get shut off because they might not spin up those drives again. 
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I have 3 Drobo Raids in my house - all with two drive redundancy - (two drives can fail at once, all data is still backed up) so if a drive goes bad, DITCH IT, throw in another and it REBUILDS the new drive back into the ‘collective’ after 40+ years in this ‘industry’ I no longer have to worry about a crashed HD. – and I have all my data backed up on some external 14TB USB drives offline, cause well, data!
Jonathan
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I assume you are running raid 6. 2 drives can crash as long as they aren’t right next to each other.
I used to run raid 5, but when I started collecting too much stuff to keep online full time I just went JBOD and started with making an identical copy of the hard drives I archived, but that was a bit too expensive… So I sourced a used LTO4 drive (upgraded later to LTO5 and have an LTO6 drive I need to transplant into an external box) because not only are tapes still one of the best long-term storage solutions and cheap to boot as long as you aren’t trying to use the latest generation LTO.
If I were going to keep a large amount of data online without good backups, I would certainly use a RAID setup though.
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Here is the blurb / propaganda from DROBO
Drobo BeyondRAID technology
To combine several physical disks into a single storage, Drobo uses its own technology called BeyondRAID, which is not like any standard RAID level. The BeyondRAID technology uses a combination of RAID1 and RAID5 for single redundancy and 3-way mirror along with RAID6 for double redundancy.
I AM SO GEEKING OUT
I had a 4 hr ‘job’ burning, but also had housework / laundry to do…
this is me watching the job on the bedroom TV while I am folding clothing!
i am in NERDVANA
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Can’t help but ask…if you saw a fire or any other problem, how fast would you be able to reach your Glowforge or at least the UI screen where you could hit cancel?
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there is about a 1 second delay, fun to watch myself drink a glass of water…
if something went wonky, there would be smoke before there would be fire – so I am assuming I have about a 5-10 second window before stuff starts to happen.
Not mostly. At least with acrylic anyway.
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well, If I have something more suspect to catch on fire (like paper , etc) or that time I tried to engrave a gas can… – 
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i may have missed it (if so I am sorry) but what hardware / software are you using to make the remote camera work?
This is close to the same unit, I think I paid $4.00 less - Then you search for a firmware update that opens up the “rtsp” port - then you can ‘stream’ the feed to VLC (on a mac or pc) and any iPhone / android device - I can find the link if needed…
Jonathan
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thanks
when i was in the army, we kept our portable database on 9mm mag tape. whenever we’d set up shop in the truck (a big box on the back of a 5 ton truck), we’d read the data off of the mag tapes onto huge, portable ceramic platter RAM drives. if my memory is right (and this was early-80s, so i could be remembering wrong), those ceramic platters were really thick. the drive housing was about 18-24" square, and about 30" high. the platters were in a clear top case that we would seat in the drive housing and then spin them up and load the data from the mag tape. when we were done, we would write it all back onto the mag tape for storage.
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https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102626624
Better yet, History of IBM magnetic disk drives - Wikipedia
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that’s probably a more advanced version. ours was definitely larger physically (and smaller memory, my brain is saying 30mb, not 300). the wikipedia link is probably closer to what we had.
but now imagine this in a mobile, secure (i.e., highly classified) truck that we would drive off-road. not like serious four wheeling, but definitely through a field.
I never used any of those things; my first computer experience was a Commodore 64. But I felt like I just missed the era when computers were real, impressive, physically imposing things. I always imagined having a collection of some kind, with my own mainframe in the garage. The closest I got was when I picked up a Sun 3/280 – two big racks of stuff including a tape drive and some ancient VME disks and hooked it up in my parents’ garage. There wasn’t enough power to turn everything on, and the lights dimmed when the hard drive motors spun up. Unfortunately many years passed between then and when I got my own garage, so it was all left to rust to pieces in an attic.
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