Data Storage
SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a mini data center to the moon as part of Lonestar Data Holdings' mission to establish lunar data storage facilities. The project aims to protect sensitive data from Earth-based hazards and bypass data sovereignty restrictions through space-based storage solutions. The initiative faces challenges like latency and maintenance but offers advantages including natural cooling and potential renewable power operations.
A deep dive into efficient storage and retrieval of text embeddings using Parquet files and polars library, demonstrated through Magic: The Gathering card analysis. The article explores alternatives to vector databases for smaller datasets, highlighting how combining Parquet files with polars offers zero-copy operations and fast similarity searches.
The document explains why some legacy systems use 1875 as a base year for dates, particularly in Social Security systems, due to practical constraints and data storage optimization in early computing. The choice of 1875 was based on logical considerations about the earliest possible birth dates for Social Security beneficiaries, rather than being a COBOL-specific implementation.
Backblaze manages 305,180 drives with a focus on data drives performance and failure rates throughout 2024, revealing an overall improvement in annualized failure rates from 1.70% in 2023 to 1.57% in 2024. The company has successfully integrated new high-capacity 24TB Seagate drives while phasing out older 4TB models, demonstrating their ongoing storage optimization strategy.
A widespread fraud scheme involving used Seagate hard drives being sold as new has been detected globally, with evidence pointing to their origin in Chinese Chia farming operations. The fraudsters reset SMART values on used drives with extensive runtime hours, though FARM values remain unmodified, affecting customers worldwide through various distribution channels including official dealers.