Technology

Do you know about tape backup systems for consumers? From my (brief) search it looks like tape is more economical at the scale used by a data center, but it seems very expensive and more difficult for consumers.

Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.

Mainly because of that. Spinning rust drives are perfect for large media libraries.

There isn't a hard drive made in the last 15 years that couldn't handle watching media files. Even the SMR crap the manufacturers introduced a while back could do that without issue. For 4k video you're going to see average transfer speeds of 50MB/s and peak in the low 100MB/s range, and that's for high quality videos. Write speed is irrelevant for media consumption, and unless your hard drive is ridiculously fragmented, seek speed is also irrelevant. Even an old 5400 RPM SATA drive is going to be able to handle that load 99.99% of the time. And anything lower than 4K video is a slam dunk.

Everything I just said goes right out the window for a multi-user system that's streaming multiple media files concurrently, but the vast majority of people never need to worry about that.

Because everything he said was wrong?

Because people are thinking through specific niche use cases coupled with "Well it works for me and I never do anything 'wrong'".

I'll definitely admit that I made the mistake of trying to have a bit of fun when talking about something that triggers the dunning kruger effect. But people SHOULD be aware of how different use patterns impacts performance, how that performance impacts users, and generally how different use patterns impact wear and tear of the drive.