[Info-vax] grey screen of death

[Simon Clubley]

On 2015-05-24, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
>
> I'd not expect to see an optical-media upgrade on Itanium due to the 
> likely lack of DVD-DL or any of the less-ancient formats in the 
> available Itanium hardware configurations, and USB media boot was 
> somewhat sketchy in general and particularly sketchy on some of the 
> oldest of the Itanium servers.  Now if VSI decides to de-supports the 
> oldest servers, or let those folks figure out their own local 
> distributions?
>
> Retail quantity-one name-brand prices on 32 GB USB3 flash was US$15 and 
> variously less, and figure a couple of dollars ordered direct from the 
> producers, but which still costs rather more in aggregate to produce 
> than DVD media.  Yes, there are good reasons to go with flash storage 
> over DVD, and there are those folks that do need or want and want to 
> pay for physical media distributions and that cannot go online for 
> whatever reason.
>

Based on experience I strongly disagree that flash storage could ever
be reliable enough to be used for software distribution direct from a
manufacturer in a production environment especially when you might need
to pull that distribution media out of storage 5-10 years later.

At home I make backups onto multiple media types approach (USB flash,
DVD-RW and hard disks) and I _always_ do a verify pass on the full
partition after updating it no matter how trivial the change.

The verify pass on USB flash (branded and unbranded) has caught failures
and (literally) bitrot at a rate which would make me uncomfortable to
use it for software distribution.

I meant what I said about bitrot BTW; I've just retired a HP USB stick
which had started flipping the bits in some files which had been
unchanged on the USB stick for a while; the verify pass caught it after
some unrelated files were added to the same backup partition on the
USB stick.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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