DEFCON 29 BRIEFING

It’s good to be back! This year was a definite trip. We only ran at about 1/3 full capacity which tracks with the general Defcon attendance numbers. We’re still pushing out to 6TB drives as DT re-encoded the InfoCon drive content which kept us under the wire even after adding 2 more years of talks! For DefCon 29, we did 168 full duplications for a total of just over 1 petabyte of copies out the door to the community.

General Intake

Many thanks go out to our volunteers. They were on point!. We must be getting good at setup because for the second (non-consecutive) year in a row, we started accepting drives over 2 hours earlier than planned!

Our first duplication run started at 2:15pm on Thursday. All our systems worked well and. By 2:00pm Saturday, we had received 169 drives and started our final duplication runs.

We were able to duplicate every functional drive given to us! We processed all of the 168 other drives and (again) cleared out all of the available drive over 6TBs in Vegas this year (we should start live tracking what locations still have drives available!). Here’s the breakdown of our 2021 requests:

• Infocon.org archive: 71

• Hash Tables 1 of 2: 52

• Hash Tables 2 of 2: 45

In addition, we were able to return all drives back to their owners - including one we saved from 2019! Even though some people didn’t pick up their drives before the 11:00am deadline on Sunday (you know who you are), we were able to coordinate last-minute pickups with them to get everything returned safely.

DRIVE DETAILS

This year we continued to catalog the brand and model of each drive.  We were able to capture information for the 169 drives we processed.  This gave us a small sample of manufacturer information.  We've dropped that detail for you below:

DRIVE FAILURES

Oddly, we only had one drive failure - even after several duplication attempts. It was a fresh, out-of-the-box WD Red Plus drive that just didn’t want to play nicely. With such a small sample this year, we really can’t say there were any real issues to call out.

Making it happen

This was a weird year. Safety was a concern for us all. It was really nice to have the commitment that everyone at the con was vaccinated and wearing masks - that helped a lot. We took some additional precautions but, generally, the village has always acted with volunteer and attendee safety in mind. That in mind, we set out to use the 66 hour window that Defcon allows for us to accept, tag, copy, and return all the drives (1600 Thursday to 1100 on Sunday) as efficiently as possible. It was hard to guage how many drives to expect this year but we planned to treat it as if we were going to be slammed - that way we’d be sure to achieve success. Since each drive typically takes about 10-12 hours to complete (on a good cycle), we have a theoretical maximum of about 550 drives per con and that’s what we were ready for.

As the drives started coming in, we kicked them off immediately and kept an extremely close eye on all of the duplicators for anything slowing the process down. This usually only allows the duplicators a few minutes of rest between cycles when swapping drives out.

This year, we had one set that took a little over 34 hours to complete - but it finished successfully on Sunday morning!

The final numbers on Sunday morning:

• Infocon.org archive: 71

• Hash Tables 1 of 2: 52

• Hash Tables 2 of 2: 45

Grand Total Completed: 168

Wrap up

In the end we were able to push a little over 1 Petabyte out the door to DefCon attendees! It was a nice, relaxing, and safe year! We’ve already started working on the improvements for next year in the new location.

Remember, if you're one of those who wasn't able to get a drive in to us, all the content is also available through torrents via Infocon.org. If you have the bandwidth, please seed them too!

Big thanks to DT, Kevin, Zant, the QM Stores, Goons, and all our volunteers for helping make DDV such a success this year! Stay safe into 2022!