DEFCON 30 BRIEFING

Welcome back, DefCon! 2022 saw some great crowds in the new venues and that pushed us up to about 80% of the DDV’s full capacity. We’re still rocking the 6TB drives as DT (again) re-encoded the InfoCon drive content which kept down to about 5.2 TB even after adding more talks, documentaries, and podcasts. For DefCon 30, we did 427 full duplications for a total of about 2.6 petabytes of copies out the door to the community. Add that to the talks we did, and there was a lot of data leaving that room this year.

General Intake

Our volunteers kicked ass this year! They were on point! We’re getting the hang of a quick setup as we were again able to start accepting drives earlier than planned! Our first duplication run started at about 3:30pm on Thursday and all our systems worked well. By 2:00pm Saturday, we had received 427 drives and started our final duplication runs.

We were able to duplicate every drive given to us with the exception of about 7. We remain consistent and (again) cleared out all of the available drive over 6TBs in Vegas this year (we should find a way to live track what locations still have drives available). Here’s the breakdown of our 2022 requests:

Infocon.org archive: 183
Hash Tables 1 of 2: 131
Hash Tables 2 of 2: 113

DDV Drive content requests

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 most of them to get almost every drive 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 427 drives we processed. This gave us a small sample of manufacturer information. We've dropped that detail for you below:

Intake by Manufacturer

DRIVE FAILURES

We had several drive failures - about 21 of them. We worked through them and after several duplication attempts were able to get all but 7 done. We’ve been seeing several repeat drives and expect that the additional errors we’re seeing are due to drives starting to age. We may be updating our data sets so next year may be a good year to get some new, larger drives! Keep in mind that this is a small data set but the Seagate (Enterprise/compute) and the HGST Deskstars had the highest failure rates.

BRAND      MODEL                6 TB  8 TB  FAILS  % FAIL
--------   ------------------   ----  ----  -----  ------
Seagate    Enterprise            43     0     6     14.0%
           Ironwolf NAS          37    31     3      4.4%
           Barracuda Compute     16    22     1      2.6%
           Skyhawk                3     0     0      0.0%
           Exos                   9     4     0      0.0%
           Firecuda               0     3     0      0.0%
Toshiba    X300                  28     2     2      6.3%
           N300                  19     6     1      4.0%
           Other                 15     2     0      0.0%
WD         Black                 18     6     0      0.0%
           Gold                  10     2     1      7.3%
           Purple                 3     2     0      0.0%
           Red                   13     6     1      5.3%
           Red Pro               19     8     1      3.7%
           Blue                  11     0     0      0.0%
           Green                  1     0     0      0.0%
           White                  3    12     0      0.0%
HGST       Deskstar              32     5     4     10.8%
Dell/Max   Other                 28     6     1      2.9%
TOTAL                           310   117    21      4.9%

Making it happen

Drive stickers that are applied upon completion

It was nice to get back into the swing of a mostly normal con this year. We got to dust off the equipment and had some really excellent community participation which always makes it a fun time.

That in mind, we set out to use the 66 hour window that Defcon allows to accept, tag, copy, and return all the drives (1600 Thursday to 1100 on Sunday) as efficiently as possible. It was hard to gauge how many drives to expect but we ended up receiving about 80% of the total capacity of drives we can handle in that amount of time. 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 shooting for.

As the drives started coming in, the first batch started at about 1530. We keep 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. Yes - things get a little heated in there. Sometimes, the room we’re in has good A/C. Not so in this case. It got pretty warm in there! We kept the talks in a different area so they were nice an comfortable. BTW — the Drive Reliability talk is available here.

Wrap up

In the end we were able to push a little over 2.5 Petabytes of data out the door to DefCon attendees this year! It was a nice, relaxing, and safe year - so far, no reports of village COVID! We’ve already started working on the improvements for next year - maybe with some better A/C.

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, Ira, Nikita, Will, Zant, the QM Stores, Goons, and all our volunteers for helping make DDV such a success this year! Stay safe into 2023!

DATA DUPLICATION VILLAGE