Why is solid-state storage so flimsy? No matter how much storage space you get, and no matter how much you free up later on, it always gets stuffed to the gills. I am, of course, talking about my attic... and the garage, and indeed the garden shed. Many reasons for this have been mooted, including the need to do something with my kids' childish belongings as they …
I think I've got into the habit of assuming that storage devices are more reliable than in reality - probably because I've been relatively lucky in twenty-odd years of owning PCs.
I can't remember experiencing any hard disk failures in that time, but I *have* had at least two or three flash drives suddenly fail to work one day (thankfully with no important data on them). In my book, I treat USB flash drives like floppy disks of old - don't keep anything of value on them for long, and if I must, I try and make sure there's at least one other copy of the file somewhere.
One SSD I haven't much given thought to, is the 8GB one in my Eee 701SD netbook. I bought that machine three years ago, and it wasn't new then ("refurbished"), so it's not impossible that one day I'll start up the Eee and D'OH! (to use the vernacular). Even a replacement SSD for the 701 would probably cost £60 or up - most likely more than the machine is worth...
And the elephant in the room: our 2TB NAS. How do you back up a machine possessing more disk space than all your other computers put together? (I'm thinking "distribute the folders across the other computers", but even that isn't ideal... my brain hurts :-( )
This is something I've known for years. My old Creative Muvo 64GB MP3 player was the first device to make me stop trusting flash chips. I ran a small server from it, leaving it plugged into the computer, and within three days it became as volatile as RAM, once I unplugged it from the computer the contents disappeared!
SSD's and flash disks are self contained. The chips and controller are on the same board, so for any repair it is likely vacuum rework soldering is needed for either controller replacement or flash chip recovery using a Willem type chip programmer, that's if the chip hasn't completely disintegrated. Why do you think RAM in a computer goes bad so quickly? So many thousands of transactions (read and write operations) per minute wears them out in no time, SSD's are the same.
Hard drives are much easier to repair, as 99% of the time it's either the control board that's playing up and can be replaced if you match the firmware correctly as it is separate from the drive itself, or it is bad sector trouble due to the drive needing remagnetising using HDD Regenerator. At worst it'll be physical damage due to a bad knock where the heads have hit the platters, that's the only fault that isn't easily fixed. Physical damage to platters or heads will need the platters taking out and sectors dumped, or the head stack replaced and recalibrated by a specialist.
A hard drive's platters thankfully can't do what a flash chip (like my old Muvo did) can in catastrophic failure and turn into RAM where all data perishes upon power loss. 99% of the time a hard disk data is safe and can be recovered, even if it does cost £700 at a specialist to remove the platters and do a raw sector read.
The exception to that is of course if you put a big magnet over your hard disk, that will wipe out data instantly and wreck the track/cylinder patterns! I've done it, it's fun to listen to the drive clickety click after that! It was a shitty Seagate and I hated it anyway! Don't try it at home kids, I'm a data recovery guy, I know what I'm doing and what I'm talking about, as this post shows :)
I too once worked on a Purup Typesetting system designing custom business forms stored on 8" floppies before (EGADS) we got the 500MB mini - then it became the weekly process of archiving off all of the old completed jobs to make room for the next week of work. And we considered it a promotion to be responsible for this painfully boring task of swapping 8" floppies for backups.
I'd like to live in reality.
Having 256Gb in my laptop and a usb dock for 3.5" disks and a heap of cheap 2Tb diskdrives and doing backup of my whole disk each day with rsync and my own backup script (normally takes 15 min and I don't even notice it) I feel quite comfortable. One does feel comfortable when one is a Linux user.
:0)
"if a hard disk starts going glitchy, I can usually back stuff off it before it's too late."
Bit like the old wooden pit props, which would start creaking before they snapped, giving miners time to get out of the way. They were replaced by steel props, which gave no warning and so weren't liked.
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