Comment by plebianRube
3 years ago
I've had magnetic drives with excellent data integrity that spent the last 20 years un touched in self storage units.
I have read CD-RWs of approximately the same age with no data loss.
SSDs sacrifice durability of data for io speed
I have HDDs from around 20 years ago and hardly touched in last 10 years, which are still good (able to read out without any issues, random checksum are good, but not all files validated).
But my optical backs were completely a disaster. Just a little bit over 5 years, over 50% were not able to read out, ~30% could be read but content were corrupted. There might be ~10% still good but too time consuming to check so I dumped them all. I still have optical drives but I cannot really remember when was the last time used it any more.
For SSDs, I've a couple of them left in cold for around 3 years, just checked a couple of days ago, seems to be good. I'm not sure how much longer they can hold, as there were known issues with Samsung 840 serials.
Given the recent debacle with the Samsung SSD firmware, I'd love to read internal hardware and firmware engineer notes and concerns. I think there are quite a few bodies in the closet that is called the consumer SSD market.
You'd at least hope that enterprise SSDs with a Dell sticker on them are better.
The enterprise stuff is almost always longer lasting, but the only one that truly lasts is (was?) optane. You shouldn't trust an ssd long term, especially modern ones. I've probably seen 100 drive failures in total (hdd and ssd) and covid era ssds are garbage for longevity. The big downside of enterprise ssds (besides price) is performance. You can literally double your speed by buying consumer grade (and it's roughly the same price to buy 2 drives for every 1 enterprise grade).
Consumer grade drives have some fast cache in front of them and while initially crazy fast can't do sustained writes without allowing down.
The article doesn't really support this claim. It argues SSDs sacrifice speed and durability for capacity and cost and then posits an unanswered question about absolute durability with an ongoing test to find out.
I do wish the test had more than $13 TLC drives though.
That's a trade-off I'm fine making, because time is in short supply - a snappier experience using my computer is worth it, and I have everything backup up in three places (Backblaze, 6 Drive RaidZ2 array in my home server, and from there to JottaCloud via Restic).