Comment by brcmthrowaway
11 days ago
The 1940-1990 era of technology can't be beat. Add hard drives and tape to the mix. What happened to electromechanical design? I doubt it would be taught anymore. Everything is solid state
11 days ago
The 1940-1990 era of technology can't be beat. Add hard drives and tape to the mix. What happened to electromechanical design? I doubt it would be taught anymore. Everything is solid state
Solid state is the superior technology for almost everything. No moving parts means more reliable, quieter, and very likely more energy efficient since no mass has to move.
Do modern hdd's last as long as the old platter ones? For me, when the SSDs fail it's frustrating because I can't open it up and do anything about it--it's a complete loss. So I tend to have a low opinion of their reliability (same issue I have with old versus new electronic-everything cars). I don't know the actual lifetimes. Surely USB sticks are universally recognized as pretty crappy. I can leave those in the same location plugged in and they'll randomly die after a couple of years.
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who never had an issue with USB flash drives. Or HDDs for that matter. Or SSDs. I don't think I've ever had any storage die on me except optical disks.
Internet says both HDDs and SSDs have similar average lifespans, but with HDDs it's usually a mechanical failure so yes, you can often DIY it back to life if you have the right parts. With SSDs it's almost always the memory cells themselves wearing out. On the flip side, data recovery is usually much easier since SSD will usually keep working in read-only mode for a while, whereas a faulty HDD won't work at all.
I've had two SSDs "die" over the years, both of them went read-only, but I was able to recover all data. SSD failure modes are weird.