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An SSD may be more reliable than an HDD, but when a drive does fail during normal operation[0] it appears that data recovery is usually significantly more fea
by strogonoff 6y ago
An SSD may be more reliable than an HDD, but when a drive does fail during normal operation[0] it appears that data recovery is usually significantly more feasible/cheaper with an HDD. I’d be glad to be proven wrong.
See also Google’s paper[1]. It doesn’t seem to be especially black-and-white.
[0] This excludes cases such as e.g. dropping an HDD during operation and ruining large plate areas, of course.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.12373.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.12373.pdf
- Kirby64 6y agoIn theory an SSD failure should always be more recoverable: eventually they should be put into a read-only state, and then data can be pulled off easily. In practice, it's a bit more nuanced since SSD failures aren't always the "we wrote too many cells, this block is now read only", and tend to be more potential other issues (driver malfunction, controller chip issue, power hardware, etc). With an HDD failure, if the hard drive itself is damaged/end of life/whatever, the act of reading it can cause further damage, so in a graceful failure the SSD seems to win. I'd suggest that the cost of data recovery on a HDD exceeds the practical limit for what most consumers would be able to stomach (since data recovery companies tend to charge thousands...) even for HDDs. Hence why redundancy/backups/RAID are important, I guess.
- rasz 6y agoIn practice I dont know of a single SSD brand/model that goes read only upon failure. I do know specific cases of manufacturer lying about this ability tho, like Intel.
- kadoban 6y agoSeems quite possible that's true, but if you're relying on data recovery haven't you already made a huge mistake?
- lmilcin 6y ago> I’d be glad to be proven wrong. You are right. But almost nobody recovers data from a broken HDD other than personal computers and even then only in exceptional circumstances. The best protection is still to have a backup. In my many years of work in IT I have never heard of any recovery from any drive other than a personal laptop (and that only once).
- perl4ever 6y agoI recall a drive that got "sticky". It would appear dead, but if you shook it clockwise and counterclockwise around the rotational axis, it would get "unstuck" and work again. I figured this out after the first time it happened, when I mailed it to be fixed and it was returned working but of course my data was wiped.
- rbanffy 6y agoAnother thing that seems to help is cooling the drive. https://youtu.be/99Sk2ZnjGQA https://youtu.be/99Sk2ZnjGQA
- rasz 6y agoHDD data recovery is a multi $billion/year business.
- lmilcin 6y agoCare to provide your source? Even assuming this is true, typical recovery is order or two of magnitude of the cost of the drive. So it is still small percentage of drives that receive any treatment in case of failure.
- rasz 6y agorandom google first result :) but checking few top recovery companies market cap they are all in the hundreds of millions range.