5 ms·

Even though I don't use any external drives, I occasionally flirt with the idea of buying an SSD to collect music. But every time I get a little bit paranoid a

Even though I don't use any external drives, I occasionally flirt with the idea of buying an SSD to collect music. But every time I get a little bit paranoid about the idea of "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" and then I start thinking about backuos, at which point I'm like "nah scree this". Are there any recommendations for particular manufacturers to look for? (Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba etc) Also, how much is the average lifetime of a consumer-grade SSD these days? I always think they'll die in 5 years, but that's totally out of my head and not from experience.

dale_glass 4y ago
For me they've been rock solid, and I've yet to see one die. I replace them much earlier than that because they just get too small to be useful. I've got a 240 GB Intel SSD with 49254 hours on it. That's 5.6 years worth of constant work. Still kicking. Not doing anything heavy though. The only reason it's still doing anything is because it's in a firewall. It does run Prometheus though, so it's not completely idle.
eCa 4y ago
My daily computer (tower pc) is coming up on 9 years. The OS drive is a 250gb Samsung SSD. I’d estimate that this computer on average has been running about 8 hours per day during its lifetime. But this is very much YMMV. (New computer is on its way, finally.) Also, SSD only for music collection seems expensive. I’d get a 2TB (or whatever size seems reasonable) spinner, and put the rest of the funds towards backups (like Backblaze).
- rkagerer 4y ago
  Out of curiosity what OS were you running and what will you have on the new one?
  - eCa 4y ago
    Win 8.1 -> Win 11 (pro)
nyanpasu64 4y ago
For music collection and playback (low-bandwidth low-parallelism sequential reads), a mechanical drive would probably be substantially cheaper than SSD for large capacities without a substantial performance hit (though I don't know if you even need terabytes to store music). Anyway I have a 256GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD from a 2016 laptop, which I've used on and off and swapped between devices, and hasn't failed yet.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  Not sure what OP's specific use case is, but for me, the one big downside of spinning drives is noise. And even if the drive itself may be fairly quiet, you have to make sure its vibrations don't propagate to furniture where they can get amplified.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    2.5 inch drives spinning at 5400 RPM are nearly silent (and that can be improved further if you tell the drive you want it to be silent).
    - vladvasiliu 4y ago
      I suppose it depends on the drive. I have a cheap external WD "passport" drive I use for backups. I sometimes sit it on a wooden end-table at my parents' house, and you can absolutely hear the vibrations.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Good point for especially storing music files. I'd like to use SSD every time for < 2TB data. Unfortunately, I'm a data hoarder so still spinning rusts.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  SSD 1Tb Crucial BX500 - $70 WD Blue 1TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD10EZRZ - $50 I can't say what $20 is 'substantially cheaper'. Sure, if you need dozens of TBs... And currently you have a big chance of getting an SMR HDD, which is... quite a gamble.
meindnoch 4y ago
Music collection is typically “write once, read forever”. It’s hard to estimate the lifetime of such read-only SSDs, but it’s measured in decades, if it’s regularly powered on and read entirely. If it’s not powered for years, you’re going to risk data loss due to thermal noise flipping bits randomly beyond the built-in ECC capabilities. If you keep it powered on, you still need to regularly scrub it (i.e. read all data) to force the firmware to fix and write back flipped bits. Some firmwares may do this periodically by themselves, but it’s a black box, so you must do it yourself to be sure. I wouldn’t recommend relying on a single drive for long-term storage of anything that’s worth more than ~$1000 - neither with SSDs nor HDDs. Freak accidents can happen with any component. You PSU can go rogue and fry your SSD, etc. The best option is most likely a single local drive with continuous mirroring to a cloud service. The drawback is the ongoing cost of the cloud, and the possibility of partial data loss, because cloud mirroring won’t be instantenous when saving bulk data. A local RAID1 array is cost-efficient, but doesn’t save you from black-swan events like floods or house fires.
- ciphol 4y ago
  I had a SSD fail not long ago. It was used regularly, but one day I noticed that reading a large file failed. I went into panic mode and stopped using it and attempted to copy everything to a new drive, but copying many of the large files failed. These large files consisted of things like music which had not been edited for years. This sounds like neither of your scenarios - not thermal bit flipping, and not overwriting. How common are failures of this sort?
  - pixl97 4y ago
    I think you're missing that there is no such thing as 'not edited' on a SSD. Data gets moved around by firmware all the time in order to ensure wear leveling is applied equally all over the drive. This is the exact kind of failure you should expect on an SSD.
  - Sakos 4y ago
    Frankly, we have no idea. If the manufacturers know, they're not telling us. I've seen dozens of failed SSDs and their failure modes are completely different from rotating disks and almost always lead to complete or significant data loss with little to no warning. What numbers we have show that failure rates are low, but honestly I would give it another decade or two before using SSD for persistent data storage (of important data without backups to rotating disks). I don't think we're there yet.
CTDOCodebases 4y ago
For drives Samsung has been good to me. I have only ever had one SSD die on me and that was an OCZ Vertex 2. I would look into Blackblaze personal backup for your use case. Just make it a habbit to download and test your backups.
pizza234 4y ago
> "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" This is not a hypothetical; all drives do fail at some point - it's just a matter of when. The only way to be safe are external backups, not even RAID (which in unlucky cases, can suffer from serial failure). If one really doesn't want to spend any money, an option is to periodically backup to an external drive, although cloud backups are relatively cheap and automated, nowadays. But also this is subject to localized mass-failure, ie. burglaries.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
> "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" Can you tell the difference in "what if {HDD,SDD} suddenly dies and I loose everything?"? > Also, how much is the average lifetime of a consumer-grade SSD these days? Years. Actually with all that TLC/QLC/xLC you can get even less than some old-time ones, but they are cheap and you can get much more than you need, so you will have plenty of resource to spare, ie if you have 250GBs of music - you can buy 1TB and have x4 'over-provision', if you have 1TB - buy 2TB or more. And as others said, music collection is basically WORM so you probably would have the problem of finding an ancient USB3 controller to attach your ancient USB->SATA/NVME external drive for your new shiny holodeck with USB23423 in 2042 than it to die on you.
adql 4y ago
The recommendation is to think about backups. > Also, how much is the average lifetime of a consumer-grade SSD these days? I always think they'll die in 5 years, but that's totally out of my head and not from experience. Some have warranty that long but the fact you wont reach TBW doesn't mean it won't lose data. JESD218 spec only guarantees year of retention unpowered (for enterprise, 3 months for customer) soooo good fucking luck. Many manufacturers don't even say the guaranteed retention in datasheet. Also, once you finish setup your backups make a calendar entry to test restores at least every year (preferably more often).
- lstodd 4y ago
  I write this from a laptop with a Plextor M5Pro from 2015 which was forgotten on a balcony (above/below zero temp swings, humidity and all) for three straight years. It all comes down to manufacturing tolerances, and damn the standards. Even the battery still somewhat works.
- wtallis 4y ago
  > JESD218 spec only guarantees year of retention unpowered (for enterprise, 3 months for customer) soooo good fucking luck. That retention spec is for a drive at the end of its write endurance. A drive that's less worn-out will have longer retention, more or less by definition (reduced retention is the main problem caused by the wear of writing lots of data). Also, IIRC it's one year for consumer and only 3 months for enterprise (albeit at a higher storage temperature).
chasil 4y ago
Stepping up from the filesystem, you are yearning for ZFS. It's bundled on the Ubuntu installer, though it taints the kernel. You need a mirror or raid pool. Set the checksum to sha256 before copying your music over if you want the utmost protection.
- veqq 4y ago
  How does it taint the kernel?
  - ciupicri 4y ago
    It's a third-party kernel module like the nvidia driver. It's not part of the official Linux kernel.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
> But every time I get a little bit paranoid about the idea of "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" Buy 2. Sync the devices regularly. Better to have 2 512GB drives and deal with syncing them once a while and half the space than 1 1TB drive and it's all gone due to any issue. Never completely depend on a single storage device.
outworlder 4y ago
> But every time I get a little bit paranoid about the idea of "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" and then I start thinking about backuos, at which point I'm like "nah scree this". If your data is that important you'll want 3 - 2 - 1. 3 copies of data: two in different media, one offsite(offsite includes cloud these days)
jjav 4y ago
> Are there any recommendations for particular manufacturers to look for? Anything can always randomly suddenly fail. Low probability, but reasonably possible. So if it contains anything collectible, you'd want mirroring (ZFS is pure awesome) for availability and separate backups just in case.

dale_glass 4y ago

For me they've been rock solid, and I've yet to see one die. I replace them much earlier than that because they just get too small to be useful. I've got a 240 GB Intel SSD with 49254 hours on it. That's 5.6 years worth of constant work. Still kicking. Not doing anything heavy though. The only reason it's still doing anything is because it's in a firewall. It does run Prometheus though, so it's not completely idle.

eCa 4y ago

My daily computer (tower pc) is coming up on 9 years. The OS drive is a 250gb Samsung SSD. I’d estimate that this computer on average has been running about 8 hours per day during its lifetime. But this is very much YMMV. (New computer is on its way, finally.) Also, SSD only for music collection seems expensive. I’d get a 2TB (or whatever size seems reasonable) spinner, and put the rest of the funds towards backups (like Backblaze).

rkagerer 4y ago
Out of curiosity what OS were you running and what will you have on the new one?
- eCa 4y ago
  Win 8.1 -> Win 11 (pro)

nyanpasu64 4y ago

For music collection and playback (low-bandwidth low-parallelism sequential reads), a mechanical drive would probably be substantially cheaper than SSD for large capacities without a substantial performance hit (though I don't know if you even need terabytes to store music). Anyway I have a 256GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD from a 2016 laptop, which I've used on and off and swapped between devices, and hasn't failed yet.

vladvasiliu 4y ago
Not sure what OP's specific use case is, but for me, the one big downside of spinning drives is noise. And even if the drive itself may be fairly quiet, you have to make sure its vibrations don't propagate to furniture where they can get amplified.
- outworlder 4y ago
  2.5 inch drives spinning at 5400 RPM are nearly silent (and that can be improved further if you tell the drive you want it to be silent).
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    I suppose it depends on the drive. I have a cheap external WD "passport" drive I use for backups. I sometimes sit it on a wooden end-table at my parents' house, and you can absolutely hear the vibrations.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Good point for especially storing music files. I'd like to use SSD every time for < 2TB data. Unfortunately, I'm a data hoarder so still spinning rusts.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
SSD 1Tb Crucial BX500 - $70 WD Blue 1TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD10EZRZ - $50 I can't say what $20 is 'substantially cheaper'. Sure, if you need dozens of TBs... And currently you have a big chance of getting an SMR HDD, which is... quite a gamble.

meindnoch 4y ago

Music collection is typically “write once, read forever”. It’s hard to estimate the lifetime of such read-only SSDs, but it’s measured in decades, if it’s regularly powered on and read entirely. If it’s not powered for years, you’re going to risk data loss due to thermal noise flipping bits randomly beyond the built-in ECC capabilities. If you keep it powered on, you still need to regularly scrub it (i.e. read all data) to force the firmware to fix and write back flipped bits. Some firmwares may do this periodically by themselves, but it’s a black box, so you must do it yourself to be sure. I wouldn’t recommend relying on a single drive for long-term storage of anything that’s worth more than ~$1000 - neither with SSDs nor HDDs. Freak accidents can happen with any component. You PSU can go rogue and fry your SSD, etc. The best option is most likely a single local drive with continuous mirroring to a cloud service. The drawback is the ongoing cost of the cloud, and the possibility of partial data loss, because cloud mirroring won’t be instantenous when saving bulk data. A local RAID1 array is cost-efficient, but doesn’t save you from black-swan events like floods or house fires.

ciphol 4y ago
I had a SSD fail not long ago. It was used regularly, but one day I noticed that reading a large file failed. I went into panic mode and stopped using it and attempted to copy everything to a new drive, but copying many of the large files failed. These large files consisted of things like music which had not been edited for years. This sounds like neither of your scenarios - not thermal bit flipping, and not overwriting. How common are failures of this sort?
- pixl97 4y ago
  I think you're missing that there is no such thing as 'not edited' on a SSD. Data gets moved around by firmware all the time in order to ensure wear leveling is applied equally all over the drive. This is the exact kind of failure you should expect on an SSD.
- Sakos 4y ago
  Frankly, we have no idea. If the manufacturers know, they're not telling us. I've seen dozens of failed SSDs and their failure modes are completely different from rotating disks and almost always lead to complete or significant data loss with little to no warning. What numbers we have show that failure rates are low, but honestly I would give it another decade or two before using SSD for persistent data storage (of important data without backups to rotating disks). I don't think we're there yet.

CTDOCodebases 4y ago

For drives Samsung has been good to me. I have only ever had one SSD die on me and that was an OCZ Vertex 2. I would look into Blackblaze personal backup for your use case. Just make it a habbit to download and test your backups.

pizza234 4y ago

> "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" This is not a hypothetical; all drives do fail at some point - it's just a matter of when. The only way to be safe are external backups, not even RAID (which in unlucky cases, can suffer from serial failure). If one really doesn't want to spend any money, an option is to periodically backup to an external drive, although cloud backups are relatively cheap and automated, nowadays. But also this is subject to localized mass-failure, ie. burglaries.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

> "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" Can you tell the difference in "what if {HDD,SDD} suddenly dies and I loose everything?"? > Also, how much is the average lifetime of a consumer-grade SSD these days? Years. Actually with all that TLC/QLC/xLC you can get even less than some old-time ones, but they are cheap and you can get much more than you need, so you will have plenty of resource to spare, ie if you have 250GBs of music - you can buy 1TB and have x4 'over-provision', if you have 1TB - buy 2TB or more. And as others said, music collection is basically WORM so you probably would have the problem of finding an ancient USB3 controller to attach your ancient USB->SATA/NVME external drive for your new shiny holodeck with USB23423 in 2042 than it to die on you.

adql 4y ago

The recommendation is to think about backups. > Also, how much is the average lifetime of a consumer-grade SSD these days? I always think they'll die in 5 years, but that's totally out of my head and not from experience. Some have warranty that long but the fact you wont reach TBW doesn't mean it won't lose data. JESD218 spec only guarantees year of retention unpowered (for enterprise, 3 months for customer) soooo good fucking luck. Many manufacturers don't even say the guaranteed retention in datasheet. Also, once you finish setup your backups make a calendar entry to test restores at least every year (preferably more often).

lstodd 4y ago
I write this from a laptop with a Plextor M5Pro from 2015 which was forgotten on a balcony (above/below zero temp swings, humidity and all) for three straight years. It all comes down to manufacturing tolerances, and damn the standards. Even the battery still somewhat works.
wtallis 4y ago
> JESD218 spec only guarantees year of retention unpowered (for enterprise, 3 months for customer) soooo good fucking luck. That retention spec is for a drive at the end of its write endurance. A drive that's less worn-out will have longer retention, more or less by definition (reduced retention is the main problem caused by the wear of writing lots of data). Also, IIRC it's one year for consumer and only 3 months for enterprise (albeit at a higher storage temperature).

chasil 4y ago

Stepping up from the filesystem, you are yearning for ZFS. It's bundled on the Ubuntu installer, though it taints the kernel. You need a mirror or raid pool. Set the checksum to sha256 before copying your music over if you want the utmost protection.

veqq 4y ago
How does it taint the kernel?
- ciupicri 4y ago
  It's a third-party kernel module like the nvidia driver. It's not part of the official Linux kernel.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

> But every time I get a little bit paranoid about the idea of "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" Buy 2. Sync the devices regularly. Better to have 2 512GB drives and deal with syncing them once a while and half the space than 1 1TB drive and it's all gone due to any issue. Never completely depend on a single storage device.

outworlder 4y ago

> But every time I get a little bit paranoid about the idea of "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" and then I start thinking about backuos, at which point I'm like "nah scree this". If your data is that important you'll want 3 - 2 - 1. 3 copies of data: two in different media, one offsite(offsite includes cloud these days)

jjav 4y ago

> Are there any recommendations for particular manufacturers to look for? Anything can always randomly suddenly fail. Low probability, but reasonably possible. So if it contains anything collectible, you'd want mirroring (ZFS is pure awesome) for availability and separate backups just in case.