4 ms·

Is point 2) still valid nowadays? I know many years ago ssd durability (when unpowered) was low, but hasn’t that significantly improved to the point of not matt

Is point 2) still valid nowadays? I know many years ago ssd durability (when unpowered) was low, but hasn’t that significantly improved to the point of not mattering? And what’s the alternative you’re proposing, spinning rust? Is that what you yourself are using, is all your non-system data on spinning drives? Imo better would be “store all your data on quality ssds if you can afford it, and do 3:2:1 backup for whatever you can’t afford to lose”. Just one piece of anecdata - I have a nas at home with 5x16tb seagate spinning drives, and a consumer grade 8tb sata qlc Samsung ssd in the sixth slot. One of the spinny drives completely died after few months and needed replacement. And the consumer-grade samsung ssd still going fine after 1.5 years of power on hours with a small but continuous write workload.

exac 3y ago
SSD's are rated for 3-10 years or some number of terabytes written to disk. My system's SSD's are both 3 years old, and most of my friends' are over 5 years old. So I would say it is a problem.
washadjeffmad 3y ago
Don't misunderstand. Bit rot occurs on unpowered solid state in as little as one month, guaranteed by one year. If you're thinking, "but what about my $brandModel?", that's the point of recognizing it's not long term storage media. Bit rot doesn't mean you're going to lose all your data, just that somewhere on the chip, there will be a cell with a charge that has potentially silently altered. If that's not okay, there are long term storage practices you can follow to ensure that in however many years, your data will be identical to its originally written state.
- rg111 3y ago
  > there are long term storage practices you can follow Can you please point me towards some resources?
  - retrac 3y ago
    Systems that use error correcting and robustness codes, checksums, like used on CDs, plus duplication/redundancy. There are resilient file systems that will spread ECC data chunks across multiple devices/media where bit-flips and partial media loss can be detected and repaired, sometimes automatically. There's offline backup software that'll do similar things.
adithyassekhar 3y ago
Ssd's fail suddenly and catastrophically one day with the controller failing most of the time. Hard disks will show sector errors and warnings before that event. Most of the time the data on the drive can be copied out even in case of corruption.
tinus_hn 3y ago
Backblaze has larger scale statistics which show that this theory that ssds are inherently unreliable is just bs. In fact they turn out to be slightly more reliable than hdds: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-drive-stats-mid-2022-review/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-drive-stats-mid-2022-revi... Just make sure you have backups because hdd or ssd, disks fail.
rasz 3y ago
Everything about NAND flash only gets worse with newer smaller processes, all in the name of lower $/GB.

exac 3y ago

SSD's are rated for 3-10 years or some number of terabytes written to disk. My system's SSD's are both 3 years old, and most of my friends' are over 5 years old. So I would say it is a problem.

washadjeffmad 3y ago

Don't misunderstand. Bit rot occurs on unpowered solid state in as little as one month, guaranteed by one year. If you're thinking, "but what about my $brandModel?", that's the point of recognizing it's not long term storage media. Bit rot doesn't mean you're going to lose all your data, just that somewhere on the chip, there will be a cell with a charge that has potentially silently altered. If that's not okay, there are long term storage practices you can follow to ensure that in however many years, your data will be identical to its originally written state.

rg111 3y ago
> there are long term storage practices you can follow Can you please point me towards some resources?
- retrac 3y ago
  Systems that use error correcting and robustness codes, checksums, like used on CDs, plus duplication/redundancy. There are resilient file systems that will spread ECC data chunks across multiple devices/media where bit-flips and partial media loss can be detected and repaired, sometimes automatically. There's offline backup software that'll do similar things.

adithyassekhar 3y ago

Ssd's fail suddenly and catastrophically one day with the controller failing most of the time. Hard disks will show sector errors and warnings before that event. Most of the time the data on the drive can be copied out even in case of corruption.

tinus_hn 3y ago

Backblaze has larger scale statistics which show that this theory that ssds are inherently unreliable is just bs. In fact they turn out to be slightly more reliable than hdds: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-drive-stats-mid-2022-review/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-drive-stats-mid-2022-revi... Just make sure you have backups because hdd or ssd, disks fail.

rasz 3y ago

Everything about NAND flash only gets worse with newer smaller processes, all in the name of lower $/GB.