SDD and HDD are 2 very different technologies, that perform the same purpose, Data Storage.

They operate on completely different principles, the only thing they share is (sometimes) their form factor and (sometimes) their operating voltages, and (sometimes) their storage capacities.

a train, and an elephant can both carry passengers and/or cargo. However they will vary greatly in their performance characteristics and in their catastrophic failures.

an HDD is a magnetic storage device, that utilizes rotating physical metal (or glass) platters, covered in a magnetic coating. There are physical read/write heads that float on a very thin (less than a human hair) layer of air (or helium in a sealed drive). A voice coil, like in a speaker, serves as an actuator to move the heads over the platters in an arc, precisely enough to read the sectors on the drive.

The platters spin somewhere around 60 mph, creating that "magic" cushion of air that the heads float on.The platters have precision bearings that make sure they spin freely, yet stay very precisely within their physical location so the relationship is maintained with the heads at a 90 degree angle to the platters, so that they may continue to float and perform their read/write functions.

A bit of dust, or a hard physical slam, can ruin that cushion of air, and the heads are ceramic, the platters, glass or aluminium, but the magentic coating is essentialy high quality rust, just like magnetic tape. Rust is rather a soft form of Iron, especially when compared to Ceramic, usually Ceramic wins!!

and a groove is dug into the rust, er "coating" and sometimes the platter as well, this is considered a non-recoverable error, and the drive has just created a debris field which will cause the rest of the platters to fail as well at some point. This is usually considered the "worst" kind of hard drive failure as its difficult to recover data without a clean room to disassemble, clean and reasssemble and then recover whatever data was on the drive.

Other failures, include, the controller board going ape shit and not being able to read or write the data or perform error correction, or the buffer ram on the board, taking a shit and no longer transfering data properly if at all. ITs a complex bit of hardware, that has many failure points, but has been engineered so well its taken for granted and is very good at what it does if you look at the mean time before failure ratings on most hard drives.

SDD are essentially NV-ram, non-voilatile random access memory. NV-RAM is/was used in devices that must retain data when the power is shut off, typically clock chips or some other real time reading like logging humidity or temprature or even IP/mac address on old Sun MicroComputers.

NV-RAM chips were/are a battery(sometimes rechargable) hooked to a memory chip and encapsulated in expoxy. an SSD is a different sort of nv-ram, it is a random access memory that doesn't lose its "state" when power is removed, it will not hold that state forever, it will decay over time, and thats why it has to be powered up every now and again to renew the strength of the state it is 'remembering'.

Obviously different beasts, an SSD has a memory controller that controls the memory chips and marks them as AFU (all fucked up) if they get CRS (Can't Remember SHit), and it rewrites the data to a new memory cells, thats why an SSD is fucked if the drive is full of data (100% utilization) - there is no place to rewrite the data when AFU occurs, and so data is lost. Heat, electrical discharge, and cosmic rays among other things can erase or destroy memory cells, if the cell isn't being used, or holds non-critical data like a britney spears song, its no big deal, if the cells that got zapped hold directory structure information which is like the "you are here" map at the shopping center, the controller doesn't know where to read/write and shit gets written over randomly and shit goes rapidly down hill from there.

Additionally memory cells are physical bits of silicon, they have a finite write cycle, they can only be erased and written over so many times then they lose their ability to maintain "state" and your SDD gets alzheimers and decides to shit itself and sit in the sun in the park all day.

Different devices, different modes of failure, ze hard drive can be recovered when the controller begins failing or the bearing start creating friction or the read write heads begin having problems, by clever software that can map around the problems or keep retrying or rewriting the data to spare areas until all data or as much as possible data is copied off the failing drive.

An SSD takes a shit and you just don't have as many means to get the data off once it hears the angels sing.

A good alternative would be an SSd that presents itself to the world as a single device, ie 1tb, but is actually 2, 1tb drives in a single package that continually backs itself up, or writes data simultaneously to both devices, then one fails, it tells the operating system, "shit is serious" replace the drive.

it would essentialy be a raid device without user interaction, eventually ssd production will become cheap enough this will be implemented as luxury feature to create marketing niches to seperate drive classes and justify extra charges/higher prices.

til then, back your shit up your ownself, create your own raids, and sleep better.

 

he or you should buy a lottery ticket, you are lucky people. it will run down eventually or take a random hit by a cosmic ray or other particle and take out a critical bit of silicon and it will be a nice tea coaster.

 

Now I´m interested, what kind of cosmic ray you are talking about? I live in Finland and everyone is coming here yearly to see some cosmic rays hitting on earth

 

The free element that planet Earth has given us is called silicon.
The other is our brain, which cannot be replicated.

Our brain stores almost everything and from time to time data and memories are deleted and overwritten.
The shelf life of your brain depends on many factors, on average 80 + -!

 

Actually most of it doesn´t get deleted, but most likely just isolated, the usage of human brains is ridigilous, we could do better
To delete it, you would need lots of alcohol and drugs or brain damage, and even then human brain can find another paths

 

Single Event Upset (SEU)

Professor Bhuva: “Really a big problem” Millions of these particles, invisible to us, race through our bodies every second without causing any damage. At least, none are known to date. However, if such neutrons, muons, pions or alpha particles hit electronics, they can “really become a big problem”, according to Bhuva.

Some of these particles are so high-energy that they can affect microelectronic circuits and change individual data bits in the memory, converting a 0 into a 1. Such a temporary disruption of the system is known as a single event upset (SEU) or soft error. A problem that is little known to the public.

Note: The smaller the CPU production, 3nm / 4nm, the higher the probability of failure.
It rarely happens but sometimes a particle changes a 0 to 1 or vice versa.

 

good points and at the least back up your own data, I usually store my data in my own directory/folder structure so I can back it up with backing up the o/s and programs, since i have plenty of copies of the operating system install media and the programs as well.

The user data changes the most and the most rapidly, as I like creating shit, so as long as that is backed up frequently, i can recreate the rest without much effort.

if you don't have alot of backup media available, at least backing up your user data will ensure you can get back to where you need to be, as long as you have already backed up the other things at least once and preferably 2 or 3 times.

incremental backups are a thing in the IT world, you backup "Your Entire ShIt", say on mondays, then every night the software (he never sleeps) walks through your data, notices what has changed and only backups the changes in a separate or additional archive, lets say its named by the day of the week, so its "Tuesday". next day its "wednesday".

your drive fails on Thursday, you can recreate everything with "your entire shit" + "Tuesday" + "Wednesday", and you only lose whatever was changed on thursday before the drive failed.

This is essentialy incremental backup, it takes up a lot less space, and "your entire shit" gets rewritten every so often to keep the number of needed incremental backups small, and fresh like a daisy just picked by a gnome drunk on mead.

Its an option in most backup software packages, learn how to use it and keep on winning.....

 

I would not be worried about myons and other particles, since their been around for billions of years

 

it just seems odd that they never change to a "3" or a "5"....

 

It depends on whether you train your memory and use it according to the instructions.
Many people have forgotten where they put the instructions.

Watch and read all the nonsense and at night in bed, when you are sleeping, the boss in your brain has to separate the rubbish from the important memories and reassign them. What your name is and how you get to work is stored in the main memory, and the fact that you don't cross the street when the light is red to avoid being run over is stored in the quickly accessible main memory.

Sometimes people are still stupid enough to cross the street when the light is red and other people should know that you don't drive 180 in the city. For these reasons of human inadequacy, AI will eventually take over everything because you just can't trust people.

Sky.Net (intern at Elon Music)

 

that is precisely why you should be worried, they have proven themselves to be in continous production and therefore are a continous threat.

 

At the microscopic level, computer processors (CPUs) are made up of millions of tiny "switches" called transistors. These transistors can be in two states, off or on (0 and 1), and their state can be changed with an electrical impulse. With 4 transistors, you can start counting in base 2 (1000 = 8, for example).

With even more transistors, combined with logic gates (AND, OR, NAND, etc.), all kinds of logic become possible. There is much more that goes into making a computer work, but this is how it works at the most basic level.

 

thats a feature, not a bug, "you just can't trust people" think how fucked up the world would be, if everyone did all the things they promised..

 

I don't beleve in the tooth fairy, or transistors. I think they are just minature "tubes" or "Valves"
if we merely had proper tweezers, we could pull them from their sockets, replace the tubes and bob's your uncle back in business. I'm working on trimming down a pair of nose hair puller tweezers to do just that,
i'm starting a "go-fund-me" page soon, be sure to contribute ... frequently....

 

This is actually important, to keep human touch on everything, you dont need computer for everything, I know how my brain works and sometimes I don't like it, but you have to work with it.. but I would not be worried about cosmic rays

 

This is gone OT, i am sorry for that, maybe another thread

 

@Garamondo Furbish, I'll give you a PhD and when I become a millionaire
you'll get 100,000 EUR in cash for your research on clear and real thinking.

If humans don't adapt to nature and don't grow crops in the summer they'll starve in the winter. If they don't turn off their satellites when there's a magnetic force, their circuits will burn out. If they underestimate the sea they'll drown.

 

I think sleep is for housekeeping, physical and mental. the brain examines the days memories, sifts for gold and stores it, and throws out the trash, the body examines the days injuries and sends repair cells to fix ourselves. a proper sleep is refreshing and renewing. not enough sleep or not enough good deep sleep and shit starts going downhills.

babies sleep a lot, they got a lotta work to do to become children and ask unanswerable questions..

 

"
If humans don't adapt to nature and don't grow crops in the summer they'll starve in the winter. If they don't turn off their satellites when there's a magnetic force, their circuits will burn out. If they underestimate the sea they'll drown."
Thank whatever I live in country where it´s almost like given in birth to have the "touch of nature", it takes me only few minutes to get in the forest, I can also collect all eateable from there

 

Just checking in on this thread, WTF