Don't buy cheap SSD brand, PNY, Patriot for example, these are as slow as HDD and i've replaced a lot of them they just seems to die randomly.

 

the loss of important data caused by failure of hdd/ssd can even lead to gastritis and depression. I recently bought a 14TB hdd for backup and I feel much more relaxed, my sexual life has also improved

 

I don't think I'd go that far, they are very different devices being presented to the consumer as the same or "equal but better" - but they are significantly different approaches to long term data storage. an SSD has finite writes, while an hdd doesn't or not in the same sense as an HDD can have orders of magnitude more writes before failure.

Thats why its important to turn caching off on SSD, to limit the amount of writes by the operating system in the background, any other services that can be excluded from using the write capabilities of the drive will extend its life. They are great devices to read from so great for storing a library.

I have an HP laptop with sata and nvme and the nvme holds an ssd, and the sata holds the much bigger (storage wise) HDD that holds
project files etc. Its the best of both worlds, I wish more laptops had this sort of diverse bus architechture - it is a good argument for keeping a desktop computer or two around as they have the space and expandibility to offer multiple storage modalities.

 

is it a seagate? I just bought one of those in December.

 

It is a Fantom 7200rpm ext drive, with a western digital hdd inside

 

I have a 34 year old 105MB Quantum external disk that was attached to my Atari back then that still works. I also have a 11 year old Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD that was a system disk for a few years but I now still use as an external drive to copy some files now and then. And I have more HDD and SSD drives that are extremely old and still work.
On the other hand I've also had several drives die on me within a year. The most extreme was a 1 TB Samsung 970 Pro M2 that died instantly within 3 months.
So the moral of this story is: Always be prepared for drive failure! It can happen soon but it may also never happen during your use of this drive? There is now way of predicting how long a drive will live. If you're lucky it will die slowly and give you signs it must be replaced ASAP and will give you the opportunity to still save your files. If you're unlucky it will die instantly and all files will be lost.
So if you really value the data a drive contains and really don't want to loose it, always make backups!

 

That was also my thought some time ago.
But it didn't really work because the data backup took ages, there were lots of crashes and the disks were too expensive.
Do you have any other experiences?

 

usb drives, the flash drives have dropped tremendously. I got a two pack of 256gb samsung drives for 25$ around christmas.
but of course then you get into having to label them and create a spreadsheet to track them. not as easy as a HDD backup, but
it does take a lot less storage space.

 

I may have a simple solution for you:
I backup my important data on external drives via Goodsync. Goodsync remembers the name of the external drive (= you do not have to rely on always having the same drive letter)
If you name the individual tasks sensibly and the name is reflected in the name of the external drive, you can actually find everything again.

For instance: I have a drive named "Photos" and a Goodsync task "Photos". As soon as I connect the external "Photos" drive Goodsync recognizes the drive automatically and collects all Photos on the different drives on my PC and network and copies them to the external drive (only if sth has changed). Takes only seconds most of the time.

So - after planning it once - I basically just plugin the drive from time to time. That's it.

p.s.: You can get Goodsync k'd.

 

Last edited: Feb 24, 2024

well theres hope at last:


A novel disc the size of a DVD can hold more than 1 million gigabits—roughly as much as is transmitted per second over the entire world’s Internet—by storing data in three dimensions as opposed to two, a new study finds.

Optical discs such as CDs and DVDs encode data using a series of microscopic pits. These pits, and the islands between them, together represent the 0s and 1s of binary code that computers use to symbolize information. CD, DVD, and Blu-ray players use lasers to read the data encoded in these discs.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-storage-petabit-optical-disc

 

Really Interesting of course.

But it's not as extreme of a size if you read it's 1 Petabit not Petabyte, means 10^12 bit makes 100 Terabyte of disk space if we devide it by 10 (8 bit plus overhead)
Let's wait 10 years

There are simply fundamental problems with permanent data storage, so there is probably no way around constant data migration to newer technology:
1. Media durability: The physical media on which the data is stored does not last forever. CDs, hard disks, even special long-term archiving media such as M-DISCs or tape drives - everything has a lifespan. Sometimes this is shorter than expected, especially if the storage conditions are not optimal.
2. Technological obsolescence: Even if the physical media stands the test of time, the technology to read that media can become obsolete. Think of floppy disks or even CDs. Modern computers often no longer have drives for them, making the data essentially inaccessible.
3. Data corruption: Data can be corrupted over time, whether through physical damage to the storage medium, software errors or so-called "bit rot", where the data literally "decomposes".
Even hard disks that are stored perfectly and are refreshed from time to time will be damaged by cosmic radiation over time. This will probably also apply to SSDs.
I have already had a few CDs (RW) that I could no longer read after a short time...
4. Format obsolescence: Even if we can read the data, we still need to understand it. Older file formats may no longer be supported by new software, making the data unusable, unless you have access to the original software, which brings its own problems.
5. Data retention requirements and retentions bans: Not all data may be stored forever (personal data) and for many data a minimum storage period is required (e.g. tax). How should a storage medium take this into account? It is not enough to just slap everything onto a storage medium once and then store it. The EU has made this more complicated in particular.

Where I live, this has already caused major problems on several occasions. Municipal administrations, for example, were suddenly no longer able to read their land registers because the readers were defective.
Or there was a completely different computer infrastructure in the former East Germany due to technology barriers of cold war, so that in some cases data can no longer be read because the computers no longer exist.

I therefore believe that even if we eventually have such a huge storage medium, it will always be difficult to guarantee that allowed data will be preserved.

 

Last edited: Feb 26, 2024

well your basically battling entropy, and entropy always wins...

 

Ofc your are right.
I am also a fan of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. No heater, ripper or cruncher here

But only at the very end. When the last proton has evaporated in 10^34a.
p.s.: If humanity or other idiots do not succeed in bringing forward the point in time massively

 

I don't know whether other people adhere to the notion of never filling a hard drive beyond 60%, but it's what I do and I have several drives on several different machines (Usually the Blue or Green Western Digital) and not one go tits up on me.

I have had to use HDD Regenerator (yes even with SSD) to repair bad sectors before, although very rarely!

 

Yes, that may be a good idea but depends on filesystem.
With hard disks, this is particularly useful when large files are fragmented, as defragmentation is completed more quickly and does not place such a heavy load on the hard disk. Once a huge hard disk is full to the brim, it can work lierally for days to defragment. Then it gets really hot and that's bad.
I find this less useful for having place for bad sectors. In my experience, an HDD that starts to produce bad sectors should be replaced as soon as possible.

 

Last edited: Feb 26, 2024

I just burn all my large libraries and instruments like Spectrasonics all Toontrack expansions Maschine expansions to dvd-r. I bought one dvd burner by LG, like 3 months ago. 25.00 free shipping from Amazon. It seems more reliable than HDD or SSD. Once they're complete writing to disc, it's a wrap.

 

keep a backup .iso of your disc in case you need to replicate them, should they get scratched or left on the old radiator or you know life happens..
theres a great program called cd catalog its for all media not just cd's, just happen to be popular when the 1st rev of the progam was written. it will creat a catalog of all your disk and you display them in your webrowser when you need a file instead of inserting countless discs and trying to figure out which one has the stuff you need.

http://www.zero2000.com/cd-catalog-expert/

should work with sd cards and usb drives as well..

 

Thanks fam. I gotta check into that. Seems very useful. With those two ideas, you can keep your data archived. I even go further and list what's on every dvd burned. OCD?

 

"Storage Media Life Expectancy: SSDs, HDDs & More"

this might be of use to people
haven't watched it yet, but I have found the channel useful in the past...

 

nah man not ocd, just cautious. computers only work long enough to trust them, then the fuck you every time....its kind of a 1st rule information technology....