You probably should have a couple, at least as external drives. They’re quite good for reliability. I think the only thing that’s better is a mag tape reel setup.
Incorrect, we moved to SSDs because they’re faster.
In reality, SSDs have a finite amount of times you can write to any bit, so they in fact have a fixed lifespan, and naturally have their health decline over time. Voltage stored on SSDs also naturally fades over time, meaning that SSDs can only store your data on them, unpowered, for a finite amount of time.
In contrast, hard disks have no explicit write limit, and magnetic writes don’t dissipate while unpowered at any significant rate, so hard disks are still superior for keeping records and documents you want to last decades.
Wow it’s been a while since I’ve seen these chonky bois
Really? You’re on fedi so I assume you host your own server and at least a couple of backups. Have you gone full solid state? \s
You probably should have a couple, at least as external drives. They’re quite good for reliability. I think the only thing that’s better is a mag tape reel setup.
I thought we moved to SSDs because they were more reliable?
Incorrect, we moved to SSDs because they’re faster.
In reality, SSDs have a finite amount of times you can write to any bit, so they in fact have a fixed lifespan, and naturally have their health decline over time. Voltage stored on SSDs also naturally fades over time, meaning that SSDs can only store your data on them, unpowered, for a finite amount of time.
The write lifespan of most SSDs is between thousands and hundreds of thousands of write cycles, so they still last years of runtime. However, the memory retention while unpowered is only about a year at 30C and only months at 40C.
In contrast, hard disks have no explicit write limit, and magnetic writes don’t dissipate while unpowered at any significant rate, so hard disks are still superior for keeping records and documents you want to last decades.