Latest on SSD, HDD and USB Drives?

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JHZR2

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I was a relatively early adopter of SSDs. My 2010 MacBook Air has one and knock on wood its still great. I also run a Samsung T5 USB SSD for iphone backups for my wife and I.

I also have tons of photos, and I keep them on a 2.5" HDD, two actually for redundancy. I also have tons of other files on a bunch of old drives and computers, which Id like to ultimately get rid of.

I see that Samsung now offers the T5 SSD in 1 and 2TB sizes. Im sure I can get 2TB+ in external USD 2.5" form factors, and even bigger in the larger sizes.

What Im thinking is that I want an archive disk to pull all my old data together - make a concerted effort; even get my old SCSI drives from 2002 or so going, and pull anything and everything off... Archive all to one point. I suspect 2TB would suffice.

Then Im also thinking of just routinely cloning my active laptop drives to SSDs or memory sticks. This way I have a bootable update.

Should I go all (USB-C/3.1) SSD? Can I boot to memory sticks on mac? (I believe so). Are there any reliable memory sticks? My experience has been no, they all tend to corrupt or get an issue after a while... At least Sandisk and Kingston (knock on wood with this tiny Samsung one I have currently).

Any reason to use HDDs at all? Thinking that if number of writes is not an issue, then the answer is no, because SSDs should be more resilient to the unforeseen and acts of God.

Recommendations?

Also, any recommendations for a good cloud based backup? Apple would be obvious, but others Im open to as well. I generally trust myself more than giving all my info, photos, etc to someone else, but at least for all the photos, way off-site safekeeping and archiving may be a nice benefit.

Thanks!
 
Cloud baby.
Sounds like you are an Apple family; iCloud is perfect.
Auto backup. Seamless... What's not to like?

FYI, we have maybe 50 notebooks, 2 servers and who knows what else in our house.
My wife is head of computer operations in a multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley company.
 
Cloud is probably a lot easier. SSD's make poor backup devices, and they really need to see power every once in awhile, so they aren't just a backup and leave it like can be done with an old spinning disk.
 
ICloud is fairly pricey for a backup service. A service like iDrive is around $70/yr for 5TB. Using a HDD is cheaper yet. If your data is important to you, keep a time machine copy and cloud copy.
 
I would say diversify. The stuff you don't mind being on cloud, put on cloud, the rest on an HDD. They are dirt cheap nowadays.
For ease of backups, get a usb to sata docking station. I would avoid anything in an enclosure as they often fail and it's not the drive, but the connections inside from what I've read.

Here is an example of one. USB3.0 and can accept 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives. They also have ones that accommodate two drives and can clone all by themselves.


Drive docking station
[Linked Image]



Dock that can clone drives
[Linked Image]
 
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Cloud is probably a lot easier. SSD's make poor backup devices, and they really need to see power every once in awhile, so they aren't just a backup and leave it like can be done with an old spinning disk.


Why is that? TRIM?

Seems that once the register is set, nothing should change on it...

And then it would be less susceptible to damage.
 
Time Machine is NOT a good back up, it gets corrupted too easy if used a lot. Carbon Copy Cloner is enterprise rock solid and you can get at your data on any computer, where Time Machine you need to reinstall it on your or a mac.
 
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Cloud is probably a lot easier. SSD's make poor backup devices, and they really need to see power every once in awhile, so they aren't just a backup and leave it like can be done with an old spinning disk.


Technically you should be spinning up a spinning drive every 6 months for a couple of minutes. Many people like podcasters and data saving people have been burned by dead drives here and there. Some think the grease hardens from non activity. I heard this from Leo LaPort, he was burned.
 
No real reason to use HDDs over SSDs except for price. In practice I have not seen any performance benefits from using a USB SSD drive over a USB HDD drive. I would also like to add that in an event of immediate power failure like if somebody pulls the cord while a read/write event is happening, SSDs are more prone to corruption.
 
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Originally Posted by Mainia
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Cloud is probably a lot easier. SSD's make poor backup devices, and they really need to see power every once in awhile, so they aren't just a backup and leave it like can be done with an old spinning disk.


Technically you should be spinning up a spinning drive every 6 months for a couple of minutes. Many people like podcasters and data saving people have been burned by dead drives here and there. Some think the grease hardens from non activity. I heard this from Leo LaPort, he was burned.


While that's probably technically true, I've fired up hard drives that have sat for 20 years and they still worked.
 
Originally Posted by JHZR2
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Cloud is probably a lot easier. SSD's make poor backup devices, and they really need to see power every once in awhile, so they aren't just a backup and leave it like can be done with an old spinning disk.


Why is that? TRIM?

Seems that once the register is set, nothing should change on it...

And then it would be less susceptible to damage.


They degrade without being powered up. The rate of degradation increases with the usage of the drive, so how heavily used the drive is will be a component of how long its safe storage life is. So, for the longest storage life, you'd want to back up to it once and park it. The more cycles it has on it, the shorter that period becomes. Also, temperature (storage temperature) plays a role as well. There was a study done that showed than an "at end of life" SSD stored at an ambient temperature of 95F could lose data in a period as short as a week. That's obviously a worst-case scenario but just something to keep in mind.
 
Originally Posted by OVERKILL

They degrade without being powered up. The rate of degradation increases with the usage of the drive, so how heavily used the drive is will be a component of how long its safe storage life is. So, for the longest storage life, you'd want to back up to it once and park it. The more cycles it has on it, the shorter that period becomes. Also, temperature (storage temperature) plays a role as well. There was a study done that showed than an "at end of life" SSD stored at an ambient temperature of 95F could lose data in a period as short as a week. That's obviously a worst-case scenario but just something to keep in mind.


This is quite interesting, thanks for sharing this info. I never knew about it. Everybody just talks how SSDs have no moveable part, hence there is nothing to degrade. Looks like they do degrade too.

For now, my case can accommodate six 3.5 inch drives, I will stick with good old HDDs for my storage needs.
 
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I am backing up to a variety of memory. 2TB HDDs, 500/256 GB SSDs (including very old Intel 80 GB SSD) and a slew of SD cards of various form factors.

While it's true that solid state storage will lose cell charge over time, in typical home conditions, they should be stable for years. And you should be backing up far more often than that.

My photo PC goes to the large HDD's (although a purge yesterday got it down to 400 GB on a Macrium Reflect image of the three drives in the case).

My Surface Book goes to the SSD's, and my Surface Go goes to the SD cards.

I back up each device about monthly, after giving each a thorough cleanup (Bleachbit, manual deletes of the temp folders and Windows logs, removing Event Viewer entries, and running "C:\Windows\System32\cleanmgr.exe /LOWDISK").

Make sure you delete the Windows Update (aka Windows.Old) using the appropriate command utility.
 
Only buy a little more storage than what you need so that every year or two youre buying new drives. Prices of new drives go down and they dont take up too much space. Then every few years , wipe them and take them to best buy after you take the magnets out to put on the fridge. Im old school.
 
To add to the valid points by Mr OVERKILL, you may experience some serious bottlenecking attempting to write large contiguous files or transactionally intensive small file activity (e.g. database activity). Use DC-class SSD for critical tasks (Data Centre Class).
Consumer grade SSD production is a very different process.
 
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Cloud is probably a lot easier. SSD's make poor backup devices, and they really need to see power every once in awhile, so they aren't just a backup and leave it like can be done with an old spinning disk.


This.

From what I learned on the job the target data retention without power is usually 1 year in room temp. If you leave it in a hot car it is 1 month before you start losing data. Their data retention is definitely NOT stable for years. HDD target is typically 5 years.

Regarding to consumer vs enterprise drive: they are designed for different things, just use typical consumer drives. Enterprise drives have a super cap that hold about 20ms of power when it loses power so it can write the buffer into the NAND, because enterprise drive doesn't really write into the NAND on every single write for speed and durability reasons. Consumer drives are tune for single queue depth single customer usage while enterprise focus on many users and therefore high queue depth performance. Consumer drives are probably about 1/2 the cost as well, and are likely faster for consumer usage.
 
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Merry Christmas to all!

With a little free time to relax, I've looked into this a bit more. Also found a citation where a lifing tool was employed to assess data longevity. See slides 26-28 on endurance:

https://www.jedec.org/sites/default/files/Alvin_Cox%20%5bCompatibility%20Mode%5d_0.pdf

The lifing model results seem rather strange. I'd think that the SSD operating and being stored at the lowest temperatures would yield the greatest life. The chart implies that operating hot (55C) then storing cool (25C) yields longest life (404 weeks), which to me is counter intuitive for any sort of calendar life and longevity scenario I'm aware of.
 
The chart mentions "detrapping retention mechanism".
Googling that yields AN0011_Flash-Data-Retention_RevB.pdf

This document describes the flash failure mechanisms that affect Data Retention and
JEDEC test methodology that determines the life of the flash based on program/erase
cycles under elevated temperature cycling.
...
For MLC NAND using floating-gate memories, as indicated in the previous section, failure may occur
due to defects that allow charge to leak through the transfer dielectric (SILC) or by the
detrapping of charge in the transfer dielectric. SILC can only be marginally accelerated
or can even be decreased by high temperature, while Detrapping can be highly
temperature-accelerated to induce data retention loss.

--
I think they choose "Enterprise"-grade SSDs to have a run temp of 55C.
I don't know of an HDD enterprise environment like that, but I haven't worked with
any off-the-shelf SSD enclosures in an enterprise, so I don't know why they'd choose such
a high run temp.
In server rooms I work in the intake air temp available is around 18C.
 
Originally Posted by JHZR2
...Can I boot to memory sticks on mac? (I believe so). Are there any reliable memory sticks? ....


Yes, you can create a bootable MacOS Installer on a flash drive/memory stick.
This free software makes it easy:
https://diskmakerx.com

Or you can do it with the Terminal application:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

But your post has me wondering about the longevity of a flash drive based bootable installer.
 
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