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- cross-posted to:
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SSDs are nice and fast but if the data table goes bad, you have lost everything. At least with a HDD you can still pull files off if filesystem table goes bad. Also unplugged SSD in a hot location will lose data quite readily. Always keep them powered to keep the bits.
NOTHING I have that is irreplaceable is on less than 2 drives nor are they ever connected at the same time. You’re just asking to lose files if you only save them on one drive.
If you have your data in one location, you have your data in zero locations.
The 3 2 1 of data retention is important
3 copies of your data
2 local
1 off-site
The 2 stands for on 2 different mediums. So HDD and tape for instance. Or HDD and SSD. Or SSD and DVDs. Whatever combo you choose that fits your needs. This (minimizes) the chance of loss of both.
Anything I have that is super important is just uploaded to a server with backups turned on. Becomes 100%, not my problem anymore.
Not your problem… until the hosting provider publishes a press release about some recent fire or flooding in the data center that “only impacted less than 1% of our customers”… and you turn out to be among them.
For “super important” stuff, I keep closer to 10 copies spread around in different places. Normal stuff is 321, and everything else is temporary.
eh, I’ve never hit that issue but I also have a copy of everything locally.
I have. Both server and backup lost, and all I got was a complimentary 1 free month. Not a fun time uploading everything again from the single local copy.
Now something similar is going on with Google for Business, where they’ve switched from “unlimited storage” to “actually, $300/10TB/month”. Like that’s going to happen (there are $100/100TB/month bare metal out there), but now I have to decide what to delete, what to keep, and what to downgrade from 321, to “temporary” single copy.
I get a lot of folks are correctly pointing out the need to back up data but isn’t that a little bit of victim blaming? This isn’t a situation where the guy had a 10 year old drive with all his photos and videos sitting around unbacked up. He had a new drive and it failed. Can we agree that brand new drives aren’t supposed to fail?
Can we agree that brand new drives aren’t supposed to fail?
No.
The typical failure rates, for pretty much all electronics, even mechanic stuff, form a “bathtub graph”: relatively many early failures, very few failures for a long time, with a final increasing number of failures tending to a 100%.
That’s why you’re supposed to have a “burn in” period for everything, before you can trust it within some probably (still make backups), and beware of it reaching end of life (make sure the backups actually work).
That’s absolutely true in the physical sense, but in the “commercial”/practical sense, most respectable companies’ QA process would shave off a large part of that first bathtub slope through testing and good quality practices. Not everything off of the assembly line is meant to make it into a boxed up product.
Apparently even respectable companies are finding out that it’s cheaper to skimp on QA and just ship a replacement item when a customer complains. Particularly when it’s small items that aren’t too expensive to ship, but some are doing it even with full blown HDDs.
In this case, I think we can remove what’s left of the benefit of the doubt from Western Digital (who owns SanDisk). They are as scammy/shady as I know a company to be.
Personally I’ve been boycotting them since 2016 after I couldn’t recover the data from an external drive, which WD encrypted without warning nor consent. A faulty component on the PCB (unrelated to the drive itself), combined with WD’s non standard practices (non SATA pins + mandated proprietary encryption) meant that I had to lose this drive and the data it contained so they could make a quick buck. I can’t trust a company with such ethics to store anything for me.
In 2020, they got themselves into another scandal. WD reds, which were advertised as pro/NAS storage, and sold at a premium, were found to behave like shingled drives (a technique that trades away some reliably and availability in exchange for extra storage density), exposing many users to heightened risk of critical failure (esp. during disks swaps). WD of course denied, and then again when confronted with evidence, up until the internet burst in flames. Again consumer hostile practices.
Here we have SSDs which have been reported for months, and by several reputable sources, to be having problems, which SanDisk even attempted to patch without success. And now, wouldn’t you think that they are trying to recall them all in order to protect consumers from likely data loss (like any responsible data storage provider would do)? Nope. They are currently trying to sell those at significant discount, as quickly as they can, hurting plenty of consumers in the process is less important than their short term financials.
As far as I can care, they can go to hell, bankruptcy is all they deserve, for the greater good.
