On 28/05/2021 17:17, Walter Dnes wrote:
Anything with spinning disk "is obsolete" they are trying to give it
way because nobody is buying them (you can buy them for few dollars),
don't expect it to last long.
I've never had a hard drive fail on me. That includes a 2008 core2
duo that I shut down last autumn. Web surfing was getting painfully
slow, and really large spreadsheets were dying in 3 gigabytes of ram,
but otherwise it still worked. 256 G SSD is not enough for me now.
That takes us into 512 G SSD territory, which will be "adequate" for
now, but who knows about my future needs.
I've recovered (or tried to) drives for other people, but again I've
been lucky in that I've never lost one of my own drives.
And as for nVME, some magazine did a "test to destruction" of
solid-state drives. They lasted almost for ever - I think the
computer(s) were configured to hammer the drives 24/7 and they lasted
over 18 months - that's probably a decade and more in normal usage.
The one thing to watch out for, is that if you DO encounter problems, DO
NOT shut the machine down. If a drive suffers failure, stage 1 seems to
be to go read-only. YOU MUST back it up immediately, because stage 2 is
to commit suicide on reboot. But you're highly unlikely to meet that
scenario in normal use.
I'm planning to buy one of those shingled horrors - a Seagate BaraCuda
12TB - for backups. Use btrfs or LVM, and rsync in-place copy. A good
idea in any case, but probably an even better idea if your main storage
is SSD.
Cheers,
Wol
