First time an SSD Drive failed on me.

[Elderberry]

I rebuilt my PC 3 yrs ago and went to all SSD drives. A M.2 500MB SSD, a 500MB 2.5in SSD, and a 2TB 2.5in SSD. Well this week the 2TB drive failed. Over a few days it would disappear. I'd reboot and it'd come back, only to disappear after a while. Until it would not come up at all.
I'm going to replace it with a Mechanical HD. I didn't lose any files. I have biweekly backups on all my drives. I'll keep my fingers crossed for my 2 remaining SSD drives.

[roamer_1]

I rebuilt my PC 3 yrs ago and went to all SSD drives. A M.2 500MB SSD, a 500MB 2.5in SSD, and a 2TB 2.5in SSD. Well this week the 2TB drive failed. Over a few days it would disappear. I'd reboot and it'd come back, only to disappear after a while. Until it would not come up at all.
I'm going to replace it with a Mechanical HD. I didn't lose any files. I have biweekly backups on all my drives. I'll keep my fingers crossed for my 2 remaining SSD drives.

I don't trust them yet. Maybe never will. All my machines are running SSD system drives, but as far as data retention goes... My volatile data (current stuff) is on those drives, but those drives back up to the cloud via Microsoft, as well as being sync'd each to the other...

But my fat data pile is still on mechanical drives, backed to two servers here, and several servers on our family WAN. Anything that is offline is also mechanical drives in USB3 cans.

I have spent a ton of time trying to recover from flash technology, with far less success than with mechanical drives - Especially across time - which may not be a fair assessment - Most of the stuff I have been on is rather old, of course... So newer tech may prove more resilient.

But as a rule, when flash dies it dies hard. There is little warning, and less chance of recovery. All data on flash drives should be treated as volatile, and backed up multiple times.

[Hoodat]

@Elderberry

Was your O/S on the drive?  Or is this an external one that failed?  I have customers that request SSDs as their main drives.  SSDs will fail at some point.  Think of each bit going on and off as a light bulb filament.  There are only a certain number of on-off actions that it can handle.  If you are using them as a main drive, then I recommend having a server with redundant SSDs.  That way, when one fails, you simply plug in a new one.

[Elderberry]

My O/S is on an internal M.2 SSD that didn't fail. The one that failed was an internal drive I use for user file storage. My entire system is backed up to 2 servers with multiple Raid HDs.  I have had many mechanical HDs fail over the years. This is just my first SSD HD failure.

[Hoodat]

OK, last question.  Was the SSD made in China?

[Elderberry]

OK, last question.  Was the SSD made in China?

So when I say it was made in China, are you going to tell me that I should have been pleased to have gotten an extremely long life out of a piece of Chinese made crap, but I should have bought “Made in the USA” electronics?

[Hoodat]

I don't believe there is such a thing as 'Made in USA' electronics.  I'm happy to get anything from Taiwan or Malaysia.

[Drago]

In general it is the total "writes" or "total bytes written" that determine SSD lifespan...some brands have a much higher rating for MTBF on "bytes written".

https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/ssd-lifespan-008.html

https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/hardware/ssd-lifespan-how-long-will-your-ssd-work/

https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/security/ssd-life-span/ 

https://graphicscardhub.com/ssd-life-calculator/

[DB]

I've got 11 years on a 256 GB SSD drive and it's still going.

SSD drives have wear with each write. How well they wear is highly variable between manufacturers using different technologies. They are not all the same.

Stored unpowered at high temperatures for a long period of time is risky as far retaining their stored data.

I'd only recommend buying well established brands that have a good track record.

[roamer_1]

In general it is the total "writes" or "total bytes written" that determine SSD lifespan...some brands have a much higher rating for MTBF on "bytes written".

Right... But a couple of things:

First, while longevity is acceptable, the way it dies is nearly always catastrophic. While mechanical drives may fail in a catastrophic fashion, they don't have to, and tend not to... If I can get the thing to show in BIOS, I will likely be able to recover something - and even without BIOS, though that is becoming very limited. Usually, if a mechanical drive is wearing out, you'll get some lost sectors, or the part will suddenly die... But you can see it coming... With time to save or recover data.

That is generally not true with flash based drives. They just DIE... So all data should be treated as volatile at all times. And in the end, there is only one fix for that, which is, as always, replication. The need for excellent backup has only increased.

And my second thought... varied degrees of durability has always been the case - Even in mechanical drives. And that also is only getting worse. Shoot, I still have Quantum drives laying around that work just fine... And Quantum was bought out by Seagate how long ago? You will find it a hard go to get that kind of durability today... In fact, I have not trusted much of any of my old go-to brands for quite some time, and only rely on WD Black nowadays... And until that proves untrue, which it eventually will, I will abstain from the race to keep on top of whose drives suck - because mostly they all do.

But it is the same thing in Flash based drives - You'll likely be ok for a while with any of them, but there is some benefit to named brands - I pretty much stay in Crucial, Kingston, and believe it or not, PNY.

But even without writes - I am getting older SSD drives to my bench that were only used for offline storage, kept in a dark drawer, and years later attempted access was made unsuccessfully. Certainly well within the write limit, these drives have somehow degraded and have become defunct simply due to age (to the best of my reckoning).

... Which is why I don't really trust them long term. My only solution so far is to keep my whole data pile live and replicated multiple times.

[roamer_1]

As an addendum...

If you are using flash hard drives for offline storage, Consider using after-market empty USB cans or a toaster of some kind, with the drive eventually stored bare rather than using sealed external units and storing them complete... Corrosion can result over time, and the drive will likely have to be extracted from the can eventually (to clean contact points), which in sealed units, means the destruction of the can anyway.

Being a pooter tech, I have many toasters, so most all my drives are used and stored bare, with the exception of my portable for my laptop, and a couple others that are ready-to-go... All of which are after market cans, easily taken apart...

The point being to store the drive bare and unencumbered by any connections to avoid long-term corrosion.

[DB]

Right... But a couple of things:

First, while longevity is acceptable, the way it dies is nearly always catastrophic. While mechanical drives may fail in a catastrophic fashion, they don't have to, and tend not to... If I can get the thing to show in BIOS, I will likely be able to recover something - and even without BIOS, though that is becoming very limited. Usually, if a mechanical drive is wearing out, you'll get some lost sectors, or the part will suddenly die... But you can see it coming... With time to save or recover data.

That is generally not true with flash based drives. They just DIE... So all data should be treated as volatile at all times. And in the end, there is only one fix for that, which is, as always, replication. The need for excellent backup has only increased.

And my second thought... varied degrees of durability has always been the case - Even in mechanical drives. And that also is only getting worse. Shoot, I still have Quantum drives laying around that work just fine... And Quantum was bought out by Seagate how long ago? You will find it a hard go to get that kind of durability today... In fact, I have not trusted much of any of my old go-to brands for quite some time, and only rely on WD Black nowadays... And until that proves untrue, which it eventually will, I will abstain from the race to keep on top of whose drives suck - because mostly they all do.

But it is the same thing in Flash based drives - You'll likely be ok for a while with any of them, but there is some benefit to named brands - I pretty much stay in Crucial, Kingston, and believe it or not, PNY.

But even without writes - I am getting older SSD drives to my bench that were only used for offline storage, kept in a dark drawer, and years later attempted access was made unsuccessfully. Certainly well within the write limit, these drives have somehow degraded and have become defunct simply due to age (to the best of my reckoning).

... Which is why I don't really trust them long term. My only solution so far is to keep my whole data pile live and replicated multiple times.

Longterm unpowered is risky for SSD drives (flash storage in general). The higher the temperature, the quicker they go. They will retain their data longer powered.

Mechanical drives still have the data on the platters even if the electronics die. As you well know, replace the electronics and you have a good shot of recovering your data. When an SSD drive loses data - you lose the data...

The bottom line is backup your data regularly and enjoy the speed benefits of an SSD drive - which is what you are doing. Much of my business critical data is up on Drobox and then spread out among multiple machines in different locations.

[Sighlass]

I still burn data to DVD disks, I understand one day finding a DvD reader will be a challenge.... and Dvds also have to be stored high dry and without extreme heat. Seems things of this Earth are only temporary.

[roamer_1]

Longterm unpowered is risky for SSD drives (flash storage in general). The higher the temperature, the quicker they go. They will retain their data longer powered.

I don't understand the mechanics of it beyond the structures I need to access, but that jibes perfectly with my observation.

Mechanical drives still have the data on the platters even if the electronics die. As you well know, replace the electronics and you have a good shot of recovering your data. When an SSD drive loses data - you lose the data...

Much harder to do on modern drives - Back in the day, I could boot my test box to a PCI card that could talk through to a drive even without it's BIOS, but AT commands are greatly diminished (or cordoned off), and with telemetry stored on a chip on the hdd board, simply swapping boards has become a chore... Add the security layer (and chips) and it is basically a brick -

I HAVE cracked hdd security a couple ways - The USB external for my laptop is a trophy of one such success. But for all intensive porpoises, unless the drive has a map to El Dorado to recover, or an exact GPS plot to a sunken galleon and it's treasures, It just ain't fiscally possible, even if it can be done...

That drive was for sh*ts and giggles, and it was a hard, hard grind for 2 weeks to gain those braggin rights - a brag that absolutely no one cares about except a handful of uber-geeks in the former Czech, and in Israel.

So it is getting nearly impossible to replace the board on a HDD. It can be done. But it ain't pretty.

The bottom line is backup your data regularly and enjoy the speed benefits of an SSD drive - which is what you are doing. Much of my business critical data is up on Drobox and then spread out among multiple machines in different locations.

That's right - I do the very same and really have, one way or another, once my data got  too big for manual backup. My lesson wrt offline storage came early in the Great Root Beer Disaster of '98 - and that was just floppies. As soon as I could network and back stuff up automagically, well, I was an early adopter. 

[roamer_1]

I still burn data to DVD disks, I understand one day finding a DvD reader will be a challenge.... and Dvds also have to be stored high dry and without extreme heat. Seems things of this Earth are only temporary.

I can tell you horror stories about data loss on CDs and DVDs. And optical drives leave much to be desired wrt recovery - You can't fix em.

Best offline storage to me is a mechanical hard drive formatted FAT32. Pretty much stays put, and no monkey business if you have to recover it - I can map fat32 by hand if I need to.

[Elderberry]

I save all my data now on multiple hard drives. I've copied all my DVD data to hard drives. Years ago I also backed up to tape, but I gave that up long ago. Hard drives usually warn you when they are starting to fail. Back before I set up weekly since backups, I had a drive that began not always booting up. I'd recycle and it'd come up. I knew I needed to replace it, but lazy me kept going since I'd been able to get it to boot. Then it wouldn't boot, wouldn't boot, wouldn't boot. And I hadn't backed it up. I pulled it out and put it in my freezer and got it very cold. I had a blank drive ready and when I reinstalled that frozen drive, it booted and I was able to back it up. I learned my lesson and all my data is now backed up.

I just now need to get off my butt and digitize and backup all the family photos I have. Back in the 70's after I got outta the Navy, I looked into getting some copies made of some old family photos. I was told I'd have to pay "Restoration" rates. Instead I set up a darkroom and began copying pictures. But recently my daughter asked me to digitized one of the family albums for her. I have stacks of albums and a barrel full of pics. I just need to get 2 it.

[roamer_1]

I save all my data now on multiple hard drives.

That brings up another notion I am half considering...
I am having more trouble with larger drives... And while one can spend the money for some whopping drives, I am beginning to circle back around to smaller drives arranged in a RAID array, rather than investing in big drives that have been proving somewhat unreliable.

Not only are the smaller proven drives more durable, if you use a redundant RAID, you have the benefit of recovery if one of the drives does fail.

Along with that, I think I am heading toward a RAID capable NAS to park on the router. I have not done much with NAS as I have two standing servers in the house (business and media) which back data between themselves. And tin is cheap for me - I probably have four machines sitting here right now that I could hang full of drives, so a NAS is actually an expensive thing for me to do comparatively.

But with that investment, I think I could eliminate my main standing server (as weird as that would be for me), providing I can get decent transfer rates to and from the NAS.

Just something I am pondering. 

[Elderberry]

That brings up another notion I am half considering...
I am having more trouble with larger drives... And while one can spend the money for some whopping drives, I am beginning to circle back around to smaller drives arranged in a RAID array, rather than investing in big drives that have been proving somewhat unreliable.

Not only are the smaller proven drives more durable, if you use a redundant RAID, you have the benefit of recovery if one of the drives does fail.

Along with that, I think I am heading toward a RAID capable NAS to park on the router. I have not done much with NAS as I have two standing servers in the house (business and media) which back data between themselves. And tin is cheap for me - I probably have four machines sitting here right now that I could hang full of drives, so a NAS is actually an expensive thing for me to do comparatively.

But with that investment, I think I could eliminate my main standing server (as weird as that would be for me), providing I can get decent transfer rates to and from the NAS.

Just something I am pondering. 

I can't see you purchasing a NAS. I do see you rolling your own NAS.

Building the perfect, cheap DIY NAS

https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2020/04/01/building-the-perfect-cheap-diy-nas/

This post was extensively discussed on Hacker News.
Alex Buznik, nas.net.ua kindly provided a two-part Russian translation: part1 and part2.

This post discusses hardware considerations, installing Linux, setting up software RAID, robustness and dealing with data corruption.

I’ve been running for a decade a self-built NAS at home, so I thought I’d write down my experience so that others might gloat over my many failures and gasp in awe at my few triumphs.

The NAS is perfect because it is simple, safe, modular and extensible and it is cheap because it is built of second hand, commodity parts.

The NAS mostly stores files (documents and media) on a software RAID 6 and serves them over Windows shares to the local network. I’m staying away from proprietary NAS solutions because a hardware failure would make data recovery hard to impossible without the exact same hardware replacement. Every piece of hardware, from the hard disks to the case and motherboard have been switched out for something else in this decade, sometimes more than once, so the focus on modularity paid for itself. Since long-term data integrity and robustness is a concern, the NAS should run some sort of redundant RAID level.

[roamer_1]

I can't see you purchasing a NAS. I do see you rolling your own NAS.

FUN! 
But outside of the small form factor Proliant micro-server he relies upon (which I will look out for), It doesn't get me much that I couldn't do in any box - That's exactly why I have stayed away from NAS all this time.

I started something similar with a raspberry pi using OpenMediaVault - Only a single drive to prove the idea. It was successful, but I never did figure out how to give it a fixed IP, and abandoned it about there... It was my intention to get a pi with sata ports and etc... But it was mostly for fun, and it has just been easier to throw a box together.

I never did figure out whether I could get a pi with multiple sata ports that were RAID capable - though multiple sata ports certainly are available... Might be fun to play with that again.

But my main emphasis was on making big space with multiple small drives and a RAID array, rather than rely on the whompin big drive that I have found to be unreliable.
One of the problems with being a recovery shop is that I have to have someplace to put the pull - and my average pull these days is going over 2T... A big pull might be 4T... Figure I might already have another pull onboard, and I kinda need something in the 6T or better range. 8T would be nice.

I am fixin to buy a brick of drives to change out my stuff - But I have already lost 3 drives over 4T (though they were not WD Black) so I am a little froggy about it. Which is why I am thinking of staying in 4s and RAIDing. 

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

I don't trust them yet. Maybe never will. All my machines are running SSD system drives, but as far as data retention goes... My volatile data (current stuff) is on those drives, but those drives back up to the cloud via Microsoft, as well as being sync'd each to the other...

But my fat data pile is still on mechanical drives, backed to two servers here, and several servers on our family WAN. Anything that is offline is also mechanical drives in USB3 cans.

I have spent a ton of time trying to recover from flash technology, with far less success than with mechanical drives - Especially across time - which may not be a fair assessment - Most of the stuff I have been on is rather old, of course... So newer tech may prove more resilient.

But as a rule, when flash dies it dies hard. There is little warning, and less chance of recovery. All data on flash drives should be treated as volatile, and backed up multiple times.

 

I personally haven't seen much difference between SSD and platter drives in terms of reliability. As a rule, backup everything. To your preferred medium, cloud or otherwise. Cloud is convenient IMO.

[Hoodat]

Best offline storage to me is a mechanical hard drive formatted FAT32.

I have zip files that exceed 10 GB in size.  How can one get past the file size limit with FAT32?

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

I have zip files that exceed 10 GB in size.  How can one get past the file size limit with FAT32?

Yeah not sure why anyone would go with FAT32 (except on some thumb drives) in this day and age but 7zip has a really good file-splitter capability.

[roamer_1]

I personally haven't seen much difference between SSD and platter drives in terms of reliability. As a rule, backup everything. To your preferred medium, cloud or otherwise. Cloud is convenient IMO.

Cloud is convenient for  my current volatile stuff. But I don't do that with my whole pile - That would get spendy. That's why the family WAN. That stuff doesn't change much or often, so after the first upload, it doesn't take much to maintain it. Just once a quarter when I jigger with things, and end-of-year when this year's volatile stuff gets boxed up and dumped into the fat pile.

But I am pretty happy with Microsoft - They have a thing with samsung, and for the first time ever in my life, all my crap (including PIM/email) just automagically shows up on all my handhelds and on four machines.

[roamer_1]

I have zip files that exceed 10 GB in size.  How can one get past the file size limit with FAT32?

Stay NTFS (or whatever) I just like fat32 because it is easier to deal with wrt recovery. I can map a FAT32 partition in my sleep. Journaling systems are tougher to mess with by hand (not to say there ain't recovery software that can do it).

[roamer_1]

Yeah not sure why anyone would go with FAT32 (except on some thumb drives) in this day and age but 7zip has a really good file-splitter capability.

To clarify: I was speaking of long-term offline storage, and the most durable means in that case. I use journaling file systems regularly.