[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 05/05/2014 11:47 AM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> Any medium can fail with no warning.

Indeed, though disks frequently (usually?) degrade with warning. SMART 
monitoring can note ECC-errors, for example. And other key components 
tend to have "lifetime" reliability, i.e., CPUs and RAM and motherboards 
are usually replaced while still functioning. Fans sometimes die early, 
but usually make a hellish noise first as a warning.

Flash is a bit unique in that it has an advertised finite life in 
write-cycles (scarily small number per-cell with modern flash) and 
though firmware cleverness extends this, they have still been observed 
to die with no warning. Very unnerving. Very trendy, too: are Mac 
notebooks even available without SSDs these days? Does Apple have some 
magic exemption to these flash problems? Very unnerving.

> Good backups have always been the go-to recourse for these occurrences. 

The term "backup" tends to refer to having historical copies of data, 
usually with a notable delay in how long it takes to restore the data.

I would suggest that with flash, hardware redundancy (external to 
whatever proprietary hocus-pocus is already in a flash product) is wise. 
Something present and immediately bootable.

In my case (1) limiting the use to a regime that is not so stressful to 
flash and (2) having a ready backup boot device, should address that. 
Unfortunately, if it does fail on me, a human presence is probably 
needed to reboot things. Just my personal basement server, so I think I 
can live with that.

-kb