[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[mbr at arlsoft.com (MBR)]

On 5/5/14 11:47 AM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> Kent Borg wrote:
>>   - Flash can die with no warning and no recourse.
> Any medium can fail with no warning. Good backups have always been the
> go-to recourse for these occurrences.
While it's true that any medium can fail with no warning, if your data's 
on a spinning magnetic platter, the most likely modes of failure do not 
destroy all the data on the platter.  If the bearings or motor fail and 
prevent the platter from spinning up.  There are data recovery shops who 
will open your drive in a clean room, install your disk's platter in a 
different disk housing, and make you a copy if all your data.  Or, worst 
case, the read head comes in contact with the platter and scrapes off 
some of the magnetic emulsion.  In that case, although data on the 
track(s) close to the head crash is irretrievably lost, most of the 
tracks are still readable, and a data recovery shop will be able to 
retrieve some of your data.  It's not cheap, but it's doable.

To the best of my knowledge there are no workarounds when a flash drive 
fails.  If you know of any, I'd be very interested to hear about them.

    Mark R.