1y ago

HDD or SSD?

Hello, everybody. I've been looking for a new storage solution. I know, that HDDs are reliable and SSDs are for fast access, but I've been an HDD user ever since. I have an SSD, but I only have the OS on it. Likewise, I want to do some basic File operations, as writing documents or copy files. It would also be great if I could use it as a Backup kind of sorts device. It would be great if I could move my data from my old WD-Elements external HDD, quickly, to an intern HDD without any fuss. I just need a Storage medium that's cheap and good. Do you have any recommendations? Thanks in advance!

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29 comments

SSDs are way more reliable than spinning disks, especially in a laptop that gets banged around. HDDs win in only one category: capacity per price.
- SSDs are way more reliable than spinning disks
  That's true, with one caveat: if an SSD fails, it's usually catastrophically and without warning. HDDs usually give some warning signs before they fail completely (bad sectors, read/write errors, strange noises).
  
  The SSD memory cell failure mode is to retain the last written contents, so I actually don't think I agree. In the SMART diagnostics, it shows how many of these bad cells are present, which is a reasonable indicator of impending failure from age
  
  One major failure mode of SSDs is that they can corrupt their FTL map. That kills all of the data instantly.
  (Now, a major reliability advantage of SSDs is that by being faster, you can also make a backup of them faster. And if backups goes faster, you're more likely to actually do them. Right? Right!?)
  
  The biggest factor in making good, automatic backups for my home server wasn't speed (it's an older machine with a SAS array of spinning discs) but the availability of affordable cloud based backup storage (I use Backblaze and sync my files to a storage bucket once a day). Then it becomes automatic, and no one has to remember to do it, and it's offsite.
  Even when external USB discs got cheap you had to remember to do it regularly and many people would forget.
- Hdd are good for storage. An SSD sometimes fails by the block mapping area that handles location of where it placed bits of data. When that fails nobody is getting any data off that storage. with an HDD even if your fs table dies you can still pull all the files off using the strings tool. Having said that some sort of self healing system like ZFS should be used to prevent bit rot.
- As someone who is slowly migrating his Nas to u.2 SSD, so much this.
  Reliability, speed, density. Everything is better with solid state.
  
  As a European: low power consumption!

29 comments