Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?

I still maintain that chrisv is a reverse troll whose purpose is to make Linux users/advocates look bad. Why? Because he is so good at it.

I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment and am happy to know that chrisv is the most effective Wintroll in this newsgroup.

And that's the problem with Linux distributions. Couple it with programs that have idiotic names and you end up spending a lot of time researching things.

I wonder how people were supposed to know that Asunder was the name of a CD-ripping program. Meanwhile, it's the very best GNU/Linux has to offer. The developers seem to be big fans of keeping things cryptic.

Speaking for myself it's because of "Don't feed the troll.". He's not even a particularly entertaining troll.

(Although I'd hesitate to describe myself as a 'Linux advocate'. I use it on my primary system, but if Windows or OS X or ... makes you happy I'm not going to try to change your mind.)

Kristof

What a LYING fsckwit!!

Why don't you try it first before resorting to lying like a fsckwit and mouthing off from an armchair?

He's correct, actually. You're the one who's lying in calling him a liar.

Typical COLA: real topic dead so the topic becomes screaming accusations.

I think it's the GNUslims' new strategy: boring us to tears with repetition so that we go away and allow them to live in their fictional existence where GNU/Linux matters.

Correct... except for the idea this is a "new strategy." They have done this for years.

I guess they're doing to us what they do to the whole female gender.

Microshaft & Appile funded trolls are tooo stuupid to know anything about technology these days ;)

Please, lets all give up using microshaft and appile products because those crocporations are too stupid and lets all stick to Linux from now on :)

High price is onne thing, but don't SSDs also have a significantly shorter lifespan (I mean the number of re-write cycles before degradation starts) compared to HDDs? Or am I stuck in the past and this problem has already been resolved?

Many (most?) Solid State Drives DO NOT RETAIN DATA FOREVER! NOT for offline backups!

If you write /vast/ amounts of data (we are talking PB for a modern SSD

- re-writing the entire disk a few thousand times) then store it at high temperature, then you might get problems with retention after as little as a year.

But if you write more sane amounts of data, and store the archived SSD at sensible temperatures (like room temperature), it will retain all its data for a good many years.

For comparison, a worn mechanical disk always has the risk of simply failing mechanically if it has been left unused and unpowered for years.

In either case, multiple copies of your archive data are advisable. But SSD's are not worse than HD's for the purpose - they are just different.

That only applies to old, small or very low-end SSD's. If you have a mid-range consumer SSD with 200GB+ of size, there is no realistic workload that could ever come close to wearing it out.

Well I have a box controlling the heating in our Church. Its SSD is actually a USB stick (about 10 years old now), but the stuff on it changes rarely (e.g. when I upgrade the software) and I carefully chose a web server (Appweb) that deliberately keeps its state information in RAM. So I hope the box will continue to run for many years (though things might break for other reasons in Jan. 2038).

BUT there are a few kilobytes of data that are changing all the time (e.g. a record of temperature changes over the last month, and the schedule of upcoming heating requirements). I did not want to trust Flash memory for that, so I installed a 128 kB EEPROM (which claimed it could be overwritten a million times before wearing out).

Was this a good move? Recently, I observed a lot of random read failures (which usually corrected themselves when you re-read the same address). Now it may be due to the hot weather (the room housing the box has regularly been at 30 degrees Celcius over this last month - maybe it will be OK when the weather gets cooler).

Should I be worried? Data is written to it a byte at a time, whenever the temperature in one of the 4 zones changes by 0.1 degree. It is not clear whether, behind the scenes, it overwrites a full 12b-byte block when you try to overwrite a single byte.

What alternative options do I have?