[GTALUG] War Story: Asus UX305ca SSD failures

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Howard Gibson via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

|    When I bought a hard drive at Best Buy, I asked about SSDs.

Seeking advice from Best Buy isn't a great idea.

	Q: What's the difference between a used car salesperson and a
	computer salesperson?

	A: The used car salesperson knows that he's lying.

|  I 
| understand that there is a maximum number of writes you can do to them, 
| and the number is rather small.  I was buying a backup drive that runs 
| at night while I am in bed, so I went for cheap and reliable.

Don't buy a backup drive, buy several.  At least alternate them.
Otherwise all your backups may disappear in the same nasty event.

If you wear out a backup device (SSD or HDD), you are doing it wrong.

(SSDs actually have decent "endurance" specs for normal uses.  Do the
arithmetic, if you care.)

I imagine that an HDD (or several) would be better for backups than an
SSD:

- HDDs are quite a bit cheaper per byte than SSDs

- HDDs are fast enough for backups.

- backups usually need decent sequential write performance, something
  that HDDs are fine with.  Relative to HDDs, SSDs excel at random
  access, something that rarely matters with backups.

- many recent-generation inexpensive SSDs slow to a crawl once their
  write buffer is full.  This would likely happen with a backup.

- there's a finite lifetime for information written to an HDD; my
  guess: 5 years is safe.  You don't want to find this out
  experimentally.  SSD information might well be significantly
  shorter-lived: I've heard claims of this but don't know the reality.
  I don't wish to find out :-)

All archives need to be recopied regularly.  Media change (I have some
information stranded in 9-track tapes).  It seems as if the newer the
medium, the shorter the lifespan.

- petroglyphs: long long time

- clay tablets: millennia

- paper (pre-wood-pulp): five hundred years

- paper made from wood pulp: 75 years

- punch cards and paper tape: 100 years

- 9-track mag tape: 10 years

- digital cassette tape 4 years (formats changed too quickly)

- floppy disks: 5 years?  Depends on the format (consider 3.0"
  floppies)

- USB flash drives: I've had them die after a year, but that's not
  expected.

- hard drives: death by standards evolution.  Try finding an ST506
  controller.  Or MFM, ESDI, SCSI, FireWire.  Support for even PATA
  is fading.

- Laser Disc, Magneto-optical disks, CD-ROM, DVD (multiple standards),
  BluRay: each has standards that get obsolete.  The actual data may
  deteriorate too.  I do have some DVD that claim to have a lifetime
  of over 100 years.