[PLUG] CMR/PMR hard drive manufacturers and vendors

Ben Koenig techkoenig at gmail.com
Mon Nov 2 17:12:22 UTC 2020


On 11/1/20 9:53 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> I'm so glad I've decided to migrate to SSDs. Not yet completed, but
> I'm working on it.
>
> SSDs generally last longer than spinny drives, although their life
> depends on how they are used. If they are constantly being written to
> they last only a couple times longer than a physical drive, But for an
> ordinary computer user their lifespan can be three or four times longer.
> When you consider the lifespan their higher purchase price is very
> comparable to old technology drives. And then there is the vastly
> higher throughput.


SSDs do not last longer than HDD. For archival and long term storage 
magnetic platters are still the best option for both capacity and 
longevity.


People like to compare apples and oranges. Remember that failure for a 
mechanical drive is effectively random. There are so many interconnected 
pieces that it is nearly impossible to predict which one will fail. For 
Solid State technology, it's about consistent wear to the media so you 
can do math and predict the time of failure for a given use case. This 
is a physical difference in what the devices actually do so you can't 
just say one is better than the other.


Most end users will experience catastrophic data loss when using SSDs in 
a redundant RAID system. This is because most end users just assume that 
SSD technology is simply better and make no attempt to monitor the 
health of the drive. In server environment a typical "flash array" 
includes software that monitors the wear to the drive, and proactive 
ejects the SSD before it actually fails.


If you assume that your SSD storage is generally better across the board 
then you will lose data. Given the massive amount of misinformation 
being distributed on the SSD vs HDD topic I would not be surprised if 
there is a rash of data loss 10 years from now when people start to hit 
those multi-TB write limits.


-Ben




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