On Tue, 24 Dec 2013 19:39:44 -0600, philo* wrote:

On 12/24/2013 07:23 PM, wrote:




I never trust my data to less than three separate HD's.

SSD's are good in that they have no moving parts to wear out but they do
have a limited number of read/ writes.

Right now, the only one I have is on a laptop I rarely use.


The thing is, when an SSD does fail, it can do so with no warning.

With a conventional drive there is usually some type of warning first
such as a SMART error, developing bad sectors or R/W errors.
I've had as many "hard " failures on hard drives as "soft" failures.
Work perfectly one minute - and totally useless the next.




Only once have I gotten on my bench a standard HD that went into
instant failure mode.

I lucked out and found an SMT cap. with a cracked solder joint and
repaired it.

The next day I gave the owner of the machine a very severe lecture on
making backups!
Of the last 5 HD failures I've had come in, 2 were "hard", one had
been slow for months, and the other one had occaisionally had access
problems, which, in hindsight, were a warning. Because it would
generally boot on the second reboot other problems were suspected -
not the drive. When it quit completely, the drive could not be
accessed even as a second drive. Not sure if a new drive would have
fixed it completely as we junked the computer.