How do SSDs and HDDs compare to optical disks in terms of stability in storage? SSD bits can lose charge over time until a lot of 1s read as 0s, right?
Commercially pressed discs don’t last forever, but longer than burnable discs. IIRC, they used to say 50 years for CDs, but in practice, it was a lot less. More like 20 or 30 if you store and handle them nicely. Easily less than 10 if you don’t.
Hard drives go bad over time; I don’t like trusting spinning platters much over 7 years. They can be OK, but they can suddenly stop working whenever.
SSDs are about the same as spinning platters.
I think we are talking about archival storage rather than storage in use. In which case hard drives can last decades.
I wouldn’t trust it that way, no. They might last decades. They also might not. It’s a gamble on any single drive, or even a few mirrored drives.
File system also matters. Modern ZFS has error checking that can handle some level of bit rot. Older formats generally don’t.
If it’s over 7 years or so, I want to get the data off of there.
Hard drives break down from use, not from sitting around. We aren’t talking about SSDs which while they don’t break down will experience data corruption over time. It’s not really a gamble at all with mirrored drives.
You’re also telling me things I already know. I already use ZFS. I agree that you should be using something with data integrity protection. Though ZFS isn’t always what you want for archival purposes.
tinkling4938@lemmynsfw.com 4 months ago
SSDs are pretty pricey for video. I use HDDs, mirrored. For some uses I put a SSD caching layer on top to speed up frequent R/W. Using only LVM, no fancy RAID hardware or anything.
0x0@programming.dev 4 months ago
ZFS FTW
frezik@midwest.social 4 months ago
I upgraded my datahoarding server to a pair of 18TB hard drives on ZFS with mirroring. It’ll be several years before I need to upgrade again, but I expect that when I do, SSDs will be cheap enough to go that route.