Question How are hard drive manufacturers going to deal with data rot on SSDs?

[Root602]

A typical SSD can retain data for 5 years unpowered, and experience data rot in as little as 6 months due to electron leakage. Yet a hard drive can retain data indefinitely as long it works. There are hard drives from the 80s that still work. Hard drives don't have limited reads and writes. Are SSDs going to replace HDDs regardless, and what are hard drive manufacturers going to do about data rot on SSDs? How long until consumers can buy whatever new technology they will come up with at a reasonable price? And until then will HDDs simply not be sold anymore and grow into disuse? What about the people that need to store data long term?

 

[DSzymborski]

If there's a need for something, the market will exist.

 

[USAFRet]

The "limited reads and writes" for SSDs, in the consumer space, is so large as to be irrelevant.

Have you, or anyone you know, ever exhausted the write cycles on an SSD, in normal consumer use?
I've asked that question many times in here, and so far, not a one.

Long term storage?
Why is this data not being accessed and checked once in a while? Even just once a year prevent your "5 year data loss".

 

[Root602]

Long term storage?
Why is this data not being accessed and checked once in a while? Even just once a year prevent your "5 year data loss".

Personally I wouldn't have the time to create checksums for every file I store on an SSD. Once data rot occurs, it's irreversible. In my opinion I don't want to play that game. If I don't power on my SSD in 6 months, say I forget it in a drawer, and my data goes bad, that's unacceptable to me. With a hard drive I don't have that problem. I can be sure that as long as I have it my files are unlikely to experience data rot at the same rate as an SSD. I want to be sure that my data is safe and that once I've saved it, it's saved. If an SSD loses it's data it literally evaporates and is unrecoverable. With a hard drive even if the disk is damaged recovery is still possible.

If there's a need for something, the market will exist.

A typical hard drive is unusable for Windows 10 and later versions due to low random read and write speed. You need to have a hard drive mounted separate to your SSD, and any disk activity these days will cause it to be used at 100% load. Video editing for example will be very slow. Gaming on a hard drive is becoming a thing of the past because assets don't load fast enough from the hard drive. The use cases are decreasing. The SATA standard which hard drives use is also becoming obsolete because there are no plans for a SATA 4. Hard drive sales are decreasing worldwide.

 

[USAFRet]

Personally I wouldn't have the time to create checksums for every file I store on an SSD. Once data rot occurs, it's irreversible. In my opinion I don't want to play that game. If I don't power on my SSD in 6 months, say I forget it in a drawer, and my data goes bad, that's unacceptable to me. With a hard drive I don't have that problem. I can be sure that as long as I have it my files are unlikely to experience data rot at the same rate as an SSD. I want to be sure that my data is safe and that once I've saved it, it's saved. If an SSD loses it's data it literally evaporates and is unrecoverable. With a hard drive even if the disk is damaged recovery is still possible.

And that is why the standard backup concept is 3-2-1.
3 copies, on at least 2 different media, at least 1 offsite or otherwise unavailable.

Any data that lives on a single device may be said to not exist at all. HDD, SSD, flash, tape, whatever.
Why was that drive in the drawer for 6 months the only copy? Thats all on you.

Smart people don't rely on a theoretical "data recovery" to insure their data.

Of my last several "dead drives", I've had to rely on someone else doing the data recovery exactly never.

 

[hedwar2011]

Are SSDs going to replace HDDs regardless

For boot drives and the like, I'm sure there will come a time when its the norm. Just like when HDDs grew larger.

what are hard drive manufacturers going to do about data rot on SSDs?

Encourage end-users to not let their drives sit un-used to prevent it.

How long until consumers can buy whatever new technology they will come up with at a reasonable price?

However long it takes for them to release said new technology, it to take hold or not, and become economical to produce.

What about the people that need to store data long term?

They will either continue to use HDDs or other long-term backup options.

 

[fzabkar]

Personally I wouldn't have the time to create checksums for every file I store on an SSD.

This Powershell command line computes an SHA256 hash for every MP4 file in the specified directory and its subdirectories, and then writes the results to a text file.

Get-ChildItem X:\your_path\*.mp4 -Recurse | Get-FileHash > X:\MP4_SHA256.txt​

​

X: is the drive letter of your SSD.

 

[dwd999]

What about the people that need to store data long term?

The current standard used for long term storage by archives and museums etc. is m-discs. They're rated for 1000 years; come back any time before then and prove them wrong.

 

[kanewolf]

The current standard used for long term storage by archives and museums etc. is m-discs. They're rated for 1000 years; come back any time before then and prove them wrong.

Depends on the amount of data. Tape is still a very common storage media for archival purposes. Data rot is mitigated through multiple copies on multiple tapes in multiple geographic locations. Data integrity requires a lot of work.

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

And until then will HDDs simply not be sold anymore and grow into disuse? What about the people that need to store data long term?

were you around when 5.25" floppies were the norm for data storage at home, or when 3.5" then became the norm?

i still remember going back and copying all of my old floppies to my first hard drive that was strictly for personal storage.
probably never even accessed 90% of that data ever again.

things change and the market and the consumers adjust to those changes.

 

[Grobe]

Personally I wouldn't have the time to create checksums for every file I store on an SSD.

There exists file systems that is taking care on this on block level so you don't have to spend time on this:

Checksumming — BTRFS documentation

 

[Bob.B]

were you around when 5.25" floppies were the norm for data storage at home, or when 3.5" then became the norm?

i still remember going back and copying all of my old floppies to my first hard drive that was strictly for personal storage.
probably never even accessed 90% of that data ever again.

things change and the market and the consumers adjust to those changes.

Take it back another step.....8" single side floppy.....high tech stuff.

 

[mdd1963]

In my USAF days with/on earlier RC-135V/W aircraft, we had HP7900 disk drives with both one fixed lower platter and one 12-15" removable platter, with a whopping 2.5 MB capacity each, and, it only weighed about 150 lbs, with a separate 40 lb DC power supply the size of an ATX midtower. (We actually used these all the way until 1991 or so on some older aircraft until those models went in for upgrade!)

Fun times!

 

[JeffreyP55]

A typical SSD can retain data for 5 years unpowered, and experience data rot in as little as 6 months due to electron leakage. Yet a hard drive can retain data indefinitely as long it works. There are hard drives from the 80s that still work. Hard drives don't have limited reads and writes. Are SSDs going to replace HDDs regardless, and what are hard drive manufacturers going to do about data rot on SSDs? How long until consumers can buy whatever new technology they will come up with at a reasonable price? And until then will HDDs simply not be sold anymore and grow into disuse? What about the people that need to store data long term?

I have a few ancient HD that still run just fine. PATA and newer SATA, Oldest is an old IBM MFM 10 MEG (Hahaha!) full height hard drive. No longer have the means to test grandpa. MFM, RLL? What is this foreign language you speak?

 

[USAFRet]

I have a few ancient HD that still run just fine. Oldest is an old IBM MFM 10 MEG (Hahaha!) full height hard drive. No longer have the means to test grandpa. MFM, RLL? What is this foreign language you speak?

Unfortunately, that is survivor bias.

You have some drives that still work.

If we were able to take a sample of 100 or 1,000 drives from that same era and technology....how many of them would power up? And how many of those still had their original data readable?
Yes, I had drives in that era. Actually, some of the data that used to live on those is still extant on my NAS.

 

[doug_c]

were you around when 5.25" floppies were the norm for data storage at home, or when 3.5" then became the norm?

i still remember going back and copying all of my old floppies to my first hard drive that was strictly for personal storage.
probably never even accessed 90% of that data ever again.

things change and the market and the consumers adjust to those changes.

And all that storage on the early disks measured in kilobytes not megabytes and certainly not gigabytes. My first computer had 64k RAM and I thought that was amazing after using Vic-20s at high school.

That's another factor to consider, the amount of data being stored and utilized on a constant basis is always growing. And new technology like SSDs allow us to read and write this data much faster.

Sure it comes with limitations like storage cells that build up charge and become unusable over time or data rot over years if unused. But the upsides of fast SSDs are pretty large.

 

[JeffreyP55]

Unfortunately, that is survivor bias.

You have some drives that still work.

If we were able to take a sample of 100 or 1,000 drives from that same era and technology....how many of them would power up? And how many of those still had their original data readable?
Yes, I had drives in that era. Actually, some of the data that used to live on those is still extant on my NAS.

I have a PATA drive in my TASCAM 24 track Porta Studio. Still works like a champ. I would like to test the 10 megger IBM. Don't quite remember but I believe Seagate made those drives. That was just a few years ago.

 

[DSzymborski]

Personally I wouldn't have the time to create checksums for every file I store on an SSD. Once data rot occurs, it's irreversible. In my opinion I don't want to play that game. If I don't power on my SSD in 6 months, say I forget it in a drawer, and my data goes bad, that's unacceptable to me. With a hard drive I don't have that problem. I can be sure that as long as I have it my files are unlikely to experience data rot at the same rate as an SSD. I want to be sure that my data is safe and that once I've saved it, it's saved. If an SSD loses it's data it literally evaporates and is unrecoverable. With a hard drive even if the disk is damaged recovery is still possible.

A typical hard drive is unusable for Windows 10 and later versions due to low random read and write speed. You need to have a hard drive mounted separate to your SSD, and any disk activity these days will cause it to be used at 100% load. Video editing for example will be very slow. Gaming on a hard drive is becoming a thing of the past because assets don't load fast enough from the hard drive. The use cases are decreasing. The SATA standard which hard drives use is also becoming obsolete because there are no plans for a SATA 4. Hard drive sales are decreasing worldwide.

And? The question isn't whether HDDs aren't going to get less popular, but whether HDDs are going to exist.

You can still buy new floppy disk drives, Super 8 players, cassette players, and so on. HDDs aren't suddenly going to fade out of existence anytime soon; they're still developing HDD technologies quite aggressively.

Maybe it'll really be hard to find a new HDD in the year 2100. I'm guessing that won't be a significant issue for nearly all of us.

In any case, if your backup plan is to back up data and then throw your drive in a drawer, that's more of a problem with your backup plan, not available technologies.

 

[Root602]

For boot drives and the like, I'm sure there will come a time when its the norm. Just like when HDDs grew larger.

Encourage end-users to not let their drives sit un-used to prevent it.

However long it takes for them to release said new technology, it to take hold or not, and become economical to produce.

They will either continue to use HDDs or other long-term backup options.

The thing is these companies have billions of dollars for research. Flash memory SSDs have been around since 1989. It's 2023 and SSDs still have the same problems they had since then. Is this seriously the best they could come up with? Imagine if you had a very boring book sitting on your shelf. The company that made the book told you, you have to open the book and read a page every year, or else the entire contents of that book will disappear. Would you be happy with that? I see the flaws of SSDs as an example of planned obsolescence. SSDs are the new hip and cool thing out right now. How soon will a new storage technology come out that's better than SSDs and hard drives? The Seagate Mach.2 Exos that has the read and write speed of a SATA SSD - it's clear that they are capable of improving hard drives to be the same as SSDs, but consumers believe the incessant marketing of SSDs on every news site and Google search result - "so fast", "blazing speed", "no moving parts", "faster and more reliable than HDDs", " ten times faster than the fastest HDD". and everyone buys them, see that they're fast, and ignore the technical side, and their obvious flaws at storing data in any condition. These flaws were taken much more seriously in the past by IT professionals, and that's why it wasn't recommended to store data on SSDs long term. But the marketing has been stepped up dramatically since the release of Windows 10, and it's been made nearly impossible to use a hard drive for anything demanding, because the old technology wasn't developed, while hard drive companies have been purely focused on developing SSDs and constantly marketing the "benefits" of SSDs, which could be mainly summarized as speed. SSDs have been improving at storing data long term, but it's still a problem enough that it's still not recommended to use them for archival/long term/cold storage. If long term storage in SSDs isn't important, why have hard drive companies been trying to improve it? We can pretend that it's not a problem and that a backup solution would solve that issue, but that's ignoring the elephant in the room, a problem with that storage technology. Why use something that's inferior at storing data long term?

 

[DSzymborski]

At this point, this is becoming more of a personal blog entry rather than a give-and-take discussion.