Question What drive type do you recommend for personal data (reliability over speed)?

[Vanz_000]

All my personal data, pics, documents (not including movies) is under 1TB. I want a drive that is going to last the longest amount of time without any failures, what type do you recommend, M.2 vs SSD vs HDD? not as interested in speed, purely reliability and life.

I do back everything up to a larger storage drive, but I am concerned that something in my personal data will become corrupt and I won't notice it and then backup my corrupt data over my storage drive version, has happened to me in the past, especially stuff stored in .zip files...

Thanks,

Vanz

 

[USAFRet]

ALL drives, across ALL types, are subject to fail at any moment.

There is no singular "best".

A good backup routine, refreshed at least weekly (mine are nightly), will ward off most/all drive fails.

 

[Vanz_000]

ALL drives, across ALL types, are subject to fail at any moment.

There is no singular "best".

A good backup routine, refreshed at least weekly (mine are nightly), will ward off most/all drive fails.

hmmm, no one has done life/reliability testing to compare them all. Sure they can fail at any moment but you can at least play the odds/percentages, no?

So if you backup nighly, let's say a sector goes down on your personal HD, and corrupts a file, then at night you copy the corrupt file over the backed up good file, how do you guard against this?

 

[USAFRet]

hmmm, no one has done life/reliability testing to compare them all. Sure they can fail at any moment but you can at least play the odds/percentages, no?

So if you backup nighly, let's say a sector goes down on your personal HD, and corrupts a file, then at night you copy the corrupt file over the backed up good file, how do you guard against this?

Of my last 3 fails of spinning hard drives...
1 Toshiba
1 Seagate
1 WesternDigital.

Nightly backups:
A Full Image, followed by a rolling series of nightly Incrementals.

I can go back to the Image of any day in the last 30 days, for any individual drive.

This backup series is all automated, goes directly to a folder tree in my NAS.
All house systems, each physical drive individually.

 

[Rokinamerica]

I backup my NVMe to an internal SSD, to an internal HDD, to an external SSD and to my cloud. I keep the external in another place and back it up weekly.

 

[Vanz_000]

just found this:

MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is a measure of how reliable a hardware product or component is over its expected lifetime. For most components, the measure is typically in thousands or even tens of thousands of hours between failures. For example, an HDD may have a mean time between failures of 300,000 hours, while an SSD might have 1.5 million hours...

Be careful when reviewing the specifications though, as they don’t mean your particular SSD will last so many hours. What it means is, given a sample set of that model of SSD, errors will occur at a certain rate. A 1.2 million hour MTBF means that if the drive is used at an average of 8 hours a day, a sample size of 1,000 SSDs would be expected to have one failure every 150 days, or about twice a year.

source = https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-reliable-are-ssds/

and this:

A simple summary is that flash drives experience significantly lower replacement rates than hard drives. However, flash drives experience significantly higher rates of uncorrectable errors than hard drives. This can mean the potential loss of data, so steps should be taken to ensure no loss of data.

source = https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/hardware/mean-time-between-failure-ssd-vs-hdd/

still digesting this info, not sure I see a clear winner for overall life reliability yet...

 

[Vanz_000]

Of my last 3 fails of spinning hard drives...
1 Toshiba
1 Seagate
1 WesternDigital.

Nightly backups:
A Full Image, followed by a rolling series of nightly Incrementals.

I can go back to the Image of any day in the last 30 days, for any individual drive.

This backup series is all automated, goes directly to a folder tree in my NAS.
All house systems, each physical drive individually.

what program(s) are you using for your backups? I'm using Goodsync right now...

do you scan your important data for corruptions or failed sectors regularly?

maybe I'm overly paranoid...

 

[USAFRet]

what program(s) are you using for your backups? I'm using Goodsync right now...

do you scan your important data for corruptions or failed sectors regularly?

maybe I'm overly paranoid...

I use Macrium Reflect.
Somewhat modified since I wrote this, but...

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

(ignore any mention of RAID in that)

Defense in depth nullifies a LOT of problems.

 

[Ralston18]

@Vanz_000

Regarding MTBF, etc.. and "still digesting this info, not sure I see a clear winner for overall life reliability yet..."

The lack of a "clear winner" or any "winner" at all is rendered moot with a good backup plan.

Just a thought.

 

[Vanz_000]

@Vanz_000

Regarding MTBF, etc.. and "still digesting this info, not sure I see a clear winner for overall life reliability yet..."

The lack of a "clear winner" or any "winner" at all is rendered moot with a good backup plan.

Just a thought.

yeah, I agree... just trying to make as solid as possible, even following USAFRet plan, if he's doing a full backup every 2 weeks how do you find corrupt files between these backups?

USAFRet:
A Full image, and then an Incremental every night for 14 days.
After 2 weeks of incremental backups (each their own file), those get rolled into a Full image.
Then start a new round of 2 weeks of Incrementals.

I really hate when I pull up a file from 10 years ago and it fails to open and Windows says its corrupt... I try to take old HHD's and replace about every 5 years and keep old ones in closet storage...

I do like USAFRet's backup plan, just trying to see if there are ways to improve it...

 

[USAFRet]

yeah, I agree... just trying to make as solid as possible, even following USAFRet plan, if he's doing a full backup every 2 weeks how do you find corrupt files between these backups?

No, NOT doing a "full backup every 2 weeks"

Rather...nightly incrementals, then once a week that corpus to another volume in the NAS, then once a quarter or so, copied to a couple of drives that live in a desk drawer at work.

 

[zlot2v2]

you need a backup plane more than depend on a single drive,
i back up my data on 3 drive, some important PIC, MOV, i will do more copies on different drive

 

[Lafong]

So if you backup nighly, let's say a sector goes down on your personal HD, and corrupts a file, then at night you copy the corrupt file over the backed up good file, how do you guard against this?

I'd like to see the community answers to this specific question myself.

I have 140,000 data files. Most have not been opened in years.

For all I know, hundreds or thousands may not open at all. I do very rarely come across one...usually a jpeg that will no longer display although it was known to be OK earlier.

I do keep backups religiously, but could easily be backing up corrupted files and not know it.

I'd guess there are ways to scan files to root out the corrupt ones, but I've never seen it detailed on this or other forums and wondering how complex or worthwhile any solution might be.

 

[Alan Alan]

I use win Rar whenever I put something on a flash drive. WinRar has recovery information built in so I you lose something RAR uses a recovery file to restore the lost bits of info. It has never let me down, the power went out once while a drive was working and it corrupted part of an RAR file. It found the recovery record and fixed it with no problem. I typically use 10% recovery information on flash drives. Got a new flash drive now. It writes about 2.5 mbps . Yeh slow, but it might hold data longer like that. I think the flash cells needs a charge to flip their logic levels so the longer the charge the more saturated the holding cell will get.