Solid State storage Disc ...

1492 wrote:
SSD are generally more reliable than either SD or Flash memory devices, as manufacturers tend to reserve the best quality memory from the wafer for them. What's not used for SSD, end up in SD/Flash drives. Which should be considered more for temporary or transient storage.

I would tend to agree to a point.

SSD drives actually have MORE SPARE memory "locations" than SD or Flash drives plus they have additional firmware which is far more sophisticated than SD or flash drives.

The combination of the SSD drive firmware AND the "extra" RESERVED memory locations allows the drive as it ages (memory locations will weaken or quit responding as they are used) to "replace" the bad or weak locations UNTIL IT RUNS OUT OF RESERVED LOCATIONS.

Early SSD drives (40gig-80gig) had really bad firmware along with not enough reserved memory folks often ended up with no warning with a "bricked" SSD drive, losing everything on it.

The hard cold reality is when SSD drives fail, it is pretty much unannounced and without any warning, not to mention a complete loss of data.

Spinning HDs tend to give you some advanced warning with odd noises and sometimes a few errors along the way. If caught SOON ENOUGH you can transfer your data to another drive BEFORE total drive failure.

No matter how you cut it, if the data is IMPORTANT TO YOU, THEN BACK IT UP!

TWO external USB HDS can get the job done (although a lot of work to manually synchronize the data between the two drives).

Better yet is if you can find an external USB HD enclosure which allows you two internal drives setup as a RAID 1 mirrored set.

Even better yet is something like a NAS with RAID 5 and above with a Hot spare..

At my work place I have a server setup with a RAID5 array for the OS and a separate RAID 5 array for my data. Plus the server has a Hot Spare on top of that.. We abuse those DATA HDs all day long by dumping images to PCs (these images are quite large at about 14gig-18gig each). Hundreds of PCs every week amounting to several thousand PCs every quarter. Not to mention imaging replacement HDs for our field techs and so on..

I have worn out about 4 data HDs since the server was put into use about 5 yrs ago. The Hot spare simply takes over and I get a notification of the event so I can simply remove the dead HD and replace it with a fresh new drive to become a hot spare.

I do not think SSD drives would last under this kind of use at this time!