[geeks] Disks: recommendations?

[David Brownlee]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 at 15:34, Phil Stracchino <phils at caerllewys.net> wrote:
>
> On 10/30/20 12:26 AM, Mouse wrote:
> >>> So far, I've avoided SSDs.  [...]
> >> On pretty much any decent modern SSD, wear leveling really isn't an
> >> issue any more, anything not bargain-basement third tier is typically
> >> now rated for multiple full device writes per DAY for longer than the
> >> entire rated service life of the drive.
> >
> > What _is_ "the entire rated service life of the drive"?  I would be
> > surprised if it were not far shorter than the time I want to keep my
> > data.
>
> Well, for instance, Samsung 850 EVO drives carry a five-year warranty,
> and their 860 Pro drives are warranted for ten years.
>
>
> > Fair point - but stuck drives typically can be made to start another
> > time or two, enough to get one last read of their data.  Do SSDs fail
> > similarly, or do they just cross a line and go from "working fine" to
> > "completely dead" when their firmware decides it's had enough?  I would
> > hope they'd instead flip from "working fine" to "read-only", but I have
> > little faith such hopes would be realized.
>
> I think SSDs still tend to abruptly and completely fail.  Either they
> work or they don't, they don't really have a "degraded" mode.

Obligatory counterpoint (though I agree that levels of SSD
functionality tends towards "all or nothing"), I have a 60GB KINGSTON
SNV425S264GB which identifies itself as a "JMicron based SSD", and
after a few years of relatively light use decided to adjust its write
speed down to a max of 9MB/sec (tested writing 64K blocks sequentially
to the disk). I have ten year old spinning rust that gets around
50MB/s... [Mmm, I must dig it out and see what happened to its read
speed :-p]

Incidentally, what are you using to mirror across the net?

I've been using syncthing to mirror around 18TB of data from a master
machine to two live remote backups (with appropriate "keep copies of
deleted/changed data for X-period setting), which I'm relatively happy
with so far, but always interested in doing better :)

David