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Seagate Ships First 8 Terabyte Hard Drive
MojoKid (1002251) writes Seagate announced today that it has begun shipping the world's first 8 Terabyte hard drive. The 8TB hard drive comes only five months after Western Digital released the first ever 6TB HDD. Up until then, Seagate's high capacity HDDs had been shipping only to select enterprise clients. The 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and, according to the manufacturer, features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centers. It's unclear what technology the drive is based on, or if PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.
That sure is a lot of porn...
WTF is that?
And I did RTFA, it doesn't mention it at all.
I'm surprised this wasn't posted by Timothy...
The clowns at Argonne National Lab are still bragging about their 6 TB hard drives. Six! So big! You should so jealous to work at Argonne, really you should.
I feel as if we are at a point where cheap capacity is outstripping the need for it for most consumers.
Would it be trivial to design a drive that can be switched into a double-speed half-capacity mode?
I remember when tape drives stored a few times more data than hard drives, and were priced about the same. I know I can back up to external USB drives (which I do using Snebu, but I which tape drives were more affordable.
Just like before I can lose entire tv series when the disk fails. But now it's the HD version of the series I will lose. That's called progress.
lucm, indeed.
Before SSD's were all the rage, a common thing to get a speed boost was to do 'short stroke' the drive. Essentially, all you do is only partition the first third of the drive and use that space.
The theory is that the head doesn't need to move around as much and speeds up the drive. I've never done it but modders used to swear by it.
I wonder how many of these multi-TB hard drives are clogged with customer schemes like VMWare images for the last six releases of some application, times four different target operating systems. There's probably 80-90 percent redundancy that could be stripped right off the top.
Would it be trivial to design a drive that can be switched into a double-speed half-capacity mode?
High RPM drives tend to have smaller capacity if I remember correctly, and any drive can be short stroked to save on seek time.
Get Perpendicular!
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
But how would the host detect the redundancy if the guest operating systems use full disk encryption? The cipher modes they use are specifically designed to hide whether a sector is a duplicate of another sector.
All them pr0nz lawdy
FTA: "Now that we download TV shows, movies, music, video games, books, and other, shall we say, forms of entertainment,"
Don't beat around the bush (pun not intended).... you mean PORN!
Disks this size should be measured in Pr0ns, not TB.
Just sayin'
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Why hasn't the price of data centers come way down with new storage technology? For example, why not keep a few terabytes of offline storage in your desk drawer instead of paying $$$ for tapes? If tapes are more reliable then what level of duplication is needed for disks to be as reliable? This combined with the multiplier effects of no_AC_necessary solid-state ... why not big data center in small closet? If the data center is inefficient, why is it still around? Latin me that, my trinity scholard.
I just had my third 1tarabyte+ hard drive fail tonight. I remember when hard drives DIDNT fail. It wasn't even a think I thought could happen. It's nice they can get them so large now, but I don't want that much in one place. I'd rather have several smaller drivers raided waiting for the inevitable.
So I have multiple servers in different locations all using 3TB external USB3 Seagate drives (powered by AC adapter). At least 12 in total, one for each server used for BMR backups. In less than a year, ALL DRIVES FAILED!!! Either they started out with bad blocks and progressively got worse, or just died.
Seagate, never again! The article below doesn't show just how bad Seagate drives are when used every day.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
Life is not for the lazy.
It would take me 20 months to fill that up.
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
If it's the outer most tracks, sure. More surface area = more bits. As such, that 1/3rd would be physically narrower making the actuator arm not having to swing as far back and forth when reading/writing to that partition. As a bonus, the outer most track also has faster throughput as more bits fly under the head vs the inner track regardless of RPM.
Life is not for the lazy.
Have you heard about the price for that HDD??
Considering how awful QC and MTBF have been with Seagate in the past 10 years or so, I really can't think of a good reason to buy this drive.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I would MUCH, MUCH rather have half speed double capacity. Just about all my storage comes much closer to write once, read mostly.
I suppose, but if your data is only small, a good OS will probably put it all together at the beginning of the drive anyway.
Plus, OSes perform better when they have got a lot of space to work with. So not all usage scenarios would improve.
If you have 8 TB of capacity in the form of two 4TB drives, you can trade speed for capacity via RAID. With RAID 0, each druve gets half of each KB, doubling throughput.
I've often wondered about building a drive with TWO sets of read/write heads. All drives going back decades read one cylinder at a time. Why not add another set of heads intge other side of the platters and read two cylinders at a time. Rotational latency eould be cut in half. One set could be used for the inner tracks and one for the outer tracks to reduce seek time.
Expanding on that, why does the head read from ONE point. The arm could be lined with a row of ten read heads. We can put millions of pixels on a four inch screen, why can't we put ten reading sensors on a two-inch arm?
love to see the rebuild time on my RAID stripes.......................zzzzzzzz
Slashdot ran a story that 60TB Disk Drives Could Be a Reality In 2016 based on promises made by Seagate.
Rather than a doubling, it seems like hard drives are continuing to go up by 2TB in the first half of the year and an additional 2TB (for a total of 4TB increase) by the second half of the year. So, it seems more likely that in 2015 we will see 10TB and 12TB drives and then in 2016 there will be 14TB and 16TB drives. While a 16TB drive is impressive, it is still only a quarter of the size promised. Also, at a rate increase of 4TB per year, we will be at 30TB by the end of the decade which is still half the 60TB prediction.
While there are some applications which could take advantage of the additional storage space, there are more applications that could take advantage of the improved performance provided by SSD. So the million dollar question seems to be at what price point and density does SSDs have to reach before the industry phases out hard drives? I don't think hard drives can mature fast enough any longer to survive to the end of the decade.
I could imagine that they'd have petabyte drives lying around, but they are just saving them for later. I could imagine when we all get bored with 8 terrabyte drives they'll go to 12 terrabytes and then 16, etc. Theoretically, If they had these drives lying around they could go straight to petabyte, but they'd miss out on a lot of upgrade cycles! Stories like this also make me wonder a little bit too: https://xato.net/privacy/dear-nsa-meant-yottabytes/
The Pillar Data Axiom SANs did this. DEC filed a patent for it back in '92. http://www.google.com/patents/...
Say you have an 8TB drive with 6 platters - the option could be to pair up the platters and write alternate bytes to each, doubling sustained read and write
That would require the head to be right over both tracks at the right moment. I'm not sure the heads are physically aligned that precisely. Or are you suggesting to separate the head assemblies for the top 3 and bottom 3 platters and do RAID 0 in a box?
In the early 1990s, AIX allowed you to partition drives (physical volumes) where a logical volume could be residing on the inner or outer part of a drive. That way, DB indexes and critical tables could be placed where access was relatively fast, while the stash for archive logs, program files, and stuff not really accessed could be placed on the outer part. Not SSD speed, but it was a way to help with database performance, especially if one had a lot of spindles.
Anyone else remember when 10MB was a decent size disk and 30MB was huge? Man I'm getting old...
Isn't it the outer portion, rather than the inner portion, given that you can reach more per revolution if it's written to the outer edge, on account of the greater circumference? And if so, then yup, this is a viable technique for speeding up read times. OS X actually implemented something similar as far back as 10.4, where it'd move the OS and other frequently-used files to the outermost portions of the platter in order to improve read performance. I never really noticed a difference, personally, but Apple clearly thought there was one, given that they implemented it into their OS as a standard feature.
It’s really very informative that I wanted ever, thanks for this.
FusionHQ 2.0 review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuR30uw-6Cg
file your patent now, i also had the same thought, and there assuredly have been others as well
I see in this drives future, let me see my crystal ball.....2 years from this day. Yes....
The drive shall fail.
Your mystical fortune says...let me see...
Use backups.
That'll be $75.
No, you can't see my third nipple.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
A bit off topic, but what would be the recommended file system to use on a drive like this when you're using it for backups? Something with built-in file checksums or is using ext2/3/4 and writing a script to generate and validate CRC files better?
I bought a 4TB WD My Book yesterday and am slightly concerned about the high failure rates for the 3TB version of the drive. Something about bad controllers...
It does work, as does putting paging on a non-OS drive. As for SSD sure it helps as a boot drive...but who fucking boots anymore? Frankly what I saw at the shop was a better boost in actual applications by using the SSD as a caching drive and as a bonus you can pick up 32GB-64GB SSDs for dirt cheap and they make perfect caching drives. That said if you can fit ALL your games AND the OS AND the applications on an SSD? Sure they fly, just be sure to have VERY recent backups as SSDs still fail without warning, unlike HDDs. you'd think they'd have fixed that by now but nope, still no warning when it comes to the SSD shitting itself.
As for TFA this makes me happy as it'll lower the cost on the smaller drives, the 1TB are already down to the $50 range and I'm hoping they'll soon be back to the $35 range they were pre-flood. I have found that most home users can get by FOR NOW with a 1TB but as the amount of media they create and consume grows so too does the space they require. Personally I'm happy (again FOR NOW) with the 6TB worth of space I have but if this drives the 4TB drives into sub $70 territory i could see snatching up another 12TB and putting my entire movie collection in HD on a media tank.
Has anybody tried the Seagate 4TB and 6TB drives in any real numbers? Hows the failure rate? I ask as I still actively avoid the Seagate 1.5 and 2TB because of all the fails i saw at the shop, they were REALLY shitty...did they fix that problem with the 4 and 6 drives?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But like you said that is totally dwarfed by SSD.
I doubt this would be cheaper than a fast 15Krpm 4TB 2.5" drive to manufacture and the 4TB drive would probably be faster overall. Sure it'd work on a 3TB consumer drive and probably be a good tradeoff, but on "the largest capacity drive in the world" I have my doubts it'd be economical and most certainly not double the speed.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
My Altair 8800 running CP/M had a washing machine size hard driver. Air compressor,
big power draw, etc. Had a 5 MB fixed platter, and a 5MB removable platter. I think
was made by Shugart. Interface was parallel port (not printer port, but similar).
In its day, it was the cat's meow.
I still have that Altair, but not the drive. I replaced with a 5MB drive to a parallel port,
8" then 5". I also experimented with IDE interface and a 3.5" drive, but I do not
remember the capacity. Then the Altair got stored away. I have a bunch of them,
and some IMSAI 8080 (a better computer).
Yes, Jeannie ... I *am* an old geezer.
Actually I think the goal is to use the innermost tracks on the disk. The linear read speed is slower, you're correct that the outer tracks are faster, but the inner tracks have lower seek times.
You're dreaming if you think HDDs don't fail without warning.
... OS X actually implemented something similar as far back as 10.4,...
2005?
heh
Ah bless.
Sounds like you want RAID0. Or even more likely, RAID10: buy four 2TB drives, get 4TB of storage and twice the transfer rate of the 8B drive Probably costs less than the 8TB drive too, though would use more SATA ports, power cables, etc.
Back in the day, my college campus mainframe, a Burroughs B6700, had (in addition to its more conventional "disk pack" drives) a head-per-track (HPT) drive. The disk was several feet in diameter and the whole surface was covered with read/write heads (they didn't need to move).
Can't find specs on the B6700 version, but here's a blurb about the older B5500 version (from http://www.retrocomputingtasma...)
-- Alastair
Patent may have expired by now.
The perfect hard drive for the Crypt-Keeper who has (almost) everything!
Interesting point.
I suppose, but if your data is only small, a good OS will probably put it all together at the beginning of the drive anyway.
It depends on the file system. It's hard to say what strategy makes a "good OS". NTFS puts files sequentially, which gives the benefit that you will have lower seek times if you do not have that much data on your hard disk. The downside is fragmentation. Now, ext4 spreads the files over the volume, which avoids fragmentation efficiently. The downside is constantly high seek times across files.
Yeah, my (ahem, my parents) first PC had a 20mb 5.25" drive. That died after a couple of years and the replacement cost $400... An upgrade to 40mb cost 700.
We'll just put your data onto your new Seagate drive... aaaand it's gone!
Worst. Signature. Ever.
I'm guessing the reason drives don't have multiple read-write heads is because that would significantly increase the cost of the drive and potential for mechanical failure, to the point where you're probably better off simply getting a second drive and using RAID as you indicated.
The row of read heads probably wouldn't work - at least for simultaneous reads - because the distance between them wouldn't properly align at different angles of the arm as it swung across the platter. You'd need to design an arm that tracked linearly across the drive, adding weight and complexity. Even if you could do that, the real benefit would be if you could get them to read parallel tracks. I'd imagine that the multiple magnetic heads would tend to interfere with each other if placed that close (you couldn't stagger them or you'd have alignment problems again). If they're placed far apart to not interfere with each other magnetically, then they have little benefit, because the odds of them aligning on multiple chunks of data across the drive that a client wishes to access would be much lower then, largely negating the advantage.
In theory, I guess that creating an array of read heads spread out across the arm but activating only one at a time (whichever is closest to the cylinder being read next) might be a way to improve latency. I can't think of a reason offhand why this wouldn't have been tried except that the added complexity might have a negative impact on reliability, or perhaps the increased weight of the arm would tend to negate this advantage. Or, it might be difficult to re-align the arm to arbitrary positions as opposed to the predictability of a single read head.
Generally speaking, in such a mature industry that's obsessed with squeezing more performance out of their hardware, it's probably safe to assume that engineers have already thought of and rejected such ideas as being impractical for some reason or another.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
How big a beowulf cluster of these would be?
first third wouldn't really do it on multiplatter drives though?
you'd have to do 100gb there and skip and 100gb and skip and 100gb... just the right way.
wouldn't surprise me if modders used to swear by bullshit though.
what I had do do once was to skip 600mbyte in the middle of a 3.2gb drive because that area was a broken platter or head and would crash the drive if tried to access - it worked just fine when I formatted around that area though...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Hope; that's a winning information lifecycle policy right there!
Honestly if this were a WD article someone would come up with the same anecdote and a different brand. Every manufacturer has had bad batches. I too have had a Seagate fail. I also had a WD fail. Like 4 IBM drives fail, a Quantum drive fail.
I wouldn't trust a Seagate drive with 100 MB of data, let alone 8 TB.
That's not necessarily true. You can get the same amount of space in a smaller number of tracks around the edge of the disk, so the horizontal movement for the largest seek is going to be smaller. Seek times on mechanical disks are based on three factors. The first two are related: the time it takes to move the head between tracks (proportional to its distance) and the time it takes for the head to settle and be able to be lowered again (dependent on its speed). The third is the time it takes for the correct sector on the track to spin under the head. In the middle, you have fewer sectors per track, so you need to move the head more often (this is where the upper bound on seek times comes from).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'd guess 2TB, before it fails.
I bought 10 Seagate drives to build a home server with, and over the course of 18 months not only did every single one of them fail, but one of the replacements failed as well.
This was not a slackjawed build either. I pretty much spared no expense on a huge 12-bay chassis with rubber HDD grommets, a 1kW power supply, and a home office with an HVAC zone all to itself.
Seagate is shit. I'll never buy another one ever.
it was possible to do this with PqMagic few years ago. It's a shame that it was discontinued, it was simply the best disk partitioner I have ever used.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Inner tracks have higher seek times. The angular velocity across the whole drive is identical so it takes just as long for the platter to spin half way on both the inner and outer tracks. So the seek delay due to waiting for the platter is identical. However, the head also needs to move and the outer tracks require less head movement per amount of data (since each track stores more data). As a result the seek delay due to head movement is lower.
But I keep losing shows anyway...
This isn't really possible anymore unless you work closely with the drive manufacturer and have insight into how the drive firmware operates. SAN vendors have to do this if they offer a "short stroke" type of feature for performance. The reason is that drives are so complex now you can't guarantee that the beginning LBA/CHS actually maps to the inside of the drive, or will permanently. If you have a bad sector or two and it gets remapped to the end of the drive it will screw with your performance/latency significantly.
After having 5 seagate drives fail all within one year, including a momentous xt that died 2 weeks after I got it, it's replacement died a week after that, and THAT replacement died last week (less than 6 months across all three), I will never buy seagate again.
They are peddling crap, and I'm surprised they haven't been hit with a class action lawsuit yet.
Seagate is shipping some samples to "select customers". Hoo fucking ray. And no word on when the drive will become generally available.
Well done slashdot.
Platter Density FTW!
I have done this on several standard 7200rpm drives with results matching or exceeding those 10,000rpm WD Velociraptor drives in several categories.
These are my old 2010 results from ATTO and HD Tach while slicing (another term for short-stroking) my drives and using Intel's Matrix RAID setup.
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/5353/ich10rmatrixraid0.png
http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/4531/attoresultsmatrixraid0.png
http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/4712/hdtachraid0750gb.png
http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/5997/hdtune750gbraid0.png
It's not just seek time. Throughput can be increased greatly if you're using a drive with suitably dense platters.
Medium business with two locations. Each locations houses 3-4 servers, running about 15-20 Virtual Machines on each host. Every essential system is virtualized. Another server, lower specs, but loaded with plain 7200 rpm enterprise class drives (Not 10k RPM drives like the VMHosts) run Microsoft DPM 2012 R2. We have it constantly backing up. Our email and file servers are backed up on the hour or every other hour. All others that are more "set it and forget it" systems that dont change or store changing data are backed up once a day or so. The entire VM. Should a VMHost fail all child VM's can be restored immediately. Likewise I have recovery points going back 2-3 months for our main data drive and email using DPM with regular drives. I can get anything near instantly rather than having to search a tape. I can see tape would be useful if something was deleted years ago and needed to be recovered. However until then I'm drive only. Likewise all our VMHost servers are RAID5 or RAID6, and even our DPM server is RAID5 so if a drive fails we're okay. If two fail at once.. it's a backup. We also try to mix batches of drives in it as well or add them spaced apart so they have different operating hours and time to replicate if it has to rebuild from a single drive loss. (Why ive been switching our main servers to RAID6, as any weaklings would die sometimes during rebuild of a raid5 array or even raid1 array which leaves out SOL).
Curious. Back in the stone ages (12 years ago) we had a 53 GB 12-platter drive (The box said "Solve your disk space storage problems forever!") that had a head fail. I was able to recover 22/23rds of the data, but it was clear that the data was recorded from one platter to the next all the way through the stack, and then the heads moved. Back in that day (I don't know if it's still true) one side of one of the platters just contained alignment information.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
A lot of external USB drive enclosures are little aluminum hard drive ovens.
There is little cooling.
I had one failure, and switched to some nice Roswill's on the Egg that have a fan tht circulates air over the drive.
No failures yet in several years of 1TB drives...but those were WD !
Soo what's it going to be Seagate?
Your post contains:
2 paragraphs.
6 sentences.
375 words.
On average, your post contains:
3.00 sentences per paragraph.
62.50 words per sentence.
For comparison, typical English text contains:
4.49 sentences per paragraph.
38.58 words per sentence.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
who is this for? People who download big high definition mkvs from torrent sites? Just kidding.
> You're dreaming if you think HDDs don't fail without warning.
More often than not, they fail WITH warning. Or rather, they give you some indication that it's time to replace a drive and you aren't stuck scrambling at the last minute because it was a surprise.
If this stuff is sneaking up on you, you are probably not paying attention.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
GParted would probably be a very familiar tool for you...
bork bork bork!
Why would they have lower seek times? It seems like lateral, track-to-track movement would be at the same speed regardless of position. And since rotational velocity is constant, the average time for a sector in the current track to come around should be identical. What's missing from that line of thinking?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
And then LBA came along in 1996 and completely mooted the strategy.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Like this one?
In a nutshell, the smaller production runs make this type of drive more than twice as expensive as two regular drives, with similar performance for independent workloads. (But if you have a particular workload, you may benefit.)
As you mention, 15k SAS drives are going to be rapidly undercut by SSDs. The price difference is no longer 10x or 20x when looking at cost/gigabyte, the price difference is now only 2-3x.
Pay 2x-3x the amount for a SSD of the same size as the 15k SAS, and you gain 50x improvement in your IOPS. For workloads where that matters, it's an easy choice to make now. As soon as you say something like "we'll short-stroke some 15k RPM SAS drives" - you should be considering enterprise level SSD instead. Less spindles needed, less power needed, and huge performance gains.
Rotating media get slowed down by vibration. There's a Youtube video of someone shouting into an array while measuring latency at Sun. With an SSD cache, you could use slower drives that are less affected and still get the speed. Slower drives also use less power & produce less heat.
Wrong.
It still works with current drives as long as they don't have remapped sectors.
Why not test it yourself instead of spreading misinformation?
In fact, HDDs have a brighter future than SSDs in terms of future scaling. Flash is hitting a wall already but there is a ton of scaling left for HDDs.
(I work with both technologies at a device manufacturing level)
Sorry but I've dealt with more failed drives at the shop than you've had hot meals and if they fail "without" warning?
Then YOU sir are not paying attention! Before a HDD fails you will see several rather blatant warning signs, warning about delayed write fails being the most obvious but there is also temp spikes on the drive (as the motor heats up trying and failing seeks) and SMART changes (not talking SMART fail, which is usually at the end, we are talking large changes in the SMART values which can be read by one of several free programs such as HWMon or HDTune) not to mention most modern drives get REALLY noisy when they are getting ready to croak.
Compare this to the "dirty little secret" of the SSD world which is the majority of SSD fails are NOT the flash chips themselves but the SSD controller chip. When that fails? NO warning, NO chance to back up your data, just flip the switch and...poof. this is why I tell my customers they should use a religiously adhered to backup system along with cloud computing to insure no data loss.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Thanks to SSDs, we now see some progression in the hard disk market. Earlier there where four hard disk vendors, and there was competition to bring out new and larger HDDs fast, prices dropped regularly. But the fourth was recently bought and after that HDD market stagnated. We were for a long time stuck with expensive 2TB disks, blaiming the floodings in Thailand which made it difficult to manufacture more HDDs. It turned out the crisis was fake:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Enjoying-Market-Manipulation-Western-Digital-Posts-Huge-Profits-Again-Part-4-283225.shtml
In fact, they posted huge profits and delivered MORE disks than usual that year. There never was a HDD shortage. Because of this oligopoly, the three vendors could uphold the prices and had no need of selling larger and cheaper disks. There were good profit with old 2TB disks.
But recently we have seen 1TB SSD disks, and also larger. And SSD prices have dropped very fast. The HDD vendors have now been forced to develop new disks and sell them, facing competition again (from the SSD vendors).
If the fourth vendor had not been bought, we would have seen 8TB disks long time ago. There would have been cheap 12TB disks by now. But thanks to the lack of compeition, they had no need of progressing HDD development. This oligpoly is probably illegal, making us paying noose bleeding prices for old HDDS. Somebody should graph prices before and after the fourth vendor was bought. Just read the link above for more information!
Sorry but I've dealt with more failed drives at the shop than you've had hot meals and if they fail "without" warning?
Unnecessary hyperbole.
Then YOU sir are not paying attention! Before a HDD fails you will see several rather blatant warning signs, warning about delayed write fails being the most obvious but there is also temp spikes on the drive (as the motor heats up trying and failing seeks) and SMART changes (not talking SMART fail, which is usually at the end, we are talking large changes in the SMART values which can be read by one of several free programs such as HWMon or HDTune) not to mention most modern drives get REALLY noisy when they are getting ready to croak.
I never said that HDDs never give warnings. I claimed that HDDs can fail without warning. I've had a few die with controller failures. It's not always a mechanical failure. I've also seen mechanical failures where the SMART information didn't contain any errors. For example, sometimes a head can just crash (rare, but can still happen even on stationary drives). You're making some dangerous assumptions on the types of ways that HDDs can fail, which if you really had dealt with more failed drives than I've had hot meals, you'd know that they aren't always predictable.
Compare this to the "dirty little secret" of the SSD world which is the majority of SSD fails are NOT the flash chips themselves but the SSD controller chip. When that fails? NO warning, NO chance to back up your data, just flip the switch and...poof. this is why I tell my customers they should use a religiously adhered to backup system along with cloud computing to insure no data loss.
I hope you give that same advice to HDD customers. And why are you suggesting that backing up from a drive showing signs of failure is desirable? If I see signs of failure, I don't trust the data coming off it. I junk it, either rebuilding the array or recovering from backup.