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No, Your SSD Won't Quickly Lose Data While Powered Down
An anonymous reader writes: A few weeks ago, we discussed reports that enterprise SSDs would lose data in a surprisingly short amount of time if left powered off. The reports were based on a presentation from Alvin Cox, a Seagate engineer, about enterprise storage practices. PCWorld spoke to him and another engineer for Seagate, and they say the whole thing was blown out of proportion. Alvin Cox said, "I wouldn't worry about (losing data). This all pertains to end of life. As a consumer, an SSD product or even a flash product is never going to get to the point where it's temperature-dependent on retaining the data." The intent of the original presentation was to set expectations for a worst case scenario — a data center writing huge amounts of data to old SSDs and then storing them long-term at unusual temperatures. It's not a very realistic situation for businesses with responsible IT departments, and almost impossible for personal drives.
yeah, right.
We have a long-term (over several years) exercise where we collect large amounts of data at a very hot waterside location overseas, in an air-conditioned office. And then the racks get moved to a non air-conditioned warehouse where they sit for a year or longer. And then we come back after a year or longer, move the racks back into office space, and do the next iteration.
We were thinking about going to SSD, just for the drive performance, and we now know that our setup is a poster child for the problem that the alarmist article described.
Of course, we copy off the valuable data and take it home, but coming back to random corruption on our system and middleware drives could introduce some real issues.
What does that tell you?
That either you're exaggerating or you do something very, very wrong with your drives? I use low-end, cheapest of the cheapest consumer-SSDs and for example this 64GB drive I have has logged 9607 hours of power-on time. Has it broken yet? No. Are there any issues with it? Nope, not a single one. I do have to ask you: what exactly do you do with those drives of yours if you manage to break them so fast?
... I have replaced half a dozen SSD's that weren't really used for much other than OS data. What does that tell you?
OS data is poisonous?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Very true, backup is key... but if you are backing up on media that loses data, are you really backing up the data?
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
all media lost data. it's just a matter of managing the loss rate.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
That as an early adopter you sure must have used some of the least reliable SSDs, with wear leveling not even quite sorted out, firmware issues or just had random bad luck. Imagine if you ever bought an IBM Death Star, Seagate 7200.11 and that bad Maxtor series as HDDs. Some other HDDs still work fine after ten years. Compared to SSDs they just have a very different kind of sword hanging above their heads.
Lost another SSD over the weekend. Crucial m4 512GB. Lost detection of the drive by the computer (Win 7 desktop), plugged it in through a USB adaptor and it's still not detected (Windows and Mac). That's 3 in the last 18 months.
RIP
Muskin Chronos 120GB (Windows 7 laptop)
Crucial m4 512GB (MacBook Pro 2012)
Crucial m4 512GB (Windows 7 desktop)
That being said I run everything on SSD: 2 HTPC, 2 desktops, 2 MacBooks, 2 Windows laptop.
I can't find the common factor that causes the failures. It would just be working one day, then next day fail detection by the computer and it's all gone.
My first OCZ Vertex - the original one - I did nothing to optimize it and spent as temp drive for everything, including torrent downloads that I later archived. It does 1.5 years later after eating through a 10k writes/sector endurance, if I read the SMART data right it had 9.6k write average and 14k writes worst case. My replacement drive from WD I did all the basic stuff to optimize and kept my torrents to a HDD, it lasted about 3.5 years and the lifespan indicator said it should have another 1.5 years left but one day it just wouldn't boot.
Now I have a Vertex 450 (before you say anything it's for boot and gaming, I keep my documents on another drive...) and it has 9589 power-on hours, that's 400 days and 96% life left. At this rate, it should last 25 years or more. It seems to me they've done a lot to fix write amplification and other issues, that easily killed some of the early drives if you actually used them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
all media lost data. it's just a matter of managing the loss rate.
Part of managing loss is understanding what makes different media lose data. For optical media, it is light. Don't leave them sitting in the sunlight. For SSDs, it is temperature. Don't store your SSDs in a hot attic, or leave them in your car parked in the sun. I put all my flash media (SSDs, SD-Cards, thumb drives) in a ziploc bag to protect them from condensation, put that inside a sealed mason jar (just in case there is a pinhole in the ziploc bag), and then put that in the bottom drawer of my refrigerator, right next to my battery stash.
there are 4 options that escalate nicely for the first 3 steps, CD, DVD, BDR, Tape
These are not good options for home users because they all involve ongoing work. Just install a 4GB network drive (available on Amazon for less than $200), and set up your home computers to do hourly incremental backups. For extra safety, buy two, keep one at your office, and swap them once a month.
unless you've vacuum-sealed those mason jars or have a dedicated fridge with redundant power (lol), the humidity is probably doing more harm than the (semi-)controlled temperature is helping. a merely closed jar is not "sealed," even with one of those rubber rings.
also i'm imagining your jar of thumb drives sitting in the fridge. what the fuck? do you ever use them? or is this long-term storage? if you do use them, you are of course letting the jar come to ambient temperature in a dry location each time you take them out of the fridge, right? otherwise it's all kind of pointless.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I put all my flash media (SSDs, SD-Cards, thumb drives) in a ziploc bag to protect them from condensation, put that inside a sealed mason jar (just in case there is a pinhole in the ziploc bag), and then put that in the bottom drawer of my refrigerator, right next to my battery stash.
This seems unwise. Packaging everything up in an airtight container under presumably room temperature and proceeding to put it in the fridge to "protect them from condensation" is great way to generate condensation.
You might want to consult a psychrometric chart or invest in desiccant.
Blu-Ray is total crap, as is all optical backup media.
The biggest problem is that it's simply far too small to be useful. To back up a 1TB drive, you'll need 20 BD-R discs. That's a lot of swapping to do a full backup.
Aside from that, they're slow, write-once, and suffer a lot from bit-rot due to poor quality media. DVD-Rs and CD-Rs had the same problems before, and those are completely useless for backup these days due to their puny size.
The only thing that makes any sense at all for consumers is USB hard drives. They're fairly cheap, they're rewriteable, and only cost probably a few times what a single set of BD-R discs would cost. After a few backups, they've equaled in cost, plus it's a lot easier and faster to do incremental backups with them since you can just use rsync.
Actually, the other poster's suggestion of using a NAS drive makes a lot of sense too.
I don't know how much Seagate's lack of attention to quality in their HDDs is reflected in their SSDs.
I don't know either, and I'm not willing to find out the hard way.
Wrong. If it's a second copy of the data, it's a backup. Doesn't matter where it is, it could even be on the same device as the original, still considered a backup. You can use location of the backup to define situational appropriateness, but location does not determine status of "backup".
I shutdown my gaming PC all the time, sometimes for weeks or even months at a time (if I get into a console game instead). I've never lost data on it except when the painter left the heater on and then proceeded to open all the doors and windows downstairs while simultaneously closing my office door. When I got home, it was like an oven in there, and the SSD lost all data, but when I reformatted and reinstalled it it continues to work to this day.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Your first claim is false. Any storage can act as a backup, including printing things out. You are making a personal judgement over quality.
Your second claim is false. Recycled backups are perfectly valid and highly used (for example cycled daily backups as part of a tape rota).
What you mean in the first claim is that a hard drive may not be THE most reliable form of backup storage (but then, its not the least either).
What you mean in the second claim is that a backup should act as a separate snapshot of data, and only be updated at known timepoints, not continuously.
Hard Drives are validly used in a range of backup systems,. including some rather high ends ones.
RAID, however, is not a backup.
They have a far shorter average offline life than the optical media. For one thing the bearings have a finite life as the lubricant breaks down over time - a lot longer than it used to be but still less on average than media problems with the optical disks.
What is viable is to shuffle stuff off those USB drives onto newer ones a few years down the track, but if you are not prepared to do that eventually the optical stuff is going to come out as far more reliable.
Sub question: Would you care if you lost a few blocks of data? Bit rot is a serious concern but the problem is an isolated one. If I lost a single photo on my computer I may be lightly upset, but no where near as upset as losing all the data on my drive.
Like you said, it depends which block.
I could have a corrupt block in the middle of a movie file and not even notice, but if I lost a block near the beginning of a large compressed archive file, I may lose the entire archive -- and if it's silent corruption undetected by the filesystem or disk drive, it may be propagated to all of my backups before it's discovered.
I'd rather have the drive fail entirely versus slow undetected block corruption.
Oh please. The main reasons for backups (esp. for individuals) are 1) user error, and 2) hardware failure, not acts of god. An on-site NAS protects against those just fine. It protects against viruses too, since the virus isn't going to easily affect the NAS box (though even better is to simply not run Windows).
Theft? How many people have had thieves run around their house looking for NAS boxes? What kind of thieves even bother to steal electronics these days anyway? They aren't worth enough on the used market to bother with.
- My only ever data loss has been the result of a direct lightning strike. Or at least it would have been if the backup wasn't located at work. I lost my PC, my NAS, and most electronics in the house in one go.
- My best friend got cleaned out by robbers who amongst other valuable things took a computer AND the NAS box.
- As for the viruses your post is simply ignorant of the modern trends. You know there's now 4 randsomware packages (that I have heard of) in the wild that will affect NAS boxes as well. 2 of them encrypt all data on NASs, one of them wipes data from the NAS but encrypts local data, and the last used a bug in Synology's software to render the NAS useless (though reports of removing the drives and putting them in other computers solved the problem.)
- Remember the phrase RAID is not a backup solution? That applies equally to NAS for ALL the same reasons.
So there you go. But I'm not going to suggest anything to you. You're more than welcome to learn by yourself.