Incredibly Important Things about SSDs You Absolutely Must Know!

[seamanq]

I am posting this here because one of the developers of a game I love and follow, Now and Then, Kinderfeld, just had a major disaster happen with an SSD failure.

SSD drives, for all their advantages, are just hard drives. Even though they do not have the moving parts a regular Hard Drive (HDD) has, they still can crash and burn. On my system, voltage irregularities that occurred because I put too many drives on the bus caused my SSD drives to have intermittent failures. In the case of Kinderfeld, he dropped his SDD, and it refused to start up. All that having been said, forewarned is fore-armed. (And four-armed is pretty funny looking, but I digress).

This comes from years of doing customer technical support, working in large data centers, and making lots of mistakes. After I had my first SSD failures, I put a backup plan in place. This consisted of
(1) making clones of my startup drive
(2) testing the clones to make sure they worked
(3) regularly backing up both my cloned startup drive and work files drive
(4) running periodic recoveries from the backups to secondary drives to make sure they were working and actually backing up what I expected to be backup up, and that they worked.

I must say that the majority of my working files actually reside on a cloud service, so the "local" files are only backups of those in the cloud. In my case, the cloud I am using is Microsoft's One Drive, which I get five 1GB @ accounts for free with my Microsoft 365 subscription which I have to have for other work I do.

I will now share knowledge that I have gained from doing over 20 years of tech support regarding backups. A backup system that you have not tested is not a backup system. * You absolutely must test your backup systems periodically to ensure that everything you think is being backed up is actually being backed up. If you have a custom Daz3d, Blender, After Effects, or other systems setups with lots of customization of preferences, this is especially important. Test, test, and retest your backups on a regular basis.

When the day comes that one of your SSDs decides to take a dirt nap, for whatever reason, you will be glad you did.

* If you read nothing of what I posted except this line, I will feel that my work has been successful.

 

[DiviDreamer]

Well not all ssd done equally, i have my samsung evo for 7 years and it still work excellent.

 

[seamanq]

Well not all ssd done equally, i have my samsung evo for 7 years and it still work excellent.

If you are using your system for production or work, you should always have backups and make sure they work. Seven years is quite long for an SSD, and blocks do start going bad on SSD drives over time because there is a maximum number of times each block can be rewritten. Back up or don't back up - it's ultimately your decision. I am just sharing what 20 years of experience (and a few very bad system failures) have taught me.

 

[ajaxred]

If you are using your system for production or work, you should always have backups and make sure they work. Seven years is quite long for an SSD, and blocks do start going bad on SSD drives over time because there is a maximum number of times each block can be rewritten. Back up or don't back up - it's ultimately your decision. I am just sharing what 20 years of experience (and a few very bad system failures) have taught me.

When a ssd fails it will gone into read only mode when a hard drive fails you have to pay 10-30 dollars per gb to get the data recovered.

 

[rayminator]

well I hope he/she gets everything back

that's why you should always make 2 to 3 backups on separate drive or usb stick or even better NAS cause you can use raid 4 and with a dedicated parity drive if one drive fails you can get your data back

 

[ajaxred]

well I hope he/she gets everything back

that's why you should always make 2 to 3 backups on separate drive or usb stick or even better NAS cause you can use raid 4 and with a dedicated parity drive if one drive fails you can get your data back

If you have a decent upload on your network you can use a cloud something like Blackblaze or Idrive if you don't want to use a physical drive. that's what I use at least.

 

[seamanq]

If you have a decent upload on your network you can use a cloud something like Blackblaze or Idrive if you don't want to use a physical drive. that's what I use at least.

I think the challenge with that is that the Daz3D library can get pretty huge, especially if you have it packed, like many developers do. My current library is close to 250GB, and that's just the main Daz3D library, not preferences and more. Add to that video backup, prefs and assets for other "heavy" apps like Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, Blender, and more and it is a lot to back up regularly over the cloud. I am just suggesting that no matter where you have your content stored, you had better make sure you have backups of it, just in case the unexpected happens. I was working at a place for 2 days and they had a major failure of their systems, and the backups they thought their cloud provider were doing were corrupted and useless. It took over a week with their business down to restore an old backup, and a few months to get things fully back to normal. I said it before, and I will say it again, a backup that you have not tested is not a backup. I told that to my manager the day I was hired, and he found out two days later how right I was.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I like how you go through the effort of trying to make a good post and good replies, but the first comment is a text book case of a customer saying 'um, well actually'

my first hardrive (ssd) failed after a year, thankfully it was the 'smart' safety feature pre detecting wear and I was able to get a new harddrive before it fully died. the harddrive still works if I need it in a pinch (ie doing wierd harddrive swapping) but I have to leave a fan on it. But considering I have a fully built computer (third build) and 7 HDD and SSD in it, that's old ssd is kept just for sentimental value.

I've actually been wanting to upgrade my computer to a workstation for over a year now, make a server and a NAS, and automate the backing up process, but then covid hit and everything slowed down. I've been waiting because I've saved up the money to use all new stuff, and I was excited to jump over to AMD epic threadripper, but I wanted the next generation, which never came out due to the supply issue. So here i am, slowly maxing out my hardrive with only one of them backed up, hoping nothing ever happens before I get a chance to fully build a complete automated server and backup system.

it sounds like this is your area of expertise, are there any programs you use for backups? or do you do hard backups, copying hard drive to hard drive, or do you use programs to automate this? I've seen a few but I'm hesitant to switch over to linux again because I'm lazy and don't want to learn Linux for the billionth time.

 

[AnimeKing314]

Something I learned in my university classes is the 3-2-1 rule of backups. You always want to have (at minimum):

3 copies
2 different media types
1 offsite copy

 

[seamanq]

I like how you go through the effort of trying to make a good post and good replies, but the first comment is a text book case of a customer saying 'um, well actually'

my first hardrive (ssd) failed after a year, thankfully it was the 'smart' safety feature pre detecting wear and I was able to get a new harddrive before it fully died. the harddrive still works if I need it in a pinch (ie doing wierd harddrive swapping) but I have to leave a fan on it. But considering I have a fully built computer (third build) and 7 HDD and SSD in it, that's old ssd is kept just for sentimental value.

I've actually been wanting to upgrade my computer to a workstation for over a year now, make a server and a NAS, and automate the backing up process, but then covid hit and everything slowed down. I've been waiting because I've saved up the money to use all new stuff, and I was excited to jump over to AMD epic threadripper, but I wanted the next generation, which never came out due to the supply issue. So here i am, slowly maxing out my hardrive with only one of them backed up, hoping nothing ever happens before I get a chance to fully build a complete automated server and backup system.

it sounds like this is your area of expertise, are there any programs you use for backups? or do you do hard backups, copying hard drive to hard drive, or do you use programs to automate this? I've seen a few but I'm hesitant to switch over to linux again because I'm lazy and don't want to learn Linux for the billionth time.

I use AOMEI Backupper. Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty dependable, and can do regular and incremental backups with disk cleanup. I use other drives as the backup media (one HDD one SDD). I also use AOMEI Backupper's Clone feature to clone drives, especially system drives. I have three system drives, either cloned or restored from backup, and all tested. It can also backup to Cloud services including OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive, if the cloud desktop apps are installed. Testing that is the next thing on my to-do list.

 

[anne O'nymous]

I am posting this here because one of the developers of a game I love and follow, Now and Then, Kinderfeld, just had a major disaster happen with an SSD failure.

79flavors made a good post regarding this.

SSD drives, for all their advantages, are just hard drives.

And they have a way smaller lifespan than mechanical ones, especially when you make intensive use of them. It's like for RAM, the "cells" are not infinitely reusable, there's a moment where you just can't write on them anymore. Therefore, the lifespan depend of the use you make of the drive. If it's your main drive, or if it host the a cache or a temporary directory, expect it to have a three year lifespan at most. What is far from the decade (and sometime more) than a mechanical hard drive can last.

 

[79flavors]

I will now share knowledge that I have gained from doing over 20 years of tech support regarding backups. A backup system that you have not tested is not a backup system. * You absolutely must test your backup systems periodically to ensure that everything you think is being backed up is actually being backed up.

To emphasis this point, I'll share that a friend who is IT support for a medium sized company had problems about 6 years ago where the server that handled backups was hacked. Nobody noticed until around 3 months later when the hackers accessed it again to install some ransomware. The initial hack was only to ensure that the company didn't have usable backups when they actually needed them.

It's an extreme example, but it's better to learn from other people's mistakes rather than your own.
There was more than one lesson there, but I can think of other less serious examples where someone tries to restore data only to realize some minor technicality means the backup is useless.

 

[seamanq]

79flavors made a good post regarding this.
What is far from the decade (and sometime more) than a mechanical hard drive can last.

From doing years of technical support I can tell you that the only hard drives that last that long, at least in my history, were the old SCSI drives. IDE drives do not last that long for one simple reason: they are a commodity. Any time something becomes a commodity, the pressure becomes great to drive prices down, and that is what has happened with IDE drives for decades. I consider myself fortunate any more to have an IDE Drive last any longer than 3 years in heavy use. A major reason I recently switched over to (mostly) SSD drives was that my main IDE drive (which I had owned for about 3 years) started failing, big-time. That, and the performance was starting to get dog slow. In my current rig, I have a 500GB SSD as a startup, and a 500GB SSD for the working files (i.e., user files). Files that don't change much, (movies, graphics, heavy resources) are off on a different SSD drive. The 500 SSD drives are very inexpensive, so replacing them is a relatively simple and inexpensive affair, especially with plenty of redundancy and tested backups.

 

[anne O'nymous]

From doing years of technical support I can tell you that the only hard drives that last that long, at least in my history, were the old SCSI drives. IDE drives do not last that long for one simple reason: they are a commodity.

Well, the near to 15yo hard drive that serve in the proxy server, and the, hmm I bought it before my daughter's birth, so it is at least 21yo now, one that serve on my log server, are surely exceptional then... And, I know a log server don't have such drive exchange, but it served for 10 years on a NNTP (including many alt.) node/access point before this.

I consider myself fortunate any more to have an IDE Drive last any longer than 3 years in heavy use.

Well, what to say ? Stop buying shit ? Since my first PC, 30 years ago, I only lost one hard drive ; my first and only attempt with WD.
On my actual main computer, I have 6 hard drives. 2 that I bought for it, 2 that are 9 years old and was already serving on my previous main computer, and 2 that are 13yo, serving their now third main computer. And obviously, if I need so many drive, it's because I use them all everyday.
Plus, as I said above, there's computers on my LAN that have older ones, and have an heavy charge (I'm above 100 GB of daily drive transfer for the proxy).

In my current rig, I have a 500GB SSD as a startup, and a 500GB SSD for the working files (i.e., user files). Files that don't change much, (movies, graphics, heavy resources) are off on a different SSD drive.

Well, you've less storage space than the average amount of data that change weekly on my computer (around 3TB), so I guess that I have an heavier use of my drives than you, and I'm apparently also spending more on them in order to have quality products.

 

[Rafster]

Well, I use github for a cloud backup of my project, and I also do every two or three days, a manual backup of the project on a separate hard drive and an USB drive. Just in case.

 

[I'm Not Thea Lundgren!]

For mass storage, I use Enterprise level HDDs.
For everything else, I use a mix of NAS and SSD drives.

I use cloud storage for everything important (i.e. everything I have that I could do without) with backups of backups.
I use a custom-made IFTTT bot to copy Dropbox to OneDrive, then check both against a private cloud.

 

[DiviDreamer]

Is there any handy auto backup software?
Coze we all people, and it's very easy to forget to make a backup at the end of the workday

 

[Rell games]

I'm using a Mega pro account, highly recommend it to everyone. The cheapest plan (5 euros per month, but it's better to get a yearly one) you'll get 400GB of space, which is more than enough for me at the moment (My project is about 130GB). It has a real-time sync feature that uploads your files right to the cloud on every change. And if you messed up somehow, every file has a history of changes, so you can download any version of your file, not just the latest one.
But you for sure need decent internet speed. I have a 100mbit and everything works perfectly fine.

 

[seamanq]

Is there any handy auto backup software?
Coze we all people, and it's very easy to forget to make a backup at the end of the workday

I use AOMEI Backupper. There is a free version to try but the pro version has more options. I like it because if you do it correctly, it can be largely set and forget, with full backups, incremental backups, and recycle capabilities. There is a small learning curve, but it is really not that hard to learn. If you use a cloud service like OneDrive, you get a two-for-one special, as one copy of the backup is on your local hard drive, and one is in the cloud, just in case your local drive gets borked.

 

[seamanq]

I'm using a Mega pro account, highly recommend it to everyone. The cheapest plan (5 euros per month, but it's better to get a yearly one) you'll get 400GB of space, which is more than enough for me at the moment (My project is about 130GB). It has a real-time sync feature that uploads your files right to the cloud on every change. And if you messed up somehow, every file has a history of changes, so you can download any version of your file, not just the latest one.
But you for sure need decent internet speed. I have a 100mbit and everything works perfectly fine.

Anyone who already has a Microsoft 365 account (paid monthly) qualifies for up to 5TB of storage at no additional charge (1TB per user). Since I need Microsoft 365 for my "day job," it gives me up to a TB of extra backup space for $0 extra. And similar to Mega, it keeps track of all the versions of the files that you upload to it so if something goes south, you can restore a previous copy. I can't say how many times that has saved my bacon!

I actually found a heavily discounted annual subscription online that is much less than the $9.99 they want to charge a month (I think it was like $60 a year and have paid in advance for 2 years) so I am good to 2023 for software and storage, at least software Microsoft-wise.