[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> writes:

> On 05/05/2014 11:47 AM, Richard Pieri wrote:
>> Any medium can fail with no warning.
>
> Indeed, though disks frequently (usually?) degrade with warning. SMART
> monitoring can note ECC-errors, for example. And other key components
> tend to have "lifetime" reliability, i.e., CPUs and RAM and
> motherboards are usually replaced while still functioning. Fans
> sometimes die early, but usually make a hellish noise first as a
> warning.
>
> Flash is a bit unique in that it has an advertised finite life in
> write-cycles (scarily small number per-cell with modern flash) and
> though firmware cleverness extends this, they have still been observed
> to die with no warning. Very unnerving. Very trendy, too: are Mac
> notebooks even available without SSDs these days? Does Apple have some
> magic exemption to these flash problems? Very unnerving.

They do, it's called "Time Machine" which they recommend you use -- and
it makes it pretty easy to do a complete restore from there.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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