windu190 Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 Recently my 4TB HDD external drive died. Out of the blue, for no apparent reason and it was only a few months old. So considering the fact these things can apparantly do that I really don't trust these things anymore and I'm looking for alternate means of storing large amounts of data. I'm thinking of getting a external SSD. One to begin with, more later since these SSD are very small (compared to 4TB drives) and expensive for some reason. But now to the big question.. Are SSD's more reliable? Or are they just as likely to just die for no apparent reason. Now I heard that a possible cause could have been the fact that I often moved it around (to other computers), very carefully I might add, but still I did not leave it in one place. The reason I got an external hard drive is because I thought it would keep my data safe and mobile. So if something where to happen to my PC, I at least still have my data. And should I ever need my data elsewhere, I can just take it somewhere else. So.. are SSD's more reliable and durable?
Min Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 All drives can (and will) eventually fail. It's just a matter of when. Backups are key. Local RAID systems can help to mitigate drive failure as well, though don't mitigate other data loss risks (Fire, theft, etc).
Gagoloth Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 for a external storage device id just stick with an hdd. External solid stats around 1tb or more can cost on the upwards of a grand or more compared to an external hdd which will only cost around 150-500$ for a 4TB. Also do research on hdd/sdd before you buy them. Id like to make a suggestion to stay away from Seagate drives. These trend to be cheaper to buy but have very high failure rates. Also you can look at this article.
Guest toymachine Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 Seagate 1TB HDD going over 6 years and have been through countless months of PC idled. I trust Seagate as much as I prefer FSP group PSUs over any other brand.
bjornk Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 Even though I do it myself, I don't think using one large external drive to store or back up all your data is a good idea. 2 x 2GB, or even better 4 x 1GB would probably be a safer solution for external storage or some RAID 1 NAS device.
windu190 Posted October 6, 2015 Author Posted October 6, 2015 Even though I do it myself, I don't think using one large external drive to store or back up all your data is a good idea. 2 x 2GB, or even better 4 x 1GB would probably be a safer solution for external storage or some RAID 1 NAS device. This is probably the solution I'm going to use. Use a whole bunch of smaller drives instead of one big drive.
Guest Posted October 6, 2015 Posted October 6, 2015 SSD drives are a little bit more reliable because they have no mechanical parts. But the RAID solution is for sure better. The best option for a RAID is a RAID5, while at least 3 drives are in parallel (and one has a check of the other two.) In this case if one drive fails, you can recover the content of the other two drives. Only one small caveat: if one drive fails, and you have exactly a same drive to replace it, then the recovery is seamless. but if you cannot find a replacement drive, then you have to create another drive (RAID or not) that is big enough to recover your other 2 drives space, and then restore the data, then build again one RAID drive.
bjornk Posted October 6, 2015 Posted October 6, 2015 Unfortunately, even RAID systems can fail unrecoverably. It's best to keep multiple backups of your important data.
Guest Posted October 6, 2015 Posted October 6, 2015 Unfortunately, even RAID systems can fail unrecoverably. It's best to keep multiple backups of your important data. Holy truth. The RAID5 recovers if just one of the drives fails. RAID1 too, but they consumes 50% of space for recovery, while RAID5 are a little bit more power consuming but loses only 33% of space for recovery.
pinky6225 Posted October 6, 2015 Posted October 6, 2015 Unless you've got plenty of money to spend you will struggle to get a SSD above 1 TB, the few that i saw are roughly £320 ($488) so to get 4 TB of storage your talking $1280 (or roughly $2,000)
windu190 Posted October 6, 2015 Author Posted October 6, 2015 Yeah I'm probably going to get a bunch of smaller HDD's connected to a USB hub.
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