SSDs versus spinning-rust drives

[David Schwartz]

Not sure what you’re even talking about here.

120GB SSDs are under $20 almost everywhere, including Best Buy.

And 64gB Class 10 SD cards are under $10, which are still likely to be way faster than your old “dinosaur” can saturate.

Never mind that you can easily run a full-blown Linux distro from a 1 GB SD flash that will last at least as long as a spinning HDD. And with 8GB of RAM, it’ll be running almost entirely out of RAM and will thus run extremely fast b/c it won’t be reading from the “disk” hardly at all.

We’re not talking MEGA-BYTES here, we’re talking GIGA-BYTES. An entire Linux distro is like around 100 MEGS or so without all of the UI bloat?

The way you’re calculating what you think is risk means you should probably go back to storing your data on paper tape.

Here’s something I found that talks about SSD lifetime ratings:

https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/ssd-lifespan.html <https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/ssd-lifespan.html>

This whole thread really makes very little sense to me. Data centers (including CDNs) have been migrating to 100% SSDs on their servers for several years now because they have a longer MTBF / GB stored, they’re WAY faster, they take less power and generate far less heat.

You seem to forget … tape backup units are quite cheap and plentiful these days in case you want to save all that precious data for the inevitable “disk crash” in a few years.

And if you’ve only got 10GB of stuff saved, then heck, just buy a handful of 32GB SDs ($4/ea) and you’ll have more backup storage than you’d ever need.

SDs are the new Floppy disks for backup storage.

-David Schwartz




> On Dec 1, 2019, at 10:27 PM, Jim <azanorak at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 12/1/19 2:57 PM, Brian Cluff wrote:
>> I should add, that you can run a hybrid setup where you run your system on the SSD and put your home directory on an spinning drive.   That's actually how I have most of my systems setup as I use a HUGE amount of space.  That way all the stuff that needs to be fast is and the stuff that just needs to be stored is on the cheaper spinning disks.
> 
> This is what I do because I can't afford 10 GB of SSDs for the video and music I have stored on this dinosaur.  It's my home entertainment center. Whenever I get  a music or video disc, it gets copied to spinning rust.  This saves my optical discs free from normal wear and tear.

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