We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD
theverge.com
theverge.com
In your small sample size maybe.
About 1/4 of hard drives I buy die in the first 24 hours since I unsportingly run badblocks on them to see whether they're on the start of the failure curve.
There are probably better stress test approaches out there. The basic idea is to find out if your drive is one that'll die early before putting a load of data you want to keep on it.
I don't do this to ssd as they have lowish write limits anyway, so I just assume any data written to a ssd will vanish at some point. Hard drives in a network share, ssd in dev machines treated as scratch storage.
It's on the TrueNAS forum, but it'll work on basically any Linux system. I'm currently using Unraid, which is based on Slackware.
(I must be luckier than the parent, because I've only had a single drive in a dozen or more die during testing - and that was a used one off ebay!)
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/22/23733267/sandisk-extreme-...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds...
So it’s at least 2 drives in a row in a short period of time. Statistically that will happen, but it’s like gambling - if you win too much you get shot.
I just lost a 4 years worth of my kid's videos. I will never forgive WD.
Edit: I just forgot to add that my old WD HD (bought around 2009-ish) is still working. But reading the contents will take hours. But the point is the quality of WD has gone downhill.
I'm sorry, but your fate was sealed the moment you decided that one copy was sufficient. Drives can fail randomly, so keeping valuable data on one without redundancy will virtually guarantee that you will lose data at some point in time. Just be thankful that you learned your lesson and it only cost 4 years worth of videos. If it happened 3 years down the line it could easily have been 7 years worth of videos.
My entire 100,000 photos, 20 year library is now in iCloud photos. It's constantly synced and backed up to icloud. Then I have it pulled down in full to a mac that then backs up to backblaze.
Lots of ways to do it, but thats one. :)
For $5-10/month you can get unlimited backup from a machine with Backblaze including your external drives.
Personally, I use a portable HD (spinning rust kind, not SSD) to do regular backups of my PC, but the portable HD itself is also backed up onto another portable HD.
I will say that the warranty service was quite good, but given the below-zero level of trust I have in SanDisk post WD acquisition, the replacement drive is going to be basically fulfilling the role of “paperweight and very oversized temporary USB drive for ephemeral sneakernet transfers”.
Bought a pair of Samsung T7’s to replace it, no issues with them so far.
I still use spinning rust as my primary back up --- arranged in a redundant array with offset manufacture dates.
You will still need to set up either BTRFS or ZFS to avoid silent Data corruption which is happening more often than most people know. And you have to set it up to scrub it from time to time. It isn't automatic.
Arguably the cheapest solution that hit the above bar would be Synology DS223J at $180, their newest entry model with BTRFS support ( on a fairly old Linux Kernel, I think it is 5.10 that will never get updated again in the life time of the product ). You will still need to buy 2 HDD in redundant RAID and set it up yourself. And it is quite bulky as well.
Hardly consumer friendly. And that is before 99.9999% on HN jumping on you, telling you need another backup for this NAS, or another off line, third location devices....
It is sad, not only just consumer. Judging by the number of comment here plenty in the tech industry simply uses an additional copy, or external SSD devices as backup. And I can understand why, but there simply isn't a simple, easy to use consumer solution that offer enough security for a reasonable price.
And I have been stating this for more than a decade already. Your Kids's video are worth a lot more than you can imagine. Tried explaining it to your wife some of those video are gone.
They're very similar drives (AFAICT, WD Gold is just a Red Pro but with a higher lifetime r/w rating) but it makes me feel a bit better that they're not from too similar of batches without having to actually temporally space out my purchases. I can buy 1 of each in the same cart.
And then for truly unrecoverable data, I back it up to S3 Deep Archive which seems to be one of AWS's only reasonably priced offerings. Don't ask me how much it's cost in egress bandwidth to pull it all back though. I'm hoping if I end up needing it I'll be grateful enough for my foresight to justify paying it.
What I do is build one good drive array then each machine gets a cheap local drive and can access the good drive via network and I don't have to spend too much putting redundancy in each machine. Now... "looks around embarrassedly" time to work on that backup system.
Yet the same drive works flawlessly in an Intel laptop. I think the m.2 to USB bridge chip inside might be the issue.
Bad drive runs happen. They’ve been happing a LOOONG time. If it’s important, dupe or raid.
Otherwise, expect to lose the data. It’s just a matter of time.
Lots of film and audio gear has a double recording option for just this reason.
I’m sorry the author has to relearn this lesson the hard way!
SSD manufacturers are well aware of what their drives should do. But they are also aware that to get sales they need to win benchmarks, and that to do that they cut corners with data integrity.
A benchmark of a drive should involve a heavy workload with a random drive hard and unplanned poweroff every 30 seconds. The drive should never lose a single fsync'ed byte.
The drive should also be put in hot/cold cycling chambers. And in radiation chambers. And journalists should publish which drives meet their obligations despite all the adverse (yet still in spec) conditions they're put through.
I bet no ssd for sale today could survive all 3 tests above for a month and still get okayish performance without data loss.
When the review sites only review one thing, corners get cut to make that one thing look good.
Any honest manufacturer who did what they thought was best for the customer, not what got them the best reviews, went bankrupt long ago.