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You are entirely correct, however most consumers would take the loss and discard the data rather than replace a drive controller or salvage the platters. That's something they would need to hire an expensive data recovery service for.

If you're a business or a professional then certainly HDDs provide you with more recovery opportunities.

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It's certainly interesting how failure modes play out for consumers given that they more often run drives to some failure..

While I wouldn't buy a HDD as a consumer, I think they are all around better from this angle. Many consumers actually did pay to have a thesis retrieved from HDDs when laptops were still using them and the partial media failure offering a data retrieval is basically the same bad option often presented on either.

(The article is out of date and I would suspect SSDs have improved at a faster rate than HDDs since, but some of that improvement will have been redirected to make even cheaper consumer options.)

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