In Defence of "Spinning Rust"
I've rarely lost any data with "traditional" or "old" drives
Having published 156 pages/articles last week, we're happy to say that we expect an even higher publication pace in weeks to come, as we finally set aside a secondary task and are now making full backups of all the laptops, then backups of other backup drives (we have 4 functioning ones in total, but 2 are over a decade old, hence too risky to rely on). So far it's going well and we still think of an offsite backup solution which would be safe; that's aside from technical safety. See, offsite backups can be a "social engineering" peril as much as anything else. Can you trust some place or person with your encrypted drive? What if that drive itself become unavailable? What if bits "flip"?
Based on my readings, which cover tapes (magnetic), SSDs and other technologies, the same old "spinning rust" still has many advantages. It's still used and still purchased a lot (even with the demeaning, derogatory term "spinning rust") because there's an appeal; when I had a faulty Seagate drive and after some insistence Seagate sent me a replacement (it was within the warranty window), so I generally trust Seagate to correct things when they go wrong (I blogged a lot about it over a decade ago). Benchmarks say that longevity-wise, SSDs may last longer, but when things go wrong, they can go very wrong. Recovery is not always possible, as I know from personal experiences with SSDs. The same is true for SD cards and microSD etc.
I've lost track of how many times the "new" and "modern" things just suddenly failed, leaving no obvious way to recover, ameliorate, or dump partial/complete data before decommissioning.
This relates to what we wrote yesterday about "Ageism in Tech". Just because something is "old" (or older) doesn't mean it ought to become extinct. █