• NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
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    10 hours ago

    I doubt it. SSDs are subject to quantuum tunneling. This means if you don’t power up an SSD once in 2-5 years, your data is gone. HDDs have no such qualms. So long as they still spin, there’s your data and when they no longer do, you still have the heads inside.

    So you have a use case that SSDs will never replace, cold data storage. I use them for my cold offsite back ups.

    • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 hours ago

      Sorry dude, but bit rot is a very real thing on HDDs. They’re magnetic media, which degrades over time. If you leave a disk cold for 2-5 years, there’s a very good chance you’ll get some bad sectors. SSDs aren’t immune from bit rot, but that’s not through quantum tunneling - not any more than your CPU is affected by it at least.

      • NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
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        14 minutes ago

        I did not meant to come across as saying that HDDs don’t suffer bit rot. However, there are specific long term storage HDDs that are built specifically to be powered up sporadically and resist external magnetic influences on the track. In a proper storage environment they will last over 5 years without being powered up and still retain all information. I know it because i use them in this exact scenario for over 2 decades. Conversely there are no such long term storage SSDs.

        SSDs store information through trapped charges which most certainly lose charge through quantuum tunneling as well as generalized charge leakage. As insulation loses effectiveness, the potential barrier for the charge allows for what is normally a manageable effect, much like in the CPU like you said, to become out of the scope of error correction techniques. This is a physical limitation that cannot be overcome.

    • n2burns@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      Nothing in this article is talking about cold storage. And if we are talking about cold storage, as others gave pointed out, HHDs are also not a great solution. LTO (magnetic tape) is the industry standard for a good reason!

      • NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
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        52 minutes ago

        Tape storage is the gold standard but it’s just not realistically applicable to low scale operations or personal data storage usage. Proper long term storage HDDs do exist and are perfectly adequate to the job as i specified above and i can attest this from personal experience.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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      9 hours ago

      You’re wrong. HDD need about as much frequently powering up as SSD, because the magnetization gets weaker.

      • NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
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        42 minutes ago

        Here’s a copy paste from superuser that will hopefully show you that what you said is incorrect in a way i find expresses my thoughts exactly

        Magnetic Field Breakdown

        Most sources state that permanent magnets lose their magnetic field strength at a rate of 1% per year. Assuming this is valid, after ~69 years, we can assume that half of the sectors in a hard drive would be corrupted (since they all lost half of their strength by this time). Obviously, this is quite a long time, but this risk is easily mitigated - simply re-write the data to the drive. How frequently you need to do this depends on the following two issues (I also go over this in my conclusion).

        https://superuser.com/questions/284427/how-much-time-until-an-unused-hard-drive-loses-its-data

      • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 hours ago

        Note that for HDDs, it doesn’t matter if they’re powered or not. The platter is not “energized” or refreshed during operation like an SSD is. Your best bet is to have some kind of parity to identify and repair those bad bits.