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Spinning Rust

         

tangor

2:50 am on Jul 4, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



My dev machine originally came with a 250gb SSD that failed inside 6 months... a replacement (at great expense of time and effort to reinstall) failed in six days.

Bogus that ... so switched to 1tb spinning rust and that worked great for a few years ... then started having errors... machine went south for two weeks as I fiddled with EVERYTHING, concluding the HD really was krapped out.

During shopping to replace drive discovered pricing/etc had changed so much in the last three years the difference between a 2tb HD and 1tb SSD was like ... $10...

Well, change was made to SSD and machine is back to being perky keen ... However, I still remain leery of SSD so immediately cloned the new install to another HD and keep that on the shelf above my desk.

In the meantime, my 25 year old computer keeps on ticking (seeming slow as molasses in winter), but still works perfectly.

So, the query is, are any of you seeing failure rates increasing as pricing drops and media gets larger/faster?

Even with backups (I use spinning rust in that regard), having to replace failed gear after just a year, is a pain in the you know what!

lucy24

3:40 am on Jul 4, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



my 25 year old computer keeps on ticking
This is enormously reassuring, because mine is about 10 and I never ever want to have to replace it. Imagine if every time you got a new car you could no longer drive the familiar roads, and had to find entirely new routes to everywhere.

tangor

4:48 am on Jul 4, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Might want to know that a more capable 17 year old computer is also plugging along quite grandly.

Only thing that happens with old hardware still running is the software, at some point, diverges and one is forced to run "outdated no longer supported OS/programs" or junk it.

I keep running to "old stuff" without an internet face because the hackers and bad actors keep trying EVERYTHING. After all, they only need a cloud presence to come after you. Sigh.

iamlost

7:13 pm on Jul 4, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Many (most?) people take manufacturers’ claim for the MTBF (mean time between failures) of storage devices as how long the device will last in use... a serious misconception.

‘Mean time’ is not real time. It is more a device half life, an arithmetic mean average: for a large enough population half will fail before the stated MTBF time/usage. Aka your device is liable to fail at any moment most probably when most inconvenient.

Which is why solid RAID and/or redundant backup or similar systems are a good idea.

Nitpicking aside...

I have an antique (built in 1989) 386SX with 2MB of RAM, 512KB graphics, and 200MB HD that still gets used to play my trove of Sierra and Sid Meier games. Plus Harpoon and 688 Attack Sub, plus... Yes I have shelves of floppies.

The older the hardware the longer it will last. Otherwise known as half life survivor bias. Being an old survivor myself... now if only those cosmic rays would stop flipping my bits... where did I put my foil cap?