[sf-lug] How not to do main storage (waas: Belated writeup of last SF-LUG meeting)

[Akkana Peck]

Rick Moen writes:
[sensible explanation of why consumer USB sticks aren't reliable for
use as main disks]
> By contrast, an SSD carefully addresses all of those things, which was
> only questionably true of first-generation SSDs, but ...

That reminds me of one other thing I wanted to ask. In another thread you said

> "old hard drives that get powered down may not come up again upon
> restart (the "head stiction" problem)".

Is that oldness measured in years, in power cycles, or in total spinning time? How old is old?

I do my backups (home system, not talking enterprise here) to a small number of external USB hard drives, rotating them with one always offsite. The oldest is maybe 10 years old. They're powered off except when actually backing up. Whichever one is offsite goes months without being powered up.

Should I be worried about stiction, and retire these disks when they reach a certain age? Should I replace them all with SSDs now that SSDs have gotten sufficiently cheap? Is there even any data on long-term SSD longevity and how it compares to spinning disks?

A web search on head stiction found mostly hand-waving and anecdata.

        ...Akkana