I had to search around and feel like a dork not knowing this. I have my data backed up, but I keep the SSDs because it's nice to have the OS running like it was... I guess I need to be cloning the drives to ISOs and storing on spinning rust.
I had to search around and feel like a dork not knowing this. I have my data backed up, but I keep the SSDs because it's nice to have the OS running like it was... I guess I need to be cloning the drives to ISOs and storing on spinning rust.
I learned this when both my old laptops would no longer boot after extended off power time (couple years). They were both stored in a working state and later both had SSDs that were totally dead.
Were the SSDs toasted, or were you able to reinstall to them?
I could be wrong, but I believe the general consensus is along the lines of "SSDs for in-use data, it's quicker and wants to be powered on often. HDDs for long-term storage, as they don't degrade when not in use nearly as fast as SSDs do.
I'd imagine HDDs also don't like not spinning for years(as mechanical elements generally like to be used from time to time). But at least platters itself are intact
I've been going through stack of external USB drives with laptop disks in them. They're all failing in some form or another. I'm going to have to migrate it all to a NAS with server-class drives I guess
At the very least, you can usually still get the data off of them. Most SSDs I've encountered with defects failed catastrophically, rendering the data completely inaccessible.
or you could power them on 1-2x /year.
Power them on and run something to exercise the read function over every bit. Thats why a ZFS filesystem integrity check/scrub is the useful model.
I'm unsure if dd if=/the/disk of=/dev/null does the read function.
why would it not? it's a low level tool to do exactly that. you could "of" it to somewhere else if you're worried it's not. I like to | hexdump -C, on an xterm set to a green font on a black background for a real matrix movie kind of feel.