What is more reliable for long term rare used storage HDD or SSD?

Circumnavigate

Circumnavigate

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 26, 2009
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Does anyone know what would be a better option for storing backups that are rarely accessed, HDD or SSD?

I thought that SSD were supposed to be more reliable but some guy told me that if they are not fired up on occasion the data risks getting lost, does anyone know if that is true?

Also there's a bunch of people on reddit saying to go for a HDD instead of a SSD for reliability over the long term.


Does anyone know what would be the better option?
Any input would be much appreciated, thanks.
 
If your data is important, you should be validating your backups from time to time. Neither HDD nor SSD are really meant for cold storage; for that you want archival discs or tapes. But you need a lot of data for tapes to make sense, and discs work best if you don't have that much data. But even then, you'll be better served if you validate your backups from time to time... and if you have a process for that, HDD and SSD are probably fine.

Multiple copies, multiple locations, etc, etc.
 
I think it might depend on "rarely" vs "never". The zero-power failure mode for a hard drive is bearing or head seizure, for an SSD it's tunneling off the storage gate transistors. For up to maybe 6+ months, zero power, I'd take the SSD, just because it's faster and isn't subject to mechanical failure. Much beyond that, I'll take the hard drive. If you're talking years of archival storage then I think you need to be thinking optical or maybe archival grade tape.

If you can connect it to power every few months, the SSD looks a lot better.
 
Nobody knows and it doesn't matter anyway, since nothing is reliable long term.
 
If it were super critical i'd stick with a HDD. If for some abnormal reason, or idiotic reason because you don't keep multiple copies in separate places - At least you have a greater chance of forensic recovery off a classic platter based drive.
 
I would expect and simply allow a data bit rot or disk failure.
Critical is mainly an undetected bad disk.

A good solution would be a a small nas with a checksum protected ZFS 2way or better 3way mirror or Z2 software raid (or an external removeable disk case for your main NAS). If you power up this ZFS pool every few months followed by a scrub, every data failure is detected and repaired. If you encounter a disk failure you can replace the disk in time.

An additional encrypted Cloud copy is an option.
 
Like mentioned above, if long term is a requirement tape is good as well as encrypted object storage in the cloud. There's also worm optical media but I've not looked at those in ages they were cost prohibitive. I keep my old hard drives around and haven't had any not boot up that I've tried but I also dd them into images and keep them on a server so I've got a 2nd copy anyway.
 
HDD, I pulled some files for someone off an ide bigfoot 1.2gb drive that hadn't been powered in decades and it was intact.
 
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