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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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I'm fed up with external hard drives. Every single one I get fails within 2 years. I got a Western Digital "my passport" 2TB hard drive and it only took a year to start making loud clicking noises (failure imminent). Are there any ones out there that are actually built to last, or am I just unlucky?
Get a cheap 2.5" SATA enclosure or an m.2 enclosure and throw a real SSD in it. That's what I've been doing and I get significantly higher speeds for significantly cheaper, as well as not having any fail on me
Yep. A good enclosure with a well rated drive in it is the way to go. Easy peasy to put together and/or pull apart if something goes wrong or you want to upgrade your storage capacity.
Dont use SSDs for offline backups. The flash storage can experience random bit flips if not powered on every now and then.
Do you have more info?
The minimum specs I've seen for NAND flash chips are 10 year retention time at room temperature.
Being powered on isn't enough to change this, the firmware would have to be actively reading, erasing and writing blocks of data to refresh them. I'm sure there are some that will do this, but it would increases some other data loss risks, wear rates and power draw; so I suspect (?) it's not universal.
My professor told me this fact in class, but upon searching for papers I did not find anything to support it.
So probably you are right.
Me having some datasheets that claim one thing doesn't mean it applies to everything and every implementation. Your prof might be right.