04-02-2024, 06:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-02-2024, 06:11 PM by Mike Watterson.)
SSD is Flash, so can fade in a drawer. Writing is the most wear. Reading has little affect. I use a pair of USB Flash sticks for slide show with music to HDMI and then a DVB-T* HD H.264 modulator box with HDMI in. The Flash controllers may silently re-write or relocate blocks. There is usually no SMART data or advance warning of failure. SATA SSD is much slower than PCie NVMe. Assume you don't have latest SSD or Flash and it needs powered annually.
An HDD has mechanical parts and if dry might sit an a drawer for 40 years. They are not usually hermetically sealed, just dust proof. I've also recently read content off some 30 year old floppies I found in the attic. I've some 1970s audio cassettes and 1960s reel to reel. Magnetic media in a box can be durable. Newer HDDs have smart controllers and might 'silently' relocate content. The SMART utility on a SATA HDD tells you lots. Most USB adaptors don't expose SMART data. An unused HDD may not wear out at all. There are cheap adaptors for PATA IDE that work on SATA hosts. SCSI cards are getting scarce and might need a PCI rather than PCI-e slot. I have a PCMCIA dual height USB interface for HDDs or Flash cards (a CF adaptor works in it). It doesn't support any other kind of PCMCIA device. Older MFM drives will need an MFM controller and likely an ISA slot. All sizes of floppy, but not all formats, will work with a Mobo 34 way floppy port, but a USB floppy drive only works FAT12 DOS.
So the issue is interface.
Power on/off is the most wear on a an HDD, spinning is 2nd most wear (bearings, not surface as the head flies), track access seeks is the 3rd most wear (bearings etc, not actual head or surface).
My main workstation and laptop are both hybrid. That's PCIe NVMe SSD for boot/OS and much cheaper per G Byte HDD for user data (on Linux it has /home and /var). The HDD SATA have SMART which can give advance warning of failure. I have separate backups of OS and user data (which includes entire Win XP (x2), 7 & 10 VMs on Linux) and use rsync for backups / sync between workstation, server in attic and main laptop. The workstation used for the old SCSI scanner and old Digital 8 camera Firewire rarely has any installs other than updates and any user scans/firewire transfers, image edits or video edits are copied to the main workstation. It has an actually cloned SATA HDD (by occasionally connecting to internal SATA port and using a Linux disk manager). Actual OS backups are done with Linux TimeShift. The physical Win98, XP, Win7 desktops and Win10 laptop are essentially 'disposable' and all the install applications installers and user data is on the server (which gets backed up and has content from ancestor servers back to about 1994, a 386 with NT 3.5).
[* Irish SD & HD both use DVB-T H.264, not DVB-T2, but I think all DVB-T2 sets do DVB-T HD H.264. The cheap €15 approx DVB-T USB sticks often used for SDR do work on HD here as the USB data is normally the MPEG-2 Transport stream, not the demuxed & decoded data]
An HDD has mechanical parts and if dry might sit an a drawer for 40 years. They are not usually hermetically sealed, just dust proof. I've also recently read content off some 30 year old floppies I found in the attic. I've some 1970s audio cassettes and 1960s reel to reel. Magnetic media in a box can be durable. Newer HDDs have smart controllers and might 'silently' relocate content. The SMART utility on a SATA HDD tells you lots. Most USB adaptors don't expose SMART data. An unused HDD may not wear out at all. There are cheap adaptors for PATA IDE that work on SATA hosts. SCSI cards are getting scarce and might need a PCI rather than PCI-e slot. I have a PCMCIA dual height USB interface for HDDs or Flash cards (a CF adaptor works in it). It doesn't support any other kind of PCMCIA device. Older MFM drives will need an MFM controller and likely an ISA slot. All sizes of floppy, but not all formats, will work with a Mobo 34 way floppy port, but a USB floppy drive only works FAT12 DOS.
So the issue is interface.
Power on/off is the most wear on a an HDD, spinning is 2nd most wear (bearings, not surface as the head flies), track access seeks is the 3rd most wear (bearings etc, not actual head or surface).
My main workstation and laptop are both hybrid. That's PCIe NVMe SSD for boot/OS and much cheaper per G Byte HDD for user data (on Linux it has /home and /var). The HDD SATA have SMART which can give advance warning of failure. I have separate backups of OS and user data (which includes entire Win XP (x2), 7 & 10 VMs on Linux) and use rsync for backups / sync between workstation, server in attic and main laptop. The workstation used for the old SCSI scanner and old Digital 8 camera Firewire rarely has any installs other than updates and any user scans/firewire transfers, image edits or video edits are copied to the main workstation. It has an actually cloned SATA HDD (by occasionally connecting to internal SATA port and using a Linux disk manager). Actual OS backups are done with Linux TimeShift. The physical Win98, XP, Win7 desktops and Win10 laptop are essentially 'disposable' and all the install applications installers and user data is on the server (which gets backed up and has content from ancestor servers back to about 1994, a 386 with NT 3.5).
[* Irish SD & HD both use DVB-T H.264, not DVB-T2, but I think all DVB-T2 sets do DVB-T HD H.264. The cheap €15 approx DVB-T USB sticks often used for SDR do work on HD here as the USB data is normally the MPEG-2 Transport stream, not the demuxed & decoded data]
