Storage Media Life Expectancy: SSDs, HDDs & More!
Lifespan of hard drives, SSDs, and other magnetic, solid state and optical media.
My 2023 video “Explaining SSDs” is here:
• Explaining SSDs: The P...
And my previous video on M-Disc is here:
• Archiving with M-Disc
I also have a related data retention video called “Cyber Security: Backups & Encryption”: • Cyber Security: Backup...
SELECTED REFERENCES
Arcserve “Data Storage Lifespans”: www.arcserve.com/blog/data-st...
Backblaze “Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2023”: www.backblaze.com/blog/backbl...
Backblaze “How Long do Disk Drives Last?”: www.backblaze.com/blog/how-lo...
Canadian Conversation Institute “Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays”: www.canada.ca/en/conservation...
CLIR “How Long Can You Store CDs and DVDs and Use Them Again?”: www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub...
Easeus “Does and SSD Need Power to Retain Data?”: www.easeus.com/resource/does-...
Easeus “How Long Do Hard Drives or External Hard Drives Last (If Unused)”: www.easeus.com/storage-media-...
ELinfor “Flash memory data retention and integrity technology”: www.elinfor.com/knowledge/fla...
Enterprise Storage Forum: “Life Expectancy of a Drive: HDD, SSD, and Flash”: www.enterprisestorageforum.co...
Google Patents “Patrol function used in flash storage controller to detect data errors”: patents.google.com/patent/US2...
IBM “Potential for SSD data loss after extended shutdown”: www.ibm.com/support/pages/pot...
IEEE Xplore “Data retention in MLC NAND flash memory”: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/...
IONAS “How Long is SSD Life Span?”: www.ionos.co.uk/digitalguide/...
JEDEC “JECEC SSD Specifications Explained”: www.jedec.org/sites/default/f...
Micron “Comparing SSD and HDD Endurance in the Age of QLC SSDs”: www.micron.com/-/media/client...
Pioneer “BDRZ13”: www.pioneerelectronics.com/PU...
Robots.net “How Long Can SSD Hold Data Without Power”: robots.net/tech/how-long-can-...
SD Association “FAQ”: www.sdcard.org/consumers/faq/
Secure Data Recovery “How Long do Hard Drives Last”: www.securedatarecovery.com/bl...
Segate “Establishing Industry Endurance Standards for Solid State Storage”: www.seagate.com/files/staticf...
Superuser “Lifespan of an SSD (NAND Flash) for minimal write use archive purposes”: superuser.com/questions/13344...
Superuser “SSD Data Refresh”: superuser.com/questions/92308...
TechTarget “What is NAND Flash wear-out?”: www.techtarget.com/searchstor...
Total Data Migration “Storage Lifespan FAQs - Tape Data Services”: totaldatamigration.com/storag...
TechTarget “Charge trap technology advantages for 3D NAND flash drives”: www.techtarget.com/searchstor...
More videos on computing and related topics can be found at:
/ @explainingcomputers
You may also like my ExplainingTheFuture channel at: / @explainingthefuture
Chapters:
00:37 Data Survival (overview)
02:25 Hard Drive Life Expectancy
07:07 Other Magnetic Storage
08:15 SSD Life Expectancy
13:30 Flash Drives & Memory Cards
14:17 CDs, DVDs & Blu-Ray
17:04 Data Immortality
#SSD #Lifespan #HDD #DVD #Blu-Ray #ExplainingComputers
You are one of the real gems of KZhead. No annoying background music or distracting jump cuts, just solid information backed with sources. Thank you.
Agreed!
Absolutely.
Yup, like my Professor in College, he is with Class, Professional and Integrity... Not toxified by Modern Clown Media...
Truth
Aye for sure
Moral of the story? Back up your data in more than one format and in more than one place. And choose your storage medium based on the criticality of the data. Great video!
Absolutly! The best defense is multiple backups!
I had few golden CD-R discs that started to rot physically after couple of years and small holes started to form on the data layer, very reliable heh
@@YoStu242Depends on the maker and the quality. I have cd's that are over 7 years old that still work to this day. I also bought cheaper ones that became unreadable after a year.
@@retropcscotland4645 7 years? I have regular consumer-grade CD-Rs from 20 years ago that are still fine.
alternative moral of the story: properly archived data will outlive any disc drive on the market 😎
Suddenly, I feel the urgency to print out my pictures of happy gatherings, to be stored in good old-fashioned photo albums.
that's actually a very very good idea (he said coming from 40 megabyte disc land 35 years or more ago) I favour photobooks and the best pics that are shining out amongst the rubbish...remember the 36 frame 35mm Fuji or Kodak film stock that used to make you a good photographer?????
Optical Disc's such as DVD and Blu-ray M-Disc should work great as a long term data archival backup.
Don't use an inkjet printer
@@sir.fender6034 I would prefer cheaper LTO drives please.
You can store pics with a cloud provider and let them worry about replacing their infrastructure on a regular basis. The cost is minimal to the consumer compared to the effort, time and expense involved in trying to maintain adequate physical backups locally.
This channel never fails to bring me back to the early 2000s
Re HDD life. Im a DC engineer for a US bank and we have a couple of Compaq ML370 servers running on their original 9.1GB 15,000rpm drives. Now 22 years old !.
I would withdraw the money from my account before it crash...! 👀
I have some macs from the 90s with original working drives
@@JeSuisUnePatateRAID is the key. Redundancy
@@I_am_RazielOnly if your house doesn't burn down or the PC is stolen
@@zetectic7968 Correct. Assumuming that. But then the PC would be the least of the problems.
I guess two of the pyramids at Gizeh are for backup only.
🤣
17:00 for the reference
The small one has the checksums.
I recently pulled out a batch of old 5.25" floppies from the eighties. I was shocked to find most of them still work.
If you want to save the data from the non-working ones, I have a trick for you. It worked for me practically every time for C64 floppies, so it probably works OK with PC DD disks (not sure how well it works with HD disks though). Cut open the disk envelope, and the envelope of an other, preferably NOS sacrificial disk. Wash your hands, and remove the disk from the envelope, lay it on the table with soft, lint free cloth or soft paper towel underneath the disk. Spray some Windex on the disk surface, and wipe it gently but thoroughly with a soft paper towel, both sides of course, dry it with a hair dryer on the lowest heat setting (carefully, from at least 10"), then insert the disk in the new envelope and read it. I had many unreadable C64 disks that I found on cleanup day 20+ years ago, and they were stored on an attic. I used an archival software and a 1541 connected to my PC via the parallel port. The software reads the disk and shows which sectors are used, empty or unreadable. Some disks had 80+% unreadable sectors, and even most of those came up 100% readable after the cleaning. I guess the Windex removed the loose magnetic particles from the top layer that were constantly clogging the head. The paper towel had brown residue on it after every cleaned disk. It's very important to use a fresh, clean envelope for reading the cleaned disks, as the old envelope is probably contaminated with loose magnetic particles. You don't have to sacrifise a new disk for every cleaned disk, you can use one clean envelope for almost unlimited number of cleaned disks.
@@mrnmrn1 That is a good advice.
I have a 1990's McAfee anti-virus 5.25" disk that still works. Used about 5x total. Only read from. Dust free... It may be the more they're used the less they last.
@@mikeb3172 Of course excessive use will wear out floppies, but even brand new ones will fail if they were stored under bad conditions. I have bought brand new floppies that were moldy.
did any of them have data on them?
Excellent as usual. The data fade issue is there for tapes as well as oxide decay when the oxide layer no longer adheres to the mylar rendering the media unusable. Tape was also known for “print thru” where data one layer of the tape could affect the adjacent layer. Archive tapes used to be rewound once a year to prevent this problem.
NO data fade with HDD 👌
I worked at the Met Office in the late 90s, They were storing archived meteorological data on magnetic tape which could be retrieved by a robotic system called COSMOS. There is a salt mine in Cheshire where government departments and banks etc store their computer backups underground given the stable geology and high security available.
I am still working on mainframes... we still use Tape drives too for archive. 😂
I also need to dig my personal salt mine or coal mine to store my back up data.
Mmmm. Salty backups.
A couple of those salt mines were converted to hold the nations gas reserves….. but guess what, when Russia cut us short the reserves were empty and not been filled due to our wonderful governments shortsightedness
Some of those old cave paintings are still hanging in there.
In the 2000s DVDs were amazing for data backup. You could get a 50 pack for a few bucks and each one had 4.7GB which was huge back then. Just imagine what a modern equivalent could hold if the capacity continued to scale
Yeah I'd love a 5TB DVD. Even Blu-Ray disks are only 25GB or 50GB which is puny nowadays. On a positive note I have literally dozens of old flash drives from 1999 - 2004. I just finally backed them all up and the data was intact in all of them! I don't know if flash drives are made as high quality nowadays though. I paid like $400 for a 128MB flash drive back then. Maybe one of the reason they were so expensive is they were based on SLC memory? Cheap flash drives nowadays are absolute garbage.
There was a recent announcement of scientists developing a 125TB optical disc. Unfortunately they're in China so you know it's not real.
It has continued to scale. There is Blue Ray and M-DISC
Nah, not really. It's pretty hard to get much more that 25GB per layer since that would require UV lasers and the whole shebang that follows. There have been experimental and proposed higher capacity optical storage media, but.... don't expect them to hit the shelves anytime soon.....
@@thelbtloverI have cd and dvd from that time. Many do not work anymore.
I happened on ExplainingComputers while researching this very topic and I became an instant fan. The information is clearly transmitted and the sharp sense of humor was like watching a great video that not only informs but entertains too. Thanks for the updated video!
Yeah, it's perfect timing for me as well. I've just set up a server with a harddisk for backup and as a media library and was wondering how to actually backup that drive reliably and affordably because a lot of data, like a lot of older movies, I put on it is now only on that drive and on the original media and I had no idea how long that would be reliable. I assumed it's not forever, which is why I digitalized it in the first place to figure the rest out later. Which happened to be now, apparently 🤣
Hello Chris. I have a deskstar hard drive from 2006. it has worked for more than 94,000 hours. and it still works today.
Not bad! Ive got a 400gb hitachi deskstar from 2005 that currently shows 87,000~ power on hours and 0 bad sectors. Ive had it in 3 different PC builds over the years and it currently is used to store games and non critical data on my most recent build. Thing is dang near silent and works flawlessly still! Hitachi makes great hard drives!!!
Deskstar?? Lucky you didn’t get the 80 gbyte ones. Those self-erased with a 100% failure rate within a year :D … we had four at our business -_-
I am still using the same hitachi 80gb sata drive from 2006 in my new computer so there goes your theory....
@@igorb2674 Nupe, not theory, fact. It only affected drives before 2002 though. Look up *IBM Deskstar 75GXP* ... nicknamed 'Death Star'. Wikipedia has neat photos of what happened on their insides... they literally self-destruct on use :D
@@igorb2674 IBM Deskstar 75GXP ... look it up. Love how facts are opinions here.
Good video. As far as data backup goes , I always subscribe to the 3-2-1 aproch :- Keep 3 copies On atleast 2 different types of media. 1. Of them stored off site. I guess you could count something like Google drive as the off site. As far as lifespan goes , i have VHS tapes that still viewable after 40+ years. the analogue nature of the data probably help. In that it dose not need to be bit perfect to still play.
@@user-zf8ki1cx2w I have scotch E180 with the BBC nuclear war move "THREADS" on it recorded on September 24 1984. kzhead.info/sun/dLBsndSyeKh-eXk/bejne.htmlsi=B20Ojeo__DFO3K9m
@@user-zf8ki1cx2wkzhead.info/sun/dLBsndSyeKh-eXk/bejne.htmlsi=B20Ojeo__DFO3K9m
VHS might still play but the recording quality probably slowly degrade due to magetic dissipation.
@@alexxx4434 I had a box of 30x5.25 disks forgotten for 20 plus years. Took the disks out, turned the packets upside down and there was a noticeable oxide powder on the desk.
" the analogue nature of the data probably help. In that it does not need to be bit perfect to still play." Nor does digital data - in that the vast majority of digital storage systems (especially CDs and later versions thereof) have error-correcting encoding, which can detect errors, and correct for them. It's when that algorithm falls over due to a too-high error rate that gives us the "digital cliff", i. e. deterioration is undetectable until it suddenly falls off altogether. (For TV transmission, I actually preferred the gradual deterioration of analogue - you got some warning, unlike with digital TV it's fine until it suddenly cuts out!)
My oldest drive (WD Elements, 1TB) has been running since 2009. No bad sectors yet.
Mines from 2013 still works
8GB sandisk sdcard on a Pi from 2012.
I've got a 1TB WD Elements, too, probably the same age and it's also running fine. (knock on silicon)
LOL. I have WD My Passport 1TB. Twice. First one I bought in 2019, then the other I bought in mid 2023. All not recognized/failed just a month ago.
@@Etendard1708 some seagate and wd have defective spindle bearing on 2.5 inch models, I dropped mine on a wooden table to free it and recover files then dispose. Freezer method may work too.
Something really important about this topic is that hard drives tend to fail on a bathtub curve. That is, either very very early in life or well out of warranty. It's definitely not a very normal distribution. That's why Backblaze's data suggested most drives last over 6 years yet their average lifespan was less than 3. This definitely makes the numbers harder to reason about.
**FACEPALM** You describe what you WANT TO see and not what the data says. Also what they(the researcher) gives as an estimate is of course no 1:1 explanation of their results, but a simplification, ballpark numbers or broke down best-practices. So to say: Subjective interpretations. You took the simplification, the analogy, the over-simplified conclusion and ignored the data. Or somehow thought their abstract IS the data? I do not even know if this is just stoopid or a satire, or ignorance?:) Also: Whatever you misunderstood about mathematics can be hopefully helped with by this: They took a small sample of 20k data points. Get a million or 10 and you will have your Gaussian normal distribution, which will in fact refute your conclusion. Also: You ignored everything that doesn't support your claim. Are you sure that you know what the word "reason" actually means? Hehehehe. Oh and just out of curiosity: Have you RTFM? Have you actually read the article or seen the raw data? NO! Because nothing there leads to the conclusions you made when digested and understood as a report you had read from the beginning to the end!
This is not about to laugh over you, but that you laugh with me: For example, take the time and have a look at "Backblaze Drive Stats for 2023" (or any of the other 20 or more reports). What do we see? Many many bell shaped curves. Should I lend you my glasses?!:) (The mentioned data: If you are interested, the data is available for free download under "Hard Drive Data and Stats", "Downloading the Raw HD Test Data")
@@dieSpinnt This comment reads like AI generated nonsense.
No, the Bathtub curve has nothing to do with the disrepancy between the numbers. Their data showed that 65%+ of all drives they installed were still going after 6+ years. Seperate from that it showed that the average lifespan of all drives that did fail was 2 years and 6 Months. That average is only of the 35% failed drives, excluding the ones still going. As a quick reality check, with more than 50%of drives reaching 6 or more years of age, the average lifespan off all installed drives could not be 2.5 years. For comparison, even assuming all 35% that failed before the 6 year mark failed on the very first day, and the remaining 65%failed on the first day of their 6th year, the avergae lifespan of all installed drives would be 3.9 years.
@@dieSpinnt This is easily the most vocal idiotic comments here. A bathtub curve of failure incident will easily correspond to a normal curve of life span, they are two different metrics.
SSD can loose data if unpowered for more then a year. - Hope they explain in detail about this. I use one for back up that sits in a drawer.
I'd like a more in-depth explanation about this as well, but I do know that the data is written and stored in electrically charged flash memory. It just makes sense to me that an SSD won't hold onto data for long periods unless there's a special configuration for this, but then they'd likely have instructions to tell you when you should hook up the SSD to a power source.
I'm now powering my backup SSD as soon as I heard it.
12:30
Depends on the grade of the SSD. My 256GB Intel 2.5" Enterprise/Data-Center Class D3-S4610 SSD from my 2015-2019 build sat unused in a box from 2019 until recently, & I just recently started using it again in a 2.5 USB enclosure & it works fine. Also, even after 4 years of active gaming/stream/home use (2015-2019) as the boot drive for my PC, it only used about 1.3% of its rated endurance (which is 1600TB written). Professional-grade SSD's FTW - they are worth the extra money for peace of mind.
@@dystopia-usaI think they "might fail". I had an unused USB flash drive for 10 years and it retained data/worked fine. It stores data in a similar way as an SSD.
My CD from Uni back in 2000 luckily lasted for over 20 years. Its still readable but now backed up.
Hey Chris.Great update to a very important topic. After your earlier video on this topic, I purchased an MDISC player and some MDISC DVR optical disks. They have proved to be a solid and reliable storage option, although the ones I bought only store 4.76 G at 4X speed. But when backing up important data, I am never in a hurry. It is also good you cleared up some confusion about SSD storage. I have always thought SSD's were less long term storage than HD's. But this video helps shed some light on that. After watching this video, I realized I need to power up some older 1.5 TB archive drives I haven't spun up in at least 2 years! It will be interesting to see if the data on them is still intact! Anyway, thanks for another super video! Take Good Care Chris.
PLEASE PROVE IT BY MAKING A TORRENT LINK WITH ALL YOUR DATA INCLUDING BANKING INFORMATION, YOUR CATS DATA OF BIRTH, YOUR MOTHERS FAVORITE FOOD AND WHERE YOU LIVE AS A TORRENT LINK AND PASTE IT AS A REPLY TO THIS REPLY.
Many filesystems dont have mechanisms for spotting small data corruptions and many more that theoretically support it dont do it automatically. I would suggest to look into which filesystem you used to store the data and research if it has one of these self-heal or corruption spotting mechanisms and if it is automatic or manual.
@@ComputerHead0001
This will be a long comment, but I figure I have some personal observations that might offer a few data points. For context, I've been using and maintaining computers since I was young(early 1990s), own a significant personal collection of computers(and drives) dating from the mid 1990s to current, and work for a medium-sized organization as an IT hardware manager. Long term storage of data on HDDs is a bit of a mixed bag. I was able to retrieve a full disk image of an HDD I used in a computer I owned when I was in high school(about 1999 or so) and retrieve practically everything. I also bought a machine last year whose drive was replaced in 1998 and used up to around 1999-2000 and hadn't been touched since; that data was still intact. However, most drives I have from the late '90s to early '00s have also experienced mechanical or controller failures that have rendered them inoperable; I highly suspect most of them weren't stored all that well. Modern HDDs tend to be significantly longer-lived as long as they don't experience early mechanical failures. I have laptop HDDs that I purchased around 2008 that are still working perfectly; they have long since been moved to external enclosures but I've used them to archive software installers and some other data for the past ten years and I haven't had a problem(yet). I also have a couple of 4TB drives that have been in my primary desktop since 2014-2015 that are still going strong, but these are mostly serve as backups and aren't regularly accessed. On the professional side of things, hard drives are rapidly being phased out for SSDs in business PCs. I'll get into SSD failures later, but I have seen more HDD failures in an office environment(mostly laptops) than I have SSDs. I haven't had great luck with old floppy disks, especially if they haven't been kept in pristine condition. I still need to go through my old floppies, but on average half of them haven't really held up. Granted, this was with them being stored in bad conditions(in a box in an unfinished basement), but I typically didn't use floppies for backup purposes. Even in the 1990s I had the opinion that they were fragile, but as a perpetually broke high schooler I couldn't step up to a Zip drive(and most computers I was around didn't have them either). CDs are also a bit of a mixed bag and very susceptible to bad storage conditions. Spills, especially on writable optical media, can be disastrous. Scratches are also an issue, so make sure that individual discs are protected. Contrariwise, I have had great luck with SD cards and USB flash drives. This used to be my primary means of archiving data that I would use between multiple computers. I did have a 16GB SD card fail, but that was after years of heavy use to where the drive was falling apart. I've also seen used cards fail, though there's a chance that they were cheap knock-offs. I have a relatively unique ExpressCard flash drive that has about 15 years of hard use and it has held up quite well(despite some physical damage). I've also had great luck with SSDs. I purchased my first SSDs in 2011(used, no less) and they're still operational. Granted, I used them as OS drives and not for long term storage of data, but they have held up very well and are still perfectly usable. I had a 1TB Crucial unit that failed on me a while ago, but I bought it used and it could have been mistreated. From a professional standpoint I've seen very few failures of SSDs, especially in comparison to HDDs. Off the top of my head I'd say I've seen maybe 5-7 SSD failures total over a decade of working in IT, and most of those failures were with older laptops(like the first Ultrabooks). Even having great luck with some formats, I can't stress enough the importance of backing up your data. Even if you're like me and don't trust/like cloud storage and can't really do offsite backup, having a local file server with a RAID array or even just running a backup task to multiple drives in a single computer is a very good idea. Having an imperfect backup plan(and realizing where it's imperfect) is better than having no backup plan at all.
RAR archive format supports a special type of redundant data called the recovery record. Presence of recovery record makes an archive larger, but allows to repair it even in case of physical data damage due to disk failure or data loss of other kind, provided that the damage is not too severe. Such damage recovery can be done with Repair archive command. ZIP archive format does not support the recovery record. I have been using 2.5-inch external hard disks made by Toshiba since 2009. I bought two 250GB disks in 2009, then two 500GB disks in 2010, then two 1.5TB disks, then two 3TB disks, and, finally one 4TB disk two years ago. Yesterday I checked all data - it was perfect!
I have a considerable number of WD drives that are older than 5 years but it doesn't mean I completely trust them. That makes backups even more important.
Only 6k subscribers left until we reach the 1 million mark!!! 🥺
That's gonna be a magical moment
I think when the next video will be released there will be 1m :)
I like "we" 😊
I've been keeping an eye on that counter - 1M party inbound! :D
Stonks!
Great video! I've been storing data on CDs, DVDs, and BR for decades (since the first 4X burners came out). I have a few tips for storage that you didn't mention: 1) I've found that it's important to store them in a dark place, or at least away from UV light, as it does degrade the plastic. It's much more noticeable on older discs, but it still has an effect on modern ones. This is a big one, and the easiest to counter, but I find a lot of people know stored them on a shelf where they got exposed to sunlight every day. None of theirs lasted. 2) High temperatures are also bad. Don't store them in the attic or anyplace where the sun really heats the room up. 3) It likely also helps to store them in a dry place. Everyone I know who lives in a humid environment had their optical discs fail when mine were fine. 4) I've read about a condition called "DVD rot" where the reflective layer develops spots or even holes. I haven't seen this happen to any of my discs myself, but I live in a mild climate and keep mine in an indoor closet. To protect against this, it can be helpful to store them inside a sealed Ziploc bag, or other superior airtight bag, or a vacuum seal bag. in other words, I would advice a consumer to store them in a box, in a closet or file cabinet, in a temperature controlled environment. That includes air conditioning if it gets warm. If it's a humid environment, or just a humid basement, then a dehumidifier may be in order, but that can be a pain.
A small-ish rarely opened cabinet/drawer/box is easily being kept dry with a small dehumidifier block, absolutely doable even for "low-tech" storage
You are answering questions that I have not considered asking. Fabulous level of detail here. Thank very much!
Thank you! My husband and I always enjoy your videos! (We were JUST talking about this subject last week! Great timing!) We wish you continued success with your KZhead channels. 👍
Your channel photo is of a male. Your husband?
Your husband is on your channel avatar then?
@@igorb2674 huh?
In our constant search for true genius, stop here and look no further. Christopher Barnatt has mastered so many different aspects of modern computing, I honestly do not understand how he retains all of that information between his ears. ANOTHER BRILLIANT VIDEO, Christopher! So very valuable to all computer users!!
He makes being smart look easy.
Very useful info on a subject which I've not seen all in on place before. I have about twenty HDD's some over twenty years old that have been dormant for many years. I am going to have to spin up, check and backup any thing of interest. Also a growing collection of SSD's, seven at the moment, which I do power up every six months, but I was unaware of the fact it's best to leave them powered up for an hour or so to do some house keeping. Thanks for another really slick video.
This is a subject I've needed to take more seriously for a long time. I'd be devastated if I lost all my family photographs. You've helped me come up with a new strategy about what I should be doing with them. Thank you for taking the time to make such a helpful video.
Not only that (and not to be alarming), but also consider photo and video formats. At some time, a huge conversion may need to happen, LOL.
@@louf7178 I mean.. I can still play all my SNES and Amiga games in 2024 on emulators so I'm not that worried we'll lose the algorithms tbh..
@@benstaniford ok
My vinyl records still reproduce quite well after 60 years
But still they can get hacked 😅
I scratched the only LP that I ever owned and moved to CDs. Waited a long time for CDs to become recordable only the find the whole hifi thing to self-implode instead (DAT vs miniDisc). Like everyone else I moved to digital (and a high-end audio interface with studio monitors).
As always, very informative. It's great that you're taking the time to give us these appraisals as these help in deciding what methods and equipment to use. Thank you.
Dang m’dude. That was a great roundup! I don’t even know about m disc. And what’s worse, I don’t realize that all of my photos are at risk!!! Yikes!!! And thanks!!!!
A couple of years back I had to deal with some failing drives. So, after moving and duplicating data around for some weeks I kept getting intermittent issues. Tried both old and trusty drives and new ones, changed cables, changed sata ports... and finally decided to upgrade the power supply. It was all finally fixed with the power supply upgrade, and to my surprise all drives were fully functional, even the ones that previously failed to power on. But I did throw away half of my sata cables. Make sure to give your spinning rust enough power and connectors or cables seem to fail more often than the drives, in my experience.
Agreed. Had a couple sata cables act funny (super slow transfer). Luckily no data loss as HDD transfer protocol seems to have compensated
Thank you Chris. This video serves as an excellent a guide for anyone planning to archive their data for a long term.
One of best Internet teachers in the world
Very useful, professional, and clear. Thank you. I work for more than 30 years now in my own little shop of computer repairs, and I can confirm, from my own experience, all you said here is based in reality. I will conclude, tough, we are still in the "Stone Age" of data preservation, and our tech do not evolved much in the last 30 -50 years, in this field. Like you said, we have much hope in the DNA data storing tech, yet we are light years away from this technology. Sad, we are a dumb race, with self-destruction instincts, spending 95% + of our resources and time, in creating weapons and perpetuating wars, to benefit a few dozens of "golden elites", interested in their own selfishness, and only that, than in our advances as human race. Data storage is fundamental for any advanced civilization, but we are not there, and I highly doubt we will ever be, with the current leadership and current tribal mentality.... We are closer to fusion than to genetic storage systems, yet we are a lot closer to self-destruction and/or absolute totalitarian regimes... Thank you for your efforts to share with us these very useful data, Sir.
I still have a 1TB WD on one computer that says 117038 power hours on hours, or 13 years 131 days. It is showing smart warnings now with reallocated sectors upto 75% of it's maximum amount. It's not in use everything has been copied to an SSD but it's still powered up in the machine.
You taught me alot my man. I learned everything from you, and still learn. When i sobered up 3 years ago, i jumped into computer building. Never in my life I thought id know, all thnx to you im 3 years experience in Computer Science. I dont need an expensive college for that, i have you.
Cool. :) Thanks for watching.
Good deal! "Keep the Faith".
Thanks Chris. I didn't realise SSD's were so 'leaky' in a depowered state. One year isn't long (appreciate they're a bit better now, but still...). As many others have stated, it underlines the need for a well thought out data back-up routine. More ££ here for the vital tea and biscuits fund. All the best.
Thanks for the tea and biscuits fund, appreciated. :)
hdd also have same problem in a depowered state
Well that was an excellent video ,thanks for taking the time to put it together. I'm now off on a journey to understand more about how SSDs work!
You are an absolute geek. And that's exactly why I keep watching your videos.
Nice review of the factors affecting longevity. HDDs and SSDs will last longer if you protect them from electrical surges, select enterprise quality units and have a low volume of data writes. I have 2 HDDs running in a NAS for 10 years without failure, but they are surge protected and have relatively low data writing. They may also fail tomorrow since they are complex units, so backup, backup, backup.
For some reason I had it in my head that hard drives would last far longer than 3 - 7 years. That is a shockingly short amount of time! I also had no idea about the concept of bit rot. This has given me good reasons to up my backup game to ensure my data is not victim to a common failure modality. Very interesting info!
They do last way longer than 7 years lol. I have many drives from 2010-2014 that still work, many of them have 40-50 000 hours and OK health.
They can last longer but a lot won't. Need checksums or something similar to check data validity
They can last a lot longer under the right conditions but they're not really designed to. Heat, vibration, humidity, excessive write cycles will all shorten a drive's life. I have hard drives from the early 1990s that work just fine. Kept only for nostalgia since they're not very practical for backups. A lot of those old drives had a fairly easy life. Before the Internet it was common for some home PCs to be only powered on for a few hours a week. Also most PCs back then ran Windows 3.1 (or just plain DOS), which didn't thrash the hard disk like the later versions of Windows.
@@zoomosis Thrash the hard disk? Pardon my ignorance. I’m just curious about what that even means.
@@easternshore8367 Modern operating systems like Windows (and OS/2 before it), Linux, MacOS, etc will typically use the hard drive (or SSD) as secondary memory when the physical memory (RAM) is exhausted. This is called memory paging. On PCs with hard drives, excessive paging was colloquially known as "thrashing" where the hard disk activity would skyrocket due to memory starvation, and the PC would slow to a crawl. This can still happen on a modern PC with an SSD, but most PCs now have more memory than they need, so excessive paging is less common.
Excellent as always Chris, I remember the SSD one, a year or so ago, but having all the media in one, wonderful.
I've been waiting for you to talk about this! Thanks!
Thanks Chris 🙂 I have a 128GB Crucial M4 SSD that was in fairly regular use for over six years...I believe it still has around 50% of its useful life remaining. It's an older MLC unit but I've tried to avoid QLC drives in my more recent purchases. Thanks for the reminder to power up some little used SSDs...and it's probably time to check my backups!
A have one, too. Bought in 2011 and it still works fine. Yes, backups are important. And remember to backup the backups. The original and at least 2 copies on separate devices or more. Because the backup drive can break, too. Last year 2 or 3 of my backup HDDs broke. But I did not bother at all, because I have like 5 or 7 copies or so. The oldest HDDs that I have are about 15 years old or 16. Still work fine. None of the SSDs, which were actually in use, broke, the oldest one is the Crucial m4. The only SSD that broke was a brand new no name one which broke after 2 f hours!!! That was the first AND the last time I bought a no name SSD. After that I got several good, incl a Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB, 2.55 PBW(yes PETAbytes). It will last many many years.
It's such a shame that companies like crucial will sneak downgrades into their SSD, like the P2 got silently downgraded from to tlc to qlc. and WD hiding information about smr drives. that's why ssd tier list and people who dig at the component level are so important, most companies will keep this information hidden.
@@balsalmalberto8086 Yeah, I get TLC only. It least for now. Maybe once the affordable drives with high capacity of SSDs will be at 4TB or 8TB or more, the TBW number of QLC drives will be acceptable. With 2TB devices or less it is definitely not the case. For now it is TLC and if it costs 20 or 30 €/$/£ more, so be it.
@@balsalmalberto8086 Without the risk of another lawsuit they need to clearly specify what technology they're using. I don't think WD can go through this again.
The distrust of QLC is irrational. They outlast comparable HDDs by a lifespan multiple. PLC is already in the works. If your drives obsolete themselves before reaching their half-life, you're likely overspending.
Back to your roots. Very well made and informative video. Thank you.
You really are a star Chris! Amazing that you've given such an in-depth, yet undertandable rundown of the various types of storage media in an 18 minute video, including older optical that everyone seems to have moved passed (though I certainly haven't) to the very latest solid state devices and everything in-between. Another truly amazing and v-useful video. I do enjoy tuning into your weekly vids!!
And clay tablets last thousands of years.
But how many terabytes do they store?
@@ifly-fsx I know this is a joke but I'm pretty sure something like storage can be almost infinity on any type of storage device with enough precision For example is a DVD and CD Even though it was the same size of disc, DVD can have more storage because it was made with more precision rather than CD Which is one of the reason why CD player can't play a DVD.
@@neutral6818 I just know that this video gave me a deep depression and constant nightmares.
@@ifly-fsx do you want to double it and give it to the next person
As long as they are stored correctly ;O)
Lenovo Thinkpad W520 SSD at 12 years and still going strong! I really should back up soon... :D Just glad to be on the right side of the bell curve... Thanks for the clear, uncluttered info.
Thank you for going so in depth!
This is the way information should be presented...clear and to the point...great video and content...💯👍
Absolutely fantastic video Christopher. Thank you for these informative, easy to understand videos. I'm fascinated by Data Archival, particularly for family video tapes from childhood days etc. I've been wondering what is the best way to store this media to last over time and have been getting so many different answers. Your video was an excellent summary. I'll have to look into M-DISC and Archival Optical Media. Your method you suggested about preventing bit-rot by removing then re-writing data to Hard Disk Drives was invaluable. I've long been a believer in Hard Drives over SSD's for archival purposes after owning so many hard drives over the years and seeing their reliability even after sitting cold for years, the idea putting it all on an SSD and finding data is lost because it wasn't powered on terrifies me. Until I can get myself a system together to burn the important media onto archival discs, your method of re-writing data to HDD's on a reasonably regular basis to prevent bit-rot will be a fantastic short-term solution to ensure redundancy. I've found WD's RED NAS drives are fantastic for this purpose in my past experience. Their lower speeds and low heat-output has ensured a very low-failure rate for me. I can't recommend WD RED drives enough for those wanting simple archival drives, but as Christopher said - one must still be mindful of magnetic decay and have systems in place to be re-writing data regularly to ensure no bit-rot. Thank you for your videos, they are so so appreciated.
My now retired main pc ran 24/7/356 with 3 used lap top drives for 8 years. I added a 2 tb drive as a main drive 2 years ago. Still running fine. But I have clean power were I live. Great vid Chris!
What's clean power?
@@feynstein1004 No brown outs.
@@menone8532And what are those?
Thank you for sharing. I appreciate your insight and the work you do on your channel 💜
I can confirm that CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are excellent for long term archiving if high quality media is used. 20 years ago, people used to swear by Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. About a year ago I copied about 100 or so of my mid-00s TY DVD-Rs onto a HDD, and every single one worked without a problem. I'm not sure if TY is still around and/or if their quality is still there... it's just as well I still have half a spindle of old blank TYs somewhere, just in case I ever need to burn stuff to DVD again.
Another fine video. I didn't know that SSD or SD drives are constantly rewriting data to keep it current. You live and learn. It would be fascinating to know what they do when they are seemingly doing nothing. It's always interesting seeing colour photos degrade over the years. Most will be gone forever unfortunately in a few decades. It's worth a visit to the Discovery Museum in Newcastle as there is an absolutely perfect carbon ink image which will never degrade, I believe it's a Joseph Swan creation.
SSDs are overrated. The best SSDs are the oldest ones. But HDD is always improving their angular density. I think HDD will make a comeback once the hype is finished and especially when they realise data rots slowly on flash memory
Another useful video. I do have a small comment. This video about storing and preserving data also only addresses the risk of data loss due to degradation of the medium. No mention is ever made of recovering corrupt data and the possibility of additional repair data. A good example of this is the use of par2 files which could possibly repair damaged data.
Perfect! Just simply, PERFECT video for this kind of matter. Thank you so very much and greetings from Portugal.
Thank you very much for this video! I will go and manually re-write all my backups on my external HDD. I don't power it on that often, so this will be a good routine to do every so often. Thanks again from the other side of the world. 🙂
I have several hhds with over 40k hours on them. They all still work great.
This is possibly one of the best videos on KZhead when it comes to informational content. As someone who loves media preservation, this was a very insightful video.
Thanks a lot; I've learn a lot (as usual) from your video. I was waiting for it during the weekend. Have a nice week!
Love your videos.. no drama, no bull, just solid, well researched and sourced information.
I never knew about the hard drive could last around 5 to 7 years but my hard drive is now 10+ years old and it still running fast as usual It's a miracle that your drive is still running for 2 decades. Probably my Hard drive is well done made
Greetings from Brazil! I love your videos! Simple, direct and with plenty of illustrations and super detailed explanations! Congratulations on the channel and always stay strong! Brazilian hugs!
Using 14y.o Samsung HDD and 9y.o Seagate HDD in my main home system right now without issues. Long life to your disks too
Feels like a video from 2009 and its awesome to be honest.
It's unsettling when storage media are not expected to last more than a few months or years. A more satisfying timescale would be that of a human life time, e.g. 100 years. When you store something, like photos, you should be able to retrieve them later in life.
I have a Toshiba 3TB HDD running about 10 years (bought in March 2014), uptime is 26k hours. I think I might consider replacing it before something happens......
Excellent video. Thank you from New Zealand 👊👍
Wow, that was fascinating! Thanks as always Chris.
SCSI ZIPs have no problem to survive 20+ years...I can read them all out in my sampler.
Hi Chris- In addition to carving data into stone, I submit Punched Cards, Punched Tape and Microfiche as a means of storing data long-term. I still have data preserved on this media going on 40 years. Oh yes and printout although the paper is yellowing.😄
Cool.
It is always refreshing to see new videos from you.
I knew most of this, but I had no idea I didn't know those few crucial bits of info.
I have some good brand CDs I burnt more than 20 years ago, and they are still readable now. Crappy brand record able CDs though didn't last more than 2 years!
The first CD I ever burned was in 1998, a backup of all my programs, drivers, Windows updates and other stuff I had downloaded because 56k was miserably slow (and every time someone called or picked up the phone it disconnected). Printed out a nice label for it and everything and made a new "edition" at least once a year with updated stuff. I still have that very first CD-R and it works fine. :D
SSDs are basically all I use. Fast R/W speeds, a relatively long lifespan and the recent decrease in price make them my favorite storage option currently. Of course M-disk and putting HDDs in a Raid configuration have there own benefits. But for everyday computing, SSDs are the way to go.
Good luck recovering data from an SSD when it fails. HDD's are much easier to recover data from.
@@andynonimuss6298ah yes but you failed to consider that I have no data worth saving. 🥲
Where are you getting these cheap SSDs from? All of our suppliers have raised their prices substantially in 2024. We even had several calls from different supplier reps weeks before the hike warning us of the impending price hike and to buy buy buy, and quick. Sure enough we had to raise our prices as our margins dropped to zero.
Bloody brilliant lad. Hugely helpful. Great information for my class.
THANK YOU for this! 🧡 I have TONS of magnetic and SSD storage, mostly media. An NFL game, recorded to my computer drive, with the highest fidelity is about 15 GB. The whole Super Bowl 58 was about 30 GB. I use Silicone dust, HD Homerun to record it off of Antenna and non-premium cable channels.(Cable Card) They all look GORGEOUS, and I want them all for years to come. 😱
ALWAYS make backup copies of your data. ALL mediums of data storage are subject to corruption and loss of data. The more copies you have, the better. You should have at least one local copy and at least one remote copy. You can use secondary drives, external drives, and cloud storage solutions for the aforementioned backups.
I've seen several instances now in which a company backed their data to tape boasting its longevity, retrieved the tape decades later, but then realized they didn't keep a drive around to actually read it. During the development of Grim Fandango Remastered, they were lucky to stumble across a tape drive in a storage unit. So far, the folks who found the ReBoot master tapes haven't been as lucky finding a D1 tape deck.
Thanks for the great, well-researched and well-presented video Chris!
So happy to see another exciting learning opportunity Peter. Always makes this long week worth waiting for. Love this channel
NICE VERY INTERESTING, I LIKE THE FORMAT .
Excellent video! Just wanted to clarify that when it comes to M-Discs, you only need a special drive for the DVD version. For Blu-ray M-Discs, any regular Blu-ray drive should work. Carve away and enjoy the lasting data! By the way, for a moment, I thought you were going to test the M-Disc you tortured back in 2016 to see if it was still readable :)
He might do it when it reaches 10 year mark in 2026!
Excellent video in regards to data storage! Getting M-Discs and an M-disc burner is in my to-do list for a while now. I've used those Zip, Jazz, Syjet, CD-W, DVD-R, BD-R, etc. throughout the years doing backups. Right now my main backups are two Synology NAS'es---one using RAID 1 and another using RAID 6. Both are using btrfs filesystem with scheduled data scrubbing every year and long extended SMART checks every 6 months. They are also syncing to other external backups for higher data redundancy and availability. I have a big album binder of CDs/DVDs/BDs backups I haven't checked for a while (more than 10 years) if they are still any good. They have been stored in a dry and cool place inside the house and watching your video kind of makes me want to see how it's doing now. 😅
Very useful video that I'll likely refer back to later. Thanks!
Keeping your important data in multiple drives also a not a bad idea.
“If you write it in papyrus and store it in a pyramid, it will last a thousand years. Everything else is just guessing” 😉
Chris, your videos never grow dull and always remain informative. Thank you for doing what you do!!
Excelent video with quite an encyclopedic structure, yet it is light on facts with providing necessary info, which plays well into the role of the video. Great job :)
I've had more Seagate drives fail than all other brands combined. I hear they are better these days, but that bridge is long burned for me.
Yeah, I've had one go bad on me after about 2 years, then I switched to Western Digital.
I have DVDs from 1998 and they still works.
The typical avid home computer user/gamer writes about 400-500GB *per month* to their drives, on average. I'm getting ready to retire my 2019-2024 PC build & calculated that I averaged 450GB written per month (15GB per day) & I use my computer a lot for gaming, streaming all the movies/shows that I watch, etc. Over the course of 52 months of use (4.3 years total) my write activity to my primary boot SSD was approx. 23.4 TB total. The intel 480GB 2.5" Enterprise-Class D3-S4610 SSD in it is rated for a write endurance of 3000TB. That should tell you how robust professional enterprise/data-center grade SSD's are. I didn't even hit 1% of its rated endurance as an avid home PC user/gamer over 4.3 years of use.
Similar story to yours here: my consumer grade Intel 480GB-SSD has 8760 TBW. After 5 years of use and almost 40TB written it still shows 100%. So theoretically it would last longer than me :))
Visiting your channel is always a treat. Please keep up the awesome work you do. Cheers.
Excellent presentation, I am pretty experienced with PCs and still learned something new.
oh no that inсel again
The truth is drives last much longer than 5-10 years but they are designed to fail so you buy more in the future. Otherwise they could last 10-20 years.
Thanks for the storage media life expectancy tour de force!
Hi, noticed your video, and there are a lot of additional issues I warn people about. There was a a plague of consumer hard disk issues. I am sorry to hear that desktop ones aren't made more reliably. I remember, there was a server years back with some historical binaries on it, and people were worried the images would be fading and starting to corrupt after 10-15 years. Like flash, it seems that it hasn't increased in reliability. But, it is the portable drives where the really big problems are. The use of plastic bearings caused failures within years. Then, the parking of the drive heads to protect them after power down in storage, caused the heads to fuse to the parking section of the disc, so when they powered up again, they immediately ripped the head off of the drive requiring expensive professional recovery services costing thousands of dollars each. (maybe you could do a video on how to prep a stored portable drive for reboot, to loosen any welded head off the surface. If only they had a park and secure at side with our touching the head mechanism instead). In copying your files to refresh them, or the system doing it, or backups, errors are introduced which really harm compressed, AV, encrypted and binary media. The problem is that the information in caches or buffers can be checked against rather than the media surface, requiring special procedures to flush all of these throughout the system. Interface and drive, to guarantee access to the recorded media surface, which backup software, operating system, system, interface and drives do not do as standard. But, even if they do they use a checksum or newer, which are subject to compensating errors that hide faults. Over time you can be subject to errors which produce major issues in these complex file types. We have people in the video production industry refreshing even thousands of terabytes of footage a year. Something has to corrupt and may not be patchable. The other issue is, these people will be unaware of it until they come back to use their or their client's footage, with the minor percentage increasing every year. To solve archival problems, Sony developed high capacity archive professional optical disc products going above 1TB that can be housed in disk swapping servers. That is a descent alternative to tape storage, which itself is delicate and I would not trust tape compared to a good Bluray, which is cheaper again based on upfront costs. The more compressed and large capacity tape gets, the more delicate. An modern optical disk is at least encased in a platter. Xxcopy, used to have an article on the copy error problem and had commands to deal with it, when doing a proper but by bit comparison of the recorded disc surface. I wish you had covered the life spans of cards and usn sticks, and those "endurance" cards. A lot of people are depending on them with a lot of environmental exposure, who need to see how nuts it is. I picked up a 10 year old Toshiba USB stick, expecting it to be blank, and was surprised ot still had it's factory software on it. Now, of you leave your card put of a machine within a year it can be corrupted, with I think 6 .o tgs for data to start corrupting, but that was 4+ years ago, maybe it's far worse now. I certainly get pictures corrupting in phone. There are other errors where reading or writing nearby cells can flip bits in memory or storage, let alone other fields. People use these memory cards and sticks, as hard drives on their single board computers, expecting them to last. But, how do we tell which ones will last of microSD SSD, and M2. Which are single level flash, like my toshiba memory stick probably was above, with the trsduobsl 10 year retention. The other issue is, as they go to high capacity finer feature sizes, they are prone to more interference and failures. There are high reliability single level flash products available for industrial purposes I think, and those endurance cards (which probably aren't single level) and the write once ones the police use. The archival testing chart numbers for optical disks. Organic versus inorganic versus UV light: Firstly, the optical disk numbers look wrong. I've read many reports of organic dyes and suffering severely, with people getting a year or so from UV light exposure. Did they do their archival life tests based off of being locked in a temperate controlled pitch black vault. That hardly challenges the organic dyes, and you are going to get unrealistically high numbers which might not reflect real world situations. But, it almost looks like the numbers were put in the wrong places. Storage retention of a hundred years, instead of one or two for CD-R would be extraordinary. I think, apart from mdisk, there was only one other long life archival CD-R which also included a sealing layer like DVD did. How many of these are archival model CD and DVD's? M-disc versus organic dye: The ceramic coating of M-Disc, was apparently, a carbon layer. How carbon is not classed as organic for this purpose, I do not know, as a common life reducing problem is mold growth through the disc, especially in the tropics. So, in hot and humid regions a whole different set of archival criteria, as not many users are going to pay to aircondition their collection to keep the temperate stable, or dehumidify. The most usba box Inna cupboard Inna room that may regularly swing above 30 even 40 sometimes during the day, even 50 if the cupboard is on a sunny wall. Reduced MDisc controversy. But, verbatim has changed the recording medium of mdisc, to similar to their other media, which really worried people. You then are talking up to 700 years instead of over 1000 years, and starting at 100 years. Now, the original m-disc, people gave out out in the sun in the lawn, with regular BD-R (maybe an organic dye version), which was unusable after a month. The mdisc was fine. I forget if they kept this up for a year. For me. 1000 years "ceramic" might last a time in a cupboard, if you keep it in a box in a cooler dried place, then better. But, something that says 100 years, I'm worried it will start corrupting in 10-20 years in hot humid conditions. I get very suck, so gave to set and forget. Now, there are new media, and a number never released or you have to pay $1000 to record a disc, which promise 1000 years or 10,000 years or longer in glass platters laser etched or volumetric. One coming out is 600TB in a few inch disk for the mass market. I suspect the patents are running out on the 5 1/4 glass inch disk ones, and Chinese manufacturers can start to make them freely soon. The capacity of unreleased disk technology, goes up into the peta bytes. One other technology was write once memory cards, with 100 year retention.. Law enforcement still uses these for their body cams, and they take it back to the station, where it gets physically put away.