The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #172025   Message #4162990
Posted By: MaJoC the Filk
19-Jan-23 - 03:11 PM
Thread Name: BS: all airlines grounded in US
Subject: RE: BS: all airlines grounded in US
> Modern SSD HDD memory as well as a lot of memory sticks are computer
> systems in their own write

Verily. This makes them an absolute bar steward for the operating system, or disc-recovery software, to handle without special pleading, which can lead to interesting problems ....

One thing people often don't realise, even if they're in the trade: SSDs have a different failure mode. Spinning-rust drives wear out a bit at a time; this is visible to the operating system, and to recovery software, so they can cope. SSDs suffer a related form of wear-out, but its internal software hides this by swapping blocks around; the first the computer knows anything's wrong is that the SSD tries this trick once too often and finds it's run out of spare blocks, and the drive goes castors-up en bloc. Upshot: The mean time to first failure of SSDs is now greater than that of spinning rust; but, unlike spinning rust, the first user-visible failure is usually fatal.

Hope this helps, folks. My knowledge may be a couple of years out-of-date, but I think I've got the basics right still (refutations hereby invited). Best insurance: good backups.