I know these comments are going to be full of people touting the virtues of having backup drives, NAS, or other high level data protection, but am I the crazy one? Knock on wood, I know nothing lasts forever, but I have decade+ old usb drives still going strong. How do they burn through so many externals?
I think selection bias is part of it, we tend to hear from the folks who run into issues more than the folks who don’t. I also think a drive that sits on a desktop or in a drawer most of the time in an air-conditioned house will last much longer than one that’s often thrown into a bag and transported in vehicles, airports, etc.
Maybe not. I don’t mean sticks though, I mean full size mechanical external drives. Not even solid state. On my 3TB, I’ve probably done about 10TB of writes (video backup, transfers, etc)
I know these comments are going to be full of people touting the virtues of having backup drives, NAS, or other high level data protection, but am I the crazy one? Knock on wood, I know nothing lasts forever, but I have decade+ old usb drives still going strong. How do they burn through so many externals?
I think selection bias is part of it, we tend to hear from the folks who run into issues more than the folks who don’t. I also think a drive that sits on a desktop or in a drawer most of the time in an air-conditioned house will last much longer than one that’s often thrown into a bag and transported in vehicles, airports, etc.
Right, we need more positive articles like “We just didn’t lose 3TB of data on a Sandisk SSD!.. Yep, the data is still there!”
Chances are your decade old USB sticks didn’t go through as much read/write operations as those 3tb ssds
Maybe not. I don’t mean sticks though, I mean full size mechanical external drives. Not even solid state. On my 3TB, I’ve probably done about 10TB of writes (video backup, transfers, etc)
They may have been doing video editing on it. That can be a good amount of read/writes that will wear down a drive.
Vjeran is a supervising producer of a tech site. He should know to back shit up. I’m sure a site as big as The Verge has decent cloud backup.