this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
500 points (93.1% liked)

Technology

59734 readers
3124 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Anyone else have a similar experience with one of these drives?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dangblingus 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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?

[–] Boozilla 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] WereCat 2 points 1 year ago

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!"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Chances are your decade old USB sticks didn't go through as much read/write operations as those 3tb ssds

[–] dangblingus 0 points 1 year ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.