SSD vs Mechanical data recovery

[Mike78]

I was reading that other thread about SSD's just suddenly dieing, so I did a bit of googling and sure enough, someday you will power on your computer to find your SSD will be dead.. but that wont be for a good few years yet and chances are you will upgrade to a new drive long before that ever happens. So no real worries there.

But in the mean time we have all those other dilemma's that cause a drive to go bad, everything from dropping it (in the case of an external drive), kids, to it been in a house fire etc etc...

So from a data recovery point of view- which drive is most reliable.

 

[Mike78]

Ive been doing a bit of reading and I think you are right about the equal failure rate.

But the thing is, an SSD failure usually means guaranteed data loss, whereas mechanical drives have very high recovery rates. Some people actually go as far as saying mechanical drive data is only truly lost if you degauss the drive, everything else such as direct fire/water damage, broken platters etc is 100% recoverable if you have the right kind of money.....apparently.

I guess the moral of the story is if you arent gaming, the few extra seconds you save probably aren't worth the risk. But if you really insist on going SSD then you better make sure you take a lot of regular backups.

 

[Mike78]

Beyond swapping out the controller board, there's nothing else you can really do as an individual. It costs £100s as a minimum to recover data off an otherwise inoperable drive, if it can be recovered at all, so I don't think it's a real reason to choose a HDD over a SSD in terms of reliability.

I hear what your saying Jokestar, but there will be always be times/cases when people would be only too happy to pay a €100 to get data back. If all you have is a few games/music/movies then you would just cut your losses and buy a new drive. But when you throw other data such as college work/photographs of loved ones etc then people will often pay whatever it takes.

 

[Mike78]

Yes your right and I agree with you 100%.

But the thing is, (just for the record I dont usually guess statistics like this) but Im willing to bet at least 90% of computer users have at least some vague understanding of backing up data and why it might be important.

So if thats the case- why are there so many data recovery companies around? Well the reason is because the vast majority of people dont think twice about backups until one day they lose everything.

If I was one of those people, Id would rather sacrifice the extra few seconds Id gain with an SSD and go mechanical.

Thats just my opinion on the whole thing anyway.