SSD for backups

[GameFan]

Hi, I was noticed the price drop in SSD storage and I'm thinking about building a full SSD system.

 

Price aside, is an SSD more likely to fail than a HDD when used to back up files and system images?

I'd be using one SSD for system, one SSD for programs and one for backing up the two drives and system images in case I run into problems.

The backups would be happening once a week and there would be about 100-500gb of data per drive.

 

Thank you.

[YoungBlade]

Generally, SSDs are more reliable than hard drives. They do have a fixed number of write cycles that they can go through, unlike a hard drive, but because hard drives have physical moving parts that are subject to mechanical failure, hard drives generally die before an SSD would.

 

Additionally, when an SSD fails, it's supposed to go into a read-only mode, which allows you to recover the data - SSDs have basically unlimited read potential, it's writes that are limited. For hard drives, their failures can result in the data being unreadable. Obviously, both can have failure modes that totally destroy your data, and a HDD has some failures that makes reading possible while writing is faulty, but in general, SSDs fail more gracefully at the end of their lives.

 

The bigger concern I would have with your back-up scheme is that it doesn't follow the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies, across 2 different types of media, and at least 1 copy off-site. If you want your data to be secure, that's the minimum you should aim for.

[GameFan]

46 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

The bigger concern I would have with your back-up scheme is that it doesn't follow the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies, across 2 different types of media, and at least 1 copy off-site. If you want your data to be secure, that's the minimum you should aim for.

I know about the backup rule, and if my data was something really critical, you bet I'd do that. The best I have right now is an older backup on an external HDD, just because of the backup frequency and I keep one additional version on my second SSD while the main backup is stored on my HDD (WD Blue that recently failed, probably because I didn't leave unallocated space on it for remapping.) Again: If I was storing some work documents or some very important top secret stuff, I'd take it more seriously, at the moment it's just some "easily" replaceable files + some non-essential documents and photos just for archival purposes on the off chance I need them.

 

But thanks for mentioning that rule, It's good to have that mentioned in as many places as possible.

[Ryker Robb]

34 minutes ago, GameFan said:

(WD Blue that recently failed, probably because I didn't leave unallocated space on it for remapping.)

You don't have to worry about that, hdds, and ssds have spare sectors/blocks for this purpose, and any drive can't use unallocated space for this purpose anyway. 

[Ryker Robb]

39 minutes ago, GameFan said:

I know about the backup rule, and if my data was something really critical, you bet I'd do that. The best I have right now is an older backup on an external HDD, just because of the backup frequency and I keep one additional version on my second SSD while the main backup is stored on my HDD (WD Blue that recently failed, probably because I didn't leave unallocated space on it for remapping.) Again: If I was storing some work documents or some very important top secret stuff, I'd take it more seriously, at the moment it's just some "easily" replaceable files + some non-essential documents and photos just for archival purposes on the off chance I need them.

 

But thanks for mentioning that rule, It's good to have that mentioned in as many places as possible.

If the data your backing up isn't super important anyway, then either an hdd or ssd will work just fine. If your using the drive only for backups, and you don't need the performance, then there isn't a real advantage to using an ssd over an hdd. ssds aren't any more reliable than a hdd in my opinion, as i have lots of old drives that still work, dating all the way back to 1993!