Durable Computer Hardware

[Big Benn]

This thread should be moved to Off Route I guess. But as we all use PCs to access and submit info to SP I'll start it here.

Just found a missing byteStor USB Flash Drive. Lost it around two months ago. I know that as I rarely use flash drives now.

Stuck it in my PC and all the data seems fine. Images, spreadsheets, word documents. All fine.

The drive was in a top pocket of a shirt.

In that two months it would have gone through at least two washing machine cycles.

And a similar number of cycles in the tumble drier.

Quite a hardy bit of kit I think!

[mconnell]

Solid state storage is very tough...soon all our hard drives will be the same technology...they are already available but very expensive...

Guess that depends on what you consider "very expensive". True they are a couple of years behind a hard drive in cost, but are also a lot faster. For comparison, a 128GB SSD runs a little under $300. A 160GB drive runs about $175. (You might find cheaper, those are just the prices I have sitting in front of me. Those are the closest in size that I see right off.)

[MoapaPk]

Do you know how long SSD data is supposed to last? Some of the CDs I wrote as back-up 10 years ago are quasi-unusable. I've considered using an 8GB USB SSD to back up a computer from 1999 that has (drum roll) an 8GB hard disk.

[drjohnso1182]

Do you know how long SSD data is supposed to last?

If it's flash-based (I believe most are), you could probably calculate how long a bit of data will remain if you were to write the data to a new flash part and then not touch it. You'd need some decent estimates for the depth of the potential well, the starting number of electrons in the well, and the lower limit needed to still read the correct value. I've not done the calculation (not sure I even remember how...), but I've heard far in excess of the 10-15 years manufacturers expect the part to be used. The more practical limitation of flash lifetime is the number of erase cycles it can handle, discussed in papers such as this one:
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/Micro2009FTest.pdf