[gymbeaux]

There will always be a need for platter drives (or other magnetic storage) because flash memory loses data over time if it's powered-off. Theoretically you can store a tape or other magnetic drive for decades in a safety deposit box or the like and your data will still be there if/when you need it.

I don't like the trend of SSDs (NVMe or otherwise) getting cheaper and cheaper because it's coming at the cost of reliability and endurance. Sure I can get 2TB for ~$100 but at this point I'm not convinced it will outlast spinning rust as has been the colloquial assumption since 2.5" SSDs first hit the scene circa 2008.

I've quickly destroyed (consumer-grade) SSDs before by running stuff that is constantly reading and writing to them. Microsoft's Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) is one example.

Therefore, I'm actually very receptive to RAID'ing SSDs, be it MDADM, ZFS or some other means. I do agree that to RAID (RAID0) NVMe drives is a bit ridiculous, but RAID1 definitely adds value.

[diggernet]

When SSDs came out I avoided them out of reliability concerns, but figured the endurance would improve over time as the tech matured. But it turns out the reality is that endurance has plummeted:

SLC: 100K cycles

MLC: 10K cycles

TLC: 3K cycles

QLC: 1K cycles

https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-performance/difference-b...

Now SSDs seem to be taking over the laptop world and HDDs are getting harder to find (and smaller, as the larger CMR drives get replaced with garbage SMR models). It seems like reliable storage in a laptop is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

[wtallis]

> because flash memory loses data over time if it's powered-off.

That's a red herring; the magnitude of this effect is usually greatly exaggerated, and in reality never comes close to being as important as the fact that flash memory is simply too expensive to use for cold storage.

And of course, the very idea of cold storage is dangerous: if you really want to ensure your data lasts for decades, you should be verifying your backups at least annually and making plans to migrate your data off any media that is obsolete and at risk of becoming hard to read using commodity hardware. This also entirely eliminates the above flash memory data retention concerns.

[throw0101b]

> That's a red herring; the magnitude of this effect is usually greatly exaggerated […]

Per JEDEC, Client SSDs have to retain data for 1 year at 30C, and Enterprise SSDs have to retain data for 3 months at 40C:

* https://www.jedec.org/sites/default/files/Alvin_Cox%20[Compa...

I'm sure most last longer, but as a CYA I wouldn't want to rely on that.

[wtallis]

That's the standard for drives that are at end of life, having exhausted their rated write endurance. Those aren't the drives anyone would use for a cold storage backup system. Drives that have only been written to a few times will retain data much longer.

[gymbeaux]

I remember reading something somewhere about a guy doing tests on "3D" NAND and other TLC/MLC NAND SSDs and finding that data was lost well before the "10 years or so" that we have come to assume unpowered SSDs can retain data for. I can't locate that article at the moment but it isn't unreasonable to expect faster degradation on denser NAND.

[wtallis]

The 3D in 3D NAND doesn't belong in scare quotes; the physical arrangement of the memory cells really is three-dimensional and it isn't just a marketing term. The transition from planar NAND to 3D NAND turned back the clock by several years in terms of shrinking memory cell volume and charge differences between adjacent data states.

The SSDs that caught the most flak for poor retention characteristics were using the last generation of planar NAND, in a three bit per cell configuration, which in hindsight was a bit of an overreach. But even then, the worst symptoms that could be reliably reproduced were poor performance reading back stale data, a result of the drives having to use higher levels of ECC to recover the data. (More recent SSDs have vastly more powerful controllers capable of running LDPC calculations much faster.) That's not quite the same as losing data.

[throw0101b]

> I do agree that to RAID (RAID0) NVMe drives is a bit ridiculous, but RAID1 definitely adds value.

RAID0 is handy in HPC for local scratch space.

[gymbeaux]

True, but Optane would be a better option for scratch, even on an AMD platform. Wouldn't have to worry about drive wear, and... I'm not sure which would have higher IOPS. With PCIe 4, it's possible the RAID0 NVMe drives would have better IOPS figures.