[paulkrush]

I had to search around and feel like a dork not knowing this. I have my data backed up, but I keep the SSDs because it's nice to have the OS running like it was... I guess I need to be cloning the drives to ISOs and storing on spinning rust.

[pluralmonad]

I learned this when both my old laptops would no longer boot after extended off power time (couple years). They were both stored in a working state and later both had SSDs that were totally dead.

[justin66]

Were the SSDs toasted, or were you able to reinstall to them?

[pluralmonad]

D.E.A.D.

Had to replace them.

[dpoloncsak]

I could be wrong, but I believe the general consensus is along the lines of "SSDs for in-use data, it's quicker and wants to be powered on often. HDDs for long-term storage, as they don't degrade when not in use nearly as fast as SSDs do.

[PunchyHamster]

I'd imagine HDDs also don't like not spinning for years(as mechanical elements generally like to be used from time to time). But at least platters itself are intact

[joezydeco]

I've been going through stack of external USB drives with laptop disks in them. They're all failing in some form or another. I'm going to have to migrate it all to a NAS with server-class drives I guess

[Yokolos]

At the very least, you can usually still get the data off of them. Most SSDs I've encountered with defects failed catastrophically, rendering the data completely inaccessible.

[gosub100]

or you could power them on 1-2x /year.

[ggm]

Power them on and run something to exercise the read function over every bit. Thats why a ZFS filesystem integrity check/scrub is the useful model.

I'm unsure if dd if=/the/disk of=/dev/null does the read function.

[fragmede]

why would it not? it's a low level tool to do exactly that. you could "of" it to somewhere else if you're worried it's not. I like to | hexdump -C, on an xterm set to a green font on a black background for a real matrix movie kind of feel.