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Where hard drives beat SSDs

Over the weekend I've been browsing through some very old hard disks.

Some of these drives were in service quarter of a century ago -- but they still work and the data on them is still intact.

That surprised me.

Of course finding a PC that supports these old SCSI and IDE drives is a mission in itself but once that problem is overcome, old drives seem to be pretty good at retaining the data stored on them all those years ago.

I didn't store these drives carefully or consider them to be backups. I just stopped using the computers they were originally in and after pulling those PCs apart, the drives lay idle in a pile in the corner of the room for two or more decades.

I was honestly expecting to find at least one of the dozen or so drives to be faulty or suffering from stiction - but without exception they just fired up and worked.

What fun it was to see a snapshot of my computing life from all those years ago. Things I'd long forgotten suddenly appeared onscreen.

Video, images, text files, programs (who remembers WinAmp?) and more.

What a shame that those using contemporary computer tech will likely never get to experience this for themselves.

What am I talking about?

Well instead of "spinners" (magnetic hard drives with spinning platters), most modern computers use solid-state memory in the form of SSDs.

An SSD is better than a spinner in almost every regard. They're faster, they're more reliable, they use less power and they're smaller.

However, there's one area where the SSD will be a huge disappointment and that's long-term data retention.

As I mentioned, all these old hard drives had sat in a corner, unloved and unused for over two decades, yet the data on them was totally intact and fully readable. Sadly, this won't be the case for SSDs that are left for the same period of time.

If you retire your current desktop computer in a few years' time and throw it in the corner or perhaps copy the contents of its SSD to a new machine before throwing that old drive in a drawer, chances are that within a year or so, the data will be gone.

By nature of the way they work, SSDs are not a long-term data storage medium. The charge stored in the memory cells slowly leaks away over time and once it's gone, so is the data.

You can slow that process by regularly powering up the drive twice a year or so, in order to refresh the charge in those cells but who's going to remember to do that dilligently over a period of decades?

When I look at the trove of memories that were lurking on those old disks it makes me smile.

No such smiles will be delivered by the pile of aging SSDs that you may accumulate over the next decade or two though. They'll be as blank and baren as the Aussie outback during an el nino summer.

If you want to store those files for long-term archiving, how the hell do you do it these days? I guess buying a (used to be) cheap USB spinner is the way to go.

Carpe Diem folks!

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