Beware what SSDs you use...

[Jan Panteltje]

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:56:45 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid>
wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

If anything matters, it should be backed up in multiple places. USB
hard drives or memory sticks are so cheap you can use them as
write-only storage. Drop one off now and then and never write over.

Dropbox is OK short-term for working files. They are unlilkely to
loose your stuff soon, and every PC has a copy even if Dropbox Inc is
nuked.

I read about people losing all their photos, or even legal or
engineering docs, because some storage thing failed or got ransomed.

 

[Joe Gwinn]

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:26:52 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:56:45 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid
wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

I read the actual complaint. The plaintiff is a lawyer who personally
suffered lost data and the runaround from Western Digital, and also is
also the lawyer filing the case, which is uncommon.

He hit them from several different legal directions, all of which look
valid. A labor of anger, not love.

Bet he wins the case. Or it\'s quickly settled.

If anything matters, it should be backed up in multiple places. USB
hard drives or memory sticks are so cheap you can use them as
write-only storage. Drop one off now and then and never write over.

Dropbox is OK short-term for working files. They are unlilkely to
loose your stuff soon, and every PC has a copy even if Dropbox Inc is
nuked.

I read about people losing all their photos, or even legal or
engineering docs, because some storage thing failed or got ransomed.

Yes. In the old days, we did at least a seven-tape backup cycle.

Joe Gwinn

 

[Joe Gwinn]

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 12:43:05 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:26:52 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:56:45 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid
wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

I read the actual complaint. The plaintiff is a lawyer who personally
suffered lost data and the runaround from Western Digital, and also is
also the lawyer filing the case, which is uncommon.

I read the complaint again. The plaintiff does not seem to be a
lawyer. He is in Placer County, part of which includes Sacramento. He
may be a photographer.

Joe Gwinn

He hit them from several different legal directions, all of which look
valid. A labor of anger, not love.

Bet he wins the case. Or it\'s quickly settled.


If anything matters, it should be backed up in multiple places. USB
hard drives or memory sticks are so cheap you can use them as
write-only storage. Drop one off now and then and never write over.

Dropbox is OK short-term for working files. They are unlilkely to
loose your stuff soon, and every PC has a copy even if Dropbox Inc is
nuked.

I read about people losing all their photos, or even legal or
engineering docs, because some storage thing failed or got ransomed.

Yes. In the old days, we did at least a seven-tape backup cycle.

Joe Gwinn

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 12:43:05 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:26:52 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:56:45 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid
wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

I read the actual complaint. The plaintiff is a lawyer who personally
suffered lost data and the runaround from Western Digital, and also is
also the lawyer filing the case, which is uncommon.

He hit them from several different legal directions, all of which look
valid. A labor of anger, not love.

Or money.

Only an idiot would trust one device to store valuable data.
Especially a lawyer.

The lawyer trick is to extort money from people who figure that a
payoff is cheaper than hiring other lawyers to fight a claim. I\'ve
seen that work in person.

Bet he wins the case. Or it\'s quickly settled.

Settled, for some amount of cash.

If anything matters, it should be backed up in multiple places. USB
hard drives or memory sticks are so cheap you can use them as
write-only storage. Drop one off now and then and never write over.

Dropbox is OK short-term for working files. They are unlilkely to
loose your stuff soon, and every PC has a copy even if Dropbox Inc is
nuked.

I read about people losing all their photos, or even legal or
engineering docs, because some storage thing failed or got ransomed.

Yes. In the old days, we did at least a seven-tape backup cycle.

The danger with a cycle is that a bad file will eventually over-write
all the cycled copies.

Write-once backup is cheap nowadays. Keep backups in different places
in case of a fire or something.

Joe Gwinn

 

[Don Y]

On 8/19/2023 9:43 AM, Joe Gwinn wrote:
> Yes. In the old days, we did at least a seven-tape backup cycle.

Unless you are periodically *verifying* your backups, you
have no idea if the media has gone tits up -- whether that\'s
the ORIGINAL medium or any of the backups. This is the
flaw in most RAID deployments.

[I had a buddy who would backup his files multiple times;
I asked him if he was sure the originals were intact AND
the backup copies -- deer in headlights!]

I store a hash of each file (along with other metadata)
in a database so I can always reexamine those aspects of
EACH file to reassure myself that they are intact, NOW.

Whenever an archive volume is mounted, a daemon starts
scanning its contents to verify these data. It tracks its
progress *in* the database so I can tell the last time a
particular file on a particular medium was verified.

[like a \"patrolled read\"]

Another daemon watches the database to coax me to install
specific media that it hasn\'t checked in a while.

Because I have the metadata for each file on hand separate
from the files, I can locate (VERY likely) duplicates of
files just by checking for duplicate (signature, size)
tuples. So, if something does get corrupted, I can find
a replacement on the same -- or different -- medium regardless
of what the other file\'s name might be!

And, there\'s no requirement that the media be writable;
I can track the integrity of, e.g., WORM media just as
reliably as magnetic or solid state.

[The biggest problem is uniquely identifying media to
the machine AND to the user]

 

[Joe Gwinn]

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 10:00:49 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 12:43:05 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:26:52 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:56:45 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid
wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

I read the actual complaint. The plaintiff is a lawyer who personally
suffered lost data and the runaround from Western Digital, and also is
also the lawyer filing the case, which is uncommon.

He hit them from several different legal directions, all of which look
valid. A labor of anger, not love.

Or money.

Only an idiot would trust one device to store valuable data.
Especially a lawyer.

The lawyer trick is to extort money from people who figure that a
payoff is cheaper than hiring other lawyers to fight a claim. I\'ve
seen that work in person.

All true, but I do think that Western Digital likely deserves the
abuse here. I recently bought such a backup disk, which seems to
work, and the serial number drew a no-problem response from WD, but
we\'ll see.

There were lots of complaints about the problem on Amazon, and WD\'s
tone gradually changed from \"no problem\" to \"a few have firmware
problems\". The remedy was limited to replacement of the disk, and it
sure did seem that WD was trying to run the warrantee clock out.

Bet he wins the case. Or it\'s quickly settled.

Settled, for some amount of cash.

Yeah.

If anything matters, it should be backed up in multiple places. USB
hard drives or memory sticks are so cheap you can use them as
write-only storage. Drop one off now and then and never write over.

Dropbox is OK short-term for working files. They are unlilkely to
loose your stuff soon, and every PC has a copy even if Dropbox Inc is
nuked.

I read about people losing all their photos, or even legal or
engineering docs, because some storage thing failed or got ransomed.

Yes. In the old days, we did at least a seven-tape backup cycle.

The danger with a cycle is that a bad file will eventually over-write
all the cycled copies.

Yep. It\'s only now that people can afford write-once media
approaches.

Write-once backup is cheap nowadays. Keep backups in different places
in case of a fire or something.

But one does need to verify that those write-once backups are in fact
readable and fully useable.


War story: In the mid 1970s, the place I worked had hired a
contractor to write some software. He demonstrated the software doing
what it was supposed to do. ... But how do we know that we received
*everything*. It\'s easy to accidentally omit some obscure but
essential bit.

I prepared a system disk with only the operating system and compiler
installed, and had the contractor install his stuff and then do the
demo. Didn\'t work - lots was missing. It took him a few days to get
it all correct.

Joe Gwinn

 

[Ralph Mowery]

In article <bdf2eihkq3ps2pbsbill5353uol4q18ln8@4ax.com>,
joegwinn@comcast.net says...

Yep. It\'s only now that people can afford write-once media
approaches.

CDs and DVD Discs have been inexpensive for many years. I learned many
years ago ftom the TRS-80 days to have 3 or 4 backupe of anything you
think is important.

Reminds me of a man that owned a business thought disks at a dollar each
were too expensive to make a daily backup. He had a crashed disk and it
took 2 typest about 2 weeks to put all his data back in.

 

[Don Y]

On 8/19/2023 8:12 PM, Ralph Mowery wrote:

CDs and DVD Discs have been inexpensive for many years. I learned many
years ago ftom the TRS-80 days to have 3 or 4 backupe of anything you
think is important.

Reminds me of a man that owned a business thought disks at a dollar each
were too expensive to make a daily backup. He had a crashed disk and it
took 2 typest about 2 weeks to put all his data back in.

(recordable) Optical media are sensitive to recording method and
storage conditions (not to mention the quality of the media).

I regularly verify the contents of all of my recorded CD/DVDs
along with noting the effective data rate (as a gross indication
of how often it is encountering recoverable errors)

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:26:52 -0700) it happened John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
<lsq1eilgf91o1dfe2ceo80b2ava5r1a3ll@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:56:45 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid
wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

If anything matters, it should be backed up in multiple places. USB
hard drives or memory sticks are so cheap you can use them as
write-only storage. Drop one off now and then and never write over.

Dropbox is OK short-term for working files. They are unlilkely to
loose your stuff soon, and every PC has a copy even if Dropbox Inc is
nuked.

I read about people losing all their photos, or even legal or
engineering docs, because some storage thing failed or got ransomed.

I back up important things to several media,
DVD / Blu-ray / M-DISC, magnetic (hard disks), SDcards, USB sticks.
M-DISC is supposed to last several hundred years:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
But will there be M-DISC readers then? Well seems they still produce LPs.. so..

If / when a nuke war happens much of electronics will no longer work because of EMPs.
Flash memory will go first I think, magnetic media will be more resilient.
I have several TB (about 10) hard discs in use,
What is essential for survival in a WW3 case? Likely not our data..
I do have a big alu box now full with 1000 CDs / DVDs / M-DISCs, etc
https://panteltje.nl/pub/CD_box_binnenkant_IXIMG_0549.JPG
optical media last a very long time in the dark!
Things I burned 20 years ago still play back. Mostly audio / video / Linux releases, snapshots of systems I had...


Some stuff I wrote is stored on my website server, so external on some company server..
Maybe google keeps backups.?
If the system / infrastructure breaks down then you no longer have access, if it still exists or not!
My experience with cheap 1 TB USB sticks so far is: lasted about a week, then no longer recognized by computer.
So FLASH is really not the way to go, same for SDcards, some just get data errors, Samsung 32 GB cards however work great so far.

It is amazing how much goes on a 1 TB USB stick, maybe all you ever wrote plus some pictures you took.
My 4 TB Toshiba USB hard disks connected to my Raspberry Pi4s so far have worked perfectly.

 

[John Walliker]

On Sunday, 20 August 2023 at 06:31:23 UTC+1, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:26:52 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jla...@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
lsq1eilgf91o1dfe2...@4ax.com>:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:56:45 GMT, Jan Panteltje <al...@comet.invalid
wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

If anything matters, it should be backed up in multiple places. USB
hard drives or memory sticks are so cheap you can use them as
write-only storage. Drop one off now and then and never write over.

Dropbox is OK short-term for working files. They are unlilkely to
loose your stuff soon, and every PC has a copy even if Dropbox Inc is
nuked.

I read about people losing all their photos, or even legal or
engineering docs, because some storage thing failed or got ransomed.
I back up important things to several media,
DVD / Blu-ray / M-DISC, magnetic (hard disks), SDcards, USB sticks.
M-DISC is supposed to last several hundred years:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
But will there be M-DISC readers then? Well seems they still produce LPs... so..

If / when a nuke war happens much of electronics will no longer work because of EMPs.
Flash memory will go first I think, magnetic media will be more resilient..

But will it? It relies on firmware in flash memory and possibly various mapping tables
also in flash.
John

I have several TB (about 10) hard discs in use,
What is essential for survival in a WW3 case? Likely not our data..
I do have a big alu box now full with 1000 CDs / DVDs / M-DISCs, etc
https://panteltje.nl/pub/CD_box_binnenkant_IXIMG_0549.JPG
optical media last a very long time in the dark!
Things I burned 20 years ago still play back. Mostly audio / video / Linux releases, snapshots of systems I had...


Some stuff I wrote is stored on my website server, so external on some company server..
Maybe google keeps backups.?
If the system / infrastructure breaks down then you no longer have access, if it still exists or not!
My experience with cheap 1 TB USB sticks so far is: lasted about a week, then no longer recognized by computer.
So FLASH is really not the way to go, same for SDcards, some just get data errors, Samsung 32 GB cards however work great so far.

It is amazing how much goes on a 1 TB USB stick, maybe all you ever wrote plus some pictures you took.
My 4 TB Toshiba USB hard disks connected to my Raspberry Pi4s so far have worked perfectly.

 

[Don Y]

On 8/20/2023 3:18 AM, John Walliker wrote:

If / when a nuke war happens much of electronics will no longer work because of EMPs.
Flash memory will go first I think, magnetic media will be more resilient.

But will it? It relies on firmware in flash memory and possibly various mapping tables
also in flash.

The issue with all preservation schemes is one of bootstrapping the technology
required to access the data. This involves people with specific skillsets
as well as technologies that can persist (for possibly long periods before
society is ready to use them).

Magnifying glasses can fit the bill...

<https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/The-Billion-Year-Archive-project-A-post-apocalyptic-disaster-recovery-plan>

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Sun, 20 Aug 2023 03:18:58 -0700 (PDT)) it happened John
Walliker <jrwalliker@gmail.com> wrote in
<2aeb5158-ce57-41ec-92b5-4b0bffd927can@googlegroups.com>:

On Sunday, 20 August 2023 at 06:31:23 UTC+1, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:26:52 -0700) it happened John Larkin=

jla...@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
lsq1eilgf91o1dfe2...@4ax.com>:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:56:45 GMT, Jan Panteltje <al...@comet.invalid
wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, =
lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-=
to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

If anything matters, it should be backed up in multiple places. USB
hard drives or memory sticks are so cheap you can use them as
write-only storage. Drop one off now and then and never write over.

Dropbox is OK short-term for working files. They are unlilkely to
loose your stuff soon, and every PC has a copy even if Dropbox Inc is
nuked.

I read about people losing all their photos, or even legal or
engineering docs, because some storage thing failed or got ransomed.
I back up important things to several media,
DVD / Blu-ray / M-DISC, magnetic (hard disks), SDcards, USB sticks.
M-DISC is supposed to last several hundred years:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
But will there be M-DISC readers then? Well seems they still produce LPs.=
. so..

If / when a nuke war happens much of electronics will no longer work beca=
use of EMPs.
Flash memory will go first I think, magnetic media will be more resilient=
.

But will it? It relies on firmware in flash memory and possibly various mapping tables
also in flash.
John

Maybe, but for a process to get back data then getting it from a magnetic disk is
still possible, not so much from a memory chip with static stored bits.
Data recovery from magnetic disk (flight recorders etc) is done routinely
even if these are completely dirty or even slightly damaged.

I played a lot with floppy drives .. and soft-hardware to read back sectors
disks is not different
The biggest metal discs I worked with were the ones in the Ampex HS100 slow motion machines
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampex
shows:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HS-100-deck-ampex.jpg
quote:
\"The video was recorded on analog magnetic disc.
The disc weighed 5 pounds (2.3 kg) and rotated at 60 rps, 3600 rpm (50 rps in PAL).
One NTSC unit could record 30 seconds of video, PAL units 36 seconds.
The video could then be played back in slow motion, stop action to freeze frame.\"
So... big, I have replaced those... sixties, seventies, used for slow motion playback in sport broadcasting.
No computas back then, all analog and digital CMOS TTL ... FLASH did not exist back then AFAIK.
No fear of magnetic discs here.. repairing or recovering FLASH? not me .

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Sun, 20 Aug 2023 04:03:53 -0700) it happened Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote in <ubsruq$1b3ut$1@dont-email.me>:

On 8/20/2023 3:18 AM, John Walliker wrote:
If / when a nuke war happens much of electronics will no longer work because of EMPs.
Flash memory will go first I think, magnetic media will be more resilient.

But will it? It relies on firmware in flash memory and possibly various mapping tables
also in flash.

The issue with all preservation schemes is one of bootstrapping the technology
required to access the data. This involves people with specific skillsets
as well as technologies that can persist (for possibly long periods before
society is ready to use them).

Magnifying glasses can fit the bill...

https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/The-Billion-Year-Archive-project-A-post-apocalyptic-disaster-recovery-plan

I just invented a better way to send the encyclopedia to alien civilization
All you need is transmit 3 ticks.
Sending it is my idea, the original is called \'The Alien problem\' and originates from a joke in sci.crypt I once read.

It (the joke) goes like this:
Alien lands on Earth with his flying cup and saucer.
He is fascinated by what all you humming beans did, so wants to take that knowledge back to his home planet,
but the books are too heavy for his flying thing.
He then takes the Encyclopedia Britannica, writes out the ASCII text as one big number..
Then he does 1 / that number, that gives him / her / it a ratio.
In the joke he takes a stick and puts a marker at the length of the stick to indicate that ratio.
Now you may argue that sticks are made of atoms and the resolution is not big enough.

So Jan Panteltje takes a radio transmitter, connects it to a dish (old one from Arebico for example)
and transmits three beeps to his hOhm planet, with the time ratio 1 / Encyclopedia Britannica hex
Is simple

But really, 3 ticks in time is all I need to know everything about you (brain wave decode)
This is also the essence in music.

Is there a granularity of time?
You can take as long as you want.....

Anyways once they receive our TV and radio programs (long after we are gone) .. they will know everything.
So it is all theoretical, but then 3 ticks does not take much, you can use very high power impulses.
Our nukes in WW3 may reveal a lot about us as did our atmospheric nuke testing.


OTOH you could perhaps store things in DNA and send some of that in a space probe.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 20 Aug 2023 05:31:15 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid>
wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:26:52 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
lsq1eilgf91o1dfe2ceo80b2ava5r1a3ll@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:56:45 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid
wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

If anything matters, it should be backed up in multiple places. USB
hard drives or memory sticks are so cheap you can use them as
write-only storage. Drop one off now and then and never write over.

Dropbox is OK short-term for working files. They are unlilkely to
loose your stuff soon, and every PC has a copy even if Dropbox Inc is
nuked.

I read about people losing all their photos, or even legal or
engineering docs, because some storage thing failed or got ransomed.

I back up important things to several media,
DVD / Blu-ray / M-DISC, magnetic (hard disks), SDcards, USB sticks.
M-DISC is supposed to last several hundred years:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
But will there be M-DISC readers then? Well seems they still produce LPs.. so..

If / when a nuke war happens much of electronics will no longer work because of EMPs.
Flash memory will go first I think, magnetic media will be more resilient.
I have several TB (about 10) hard discs in use,
What is essential for survival in a WW3 case? Likely not our data..
I do have a big alu box now full with 1000 CDs / DVDs / M-DISCs, etc
https://panteltje.nl/pub/CD_box_binnenkant_IXIMG_0549.JPG
optical media last a very long time in the dark!
Things I burned 20 years ago still play back. Mostly audio / video / Linux releases, snapshots of systems I had...


Some stuff I wrote is stored on my website server, so external on some company server..
Maybe google keeps backups.?
If the system / infrastructure breaks down then you no longer have access, if it still exists or not!
My experience with cheap 1 TB USB sticks so far is: lasted about a week, then no longer recognized by computer.
So FLASH is really not the way to go, same for SDcards, some just get data errors, Samsung 32 GB cards however work great so far.

It is amazing how much goes on a 1 TB USB stick, maybe all you ever wrote plus some pictures you took.
My 4 TB Toshiba USB hard disks connected to my Raspberry Pi4s so far have worked perfectly.

We drop off a terabyte USB hard drive once a month, the entire company
archive. I sometimes plug one in and look at the files, and so far not
one has had a problem.

Hard drives are amazing.

 

[chrisq]

On 8/18/23 06:56, Jan Panteltje wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

Only use Hitachi or Samsung here, long term suppliers to the corporate
markets, who tend to be fussy about storage. Use mainly sas ssd drives
and they are starting to appear on the surplus market. On test, a recent
batch showed typically 4% drive lifetime wear limit, so essentially
unused.

I don\'t use consumer electronics quality for any storage critical to the
business or work. Not worth the hassle. Spend a bit more for the best
and sleep easy...

 

[boB]

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 18:31:44 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 10:00:49 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 12:43:05 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:26:52 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:56:45 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid
wrote:

Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says
The suit is seeking class-action certification.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

I read the actual complaint. The plaintiff is a lawyer who personally
suffered lost data and the runaround from Western Digital, and also is
also the lawyer filing the case, which is uncommon.

He hit them from several different legal directions, all of which look
valid. A labor of anger, not love.

Or money.

Only an idiot would trust one device to store valuable data.
Especially a lawyer.

The lawyer trick is to extort money from people who figure that a
payoff is cheaper than hiring other lawyers to fight a claim. I\'ve
seen that work in person.

All true, but I do think that Western Digital likely deserves the
abuse here. I recently bought such a backup disk, which seems to
work, and the serial number drew a no-problem response from WD, but
we\'ll see.

There were lots of complaints about the problem on Amazon, and WD\'s
tone gradually changed from \"no problem\" to \"a few have firmware
problems\". The remedy was limited to replacement of the disk, and it
sure did seem that WD was trying to run the warrantee clock out.



Bet he wins the case. Or it\'s quickly settled.

Settled, for some amount of cash.

Yeah.


If anything matters, it should be backed up in multiple places. USB
hard drives or memory sticks are so cheap you can use them as
write-only storage. Drop one off now and then and never write over.

Dropbox is OK short-term for working files. They are unlilkely to
loose your stuff soon, and every PC has a copy even if Dropbox Inc is
nuked.

I read about people losing all their photos, or even legal or
engineering docs, because some storage thing failed or got ransomed.

Yes. In the old days, we did at least a seven-tape backup cycle.

The danger with a cycle is that a bad file will eventually over-write
all the cycled copies.

Yep. It\'s only now that people can afford write-once media
approaches.


Write-once backup is cheap nowadays. Keep backups in different places
in case of a fire or something.

But one does need to verify that those write-once backups are in fact
readable and fully useable.


War story: In the mid 1970s, the place I worked had hired a
contractor to write some software. He demonstrated the software doing
what it was supposed to do. ... But how do we know that we received
*everything*. It\'s easy to accidentally omit some obscure but
essential bit.

I prepared a system disk with only the operating system and compiler
installed, and had the contractor install his stuff and then do the
demo. Didn\'t work - lots was missing. It took him a few days to get
it all correct.

Joe Gwinn

We just had an older Crucial SSD die in the middle of data logging

boB

 

[Don Y]

On 8/21/2023 7:48 PM, boB wrote:
> We just had an older Crucial SSD die in the middle of data logging

Assuming the capture of the data was important (even if only for
a short-term use), this is the perfect application for redundant
storage. Even if some aspect of the store fails *during* the
collection, the redundant capabilities will ensure that the
data is available for some time after that failure (then, you
can copy it to another medium -- or, otherwise consume it).

Spinning rust seems to give more of a \"heads up\" to coming
failures (unless the motor/actuator fails).

[Having said that, I\'ve only encountered two disk failures in
40+ years]

 

[Don Y]

On 8/21/2023 8:11 PM, Don Y wrote:

Spinning rust seems to give more of a \"heads up\" to coming
failures (unless the motor/actuator fails).

[Having said that, I\'ve only encountered two disk failures in
40+ years]

While *I* have only had two drive failures, I designed a box
to sanitize and characterize disks for reuse. One of the things
it does is monitor performance of the drive *while* exercising
and sanitizing it to determine if \"reuse\" is realistic.

Lots of disks from businesses see oodles of PoHs!

 

[Don Y]

On 8/21/2023 10:45 AM, chrisq wrote:

Only use Hitachi or Samsung here, long term suppliers to the corporate
markets, who tend to be fussy about storage. Use mainly sas ssd drives
and they are starting to appear on the surplus market. On test, a recent
batch showed typically 4% drive lifetime wear limit, so essentially
unused.

I don\'t use consumer electronics quality for any storage critical to the
business or work. Not worth the hassle. Spend a bit more for the best
and sleep easy...

I think that depends on *how* you use media.

I\'ve probably ~200+T (300?), here -- but that\'s two copies of ~100+T.

I have no problem using consumer kit for cold storage;
I can buy a pair of 8T (shingled) USB3 drives for $200.
As they aren\'t used \"interactively\", I can easily get
100MB/s throughput so it doesn\'t take long to push a
copy of a VM onto one -- or, pull a copy *off* one.

And, as they sit \"cold\" 99+% of the time, they tend to
not have problems. I check their contents, periodically
(by verifying the hashes of each individual file against
previously stored hashes). Silly to devote 15K drives
to storing things that are seldom accessed!

[I have some 1.5T consumer USB2 drives that are now
more than a decade old with no problems. But, they are
a nuisance as the i/f is so damn slow! Yet, perfectly
fine for archiving music!]

I\'d not rely on any of it in my workstations based on
performance, if nothing else. With 144G in each
workstation, the speed of the (rust) disk is only
an issue on the initial load of an application;
thereafter its contents are cached for the session.

[All of the (samsung) SSDs I have are tiny (< 500G)
so not very useful. (I have 6T in each workstation
and that\'s pretty cramped!)]