14 Jul
2024
14 Jul
'24
4:45 p.m.
On Saturday 13 July 2024 13:41:35 dep via tde-users wrote:
Am on a tablet running ProtonMail, so I can't
readily bottom post. But I
saw that this involves SSDs, and thought it worth mentioning that SSDs are
notorious for failing as a result of blackouts. If you look around you will
find the exact mechanism; it usually involves the power dying while a write
is underway.
It happened to me this spring during my RPi build-a-television project.
Brand new 1tb SSD, literally just out of the box and checked. Was copying
Debian install from the SD card to SSD. Power merely glitched, maybe a
second. That was all it took. SSD was stone dead. Fortunately, Crucial
replaced it. And I got small UPSes for every machine that has an SSD.
They're pretty delicate. And their failure modes are non-obvious. I spent
several days trying to resurrect mine before giving up.
dep
Yeah, and not just SSDs. I had a regular old spinning hard drive that got
killed like that, although it was a more severe case. I was copying files
from one hard drive to another for backup, and the power went out. Two birds
were killed with one stone.
I lost everything, all that data, including 40 years of field research, only
some of which I have in hard copy (and those hard copies are buried away in
files in storage).
If you or anybody else could recommend some good UPS for backups of my
machines, that would be a great help. I used to have one back in the days of
desktop computers (and I do still have a desktop, in storage), but now with
laptops and tablets and smartphones trying to take over the world, the power
backup solutions are getting hard to find. Or maybe things are just changing
too fast, and I am too old and slow to catch on.
Bill