Blog 05 – SSD or HDD? - Saving Memories through better Laptop Practices Part 2

So have you ever wondered which is better for storage of your precious memories?

Summary

Storage Conditions - SSD vs HDD Can factors such as temperature and humidity affect the retention lifetime of stored data on HDD and SSD?

In short – yes – no storage media will last forever.

High humidity for example can be a significant problem for both SSD and HDD as it can lead to the oxidization and corrosion of metals.

However high storage temperatures have a significant effect on SSD data retention; the rate of data degradation in NAND flash memory accelerates considerably with increased temperature.

For the average use of a laptop or mobile device, this area probably isn’t going to be an issue, but when you start looking at servers and data centres' media storage conditions, it is a required to protect against drive failure (and potentially data loss) as a result of overheating or high humidity.

The reality is for normal day-to-day usage in a laptop or PC, for example, you needn’t lose sleep over the life expectancy of your storage media.

Aside from an incredibly small proportion of manufacturer defects, your HDD or SSD shouldn’t give up on you easily if you’re taking care of it and keeping it away from physical hazards.

If you’d like to investigate more there are many different ways to monitor the logical health of your devices; there’s ‘SMART’ tools to predict drive failures and software to check the wear and tear of SSDs in detail, including how much usable life it has left.

With mobile devices, there is obviously a higher risk of physical damage (dropping a phone on the floor, iPads taking a bath, etc.), but with normal everyday usage you would be highly unlikely to encounter issues in the longevity of the storage media itself.

If you’re looking to store data longer-term then it might be best to go HDD over SSD, or better yet - look into the wonderful world of magnetic tape storage (yes, they still exist!).

If you are looking for further guidance on which storage type is best for your business, it’s worth also checking out this article, which talks about HDD, SSD and the more recent ‘hybrid’ drive.

For more information https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/blog/hdds-vs-ssds?fbclid=IwAR01OYb3rjr4Oc70cmyIcQgzO8ffmV5f4QFp8YGtIZlil6dKOwrEvpXEp9M#:~:text=Can%20factors%20such%20as%20temperature,oxidization%20and%20corrosion%20of%20metals

So why wait?

Save your memories today before they decide to disappear forever for unforeseen reasons.

I hope this will save you many precious and hilarious memories today.