Solid State Drives – Why Backup Is More Important Than Ever

Backup of your data have always been important, most people understand that, although many are guilty of ignoring this basic requirement – and in many cases they get away with it as their PC gives some warning or symptom of the hard drive failing before it gives out altogether. However with the arrival of Solid State Drives (SSDs’) backup has taken on a new level of importance due to the way in which SSDs’ fail compared to their ‘mechanical’ ancestors.

We’ve all gotten used the level of reliability we can expect from mechanical hard drives over the last 20 years or so. Certainly most IT technicians will agree that mechanical hard drive reliability is pretty good – although give the nature of their job they will get to see more failed drives than most. Given a new machine with a new hard drive you could reasonably expect (say 95% of the time) that the hard drive would last for over 5 years without any problems.

When mechanical hard drives fail, or are about to fail, they usually (in maybe 90% of cases) give some indication that they are ‘on the way out’; strange noises or clicks; blue screen errors; check/scan disk running at boot up every few days etc. This gives you (or your helpful IT support person) fair warning and time, even with no current backup, to order up a replacement drive, plug it in and copy the data from the old drive to the new one – phew!

Even if a mechanical drive fails to a point that the operating system on it will no longer boot - if it’s still spinning there’s at least a fair chance that the numerous data recovery software tools that are available will be able to salvage the majority of your data. It’s rare, although there are always exceptions, that you lose all access to a hard drive and your data is effectively lost (at least without resorting to specialist data recovery companies – who aren’t cheap).

Now to solid state drives. These have been up and coming for a few years now, super- fast, eco-friendly etc. but – and this is the main point of this article - like any electronic device they can, and do, fail and when they do its usually going to be without any warning and probably catastrophically. It’s often the controller part of the drive that fails – this is the part that sits between the SSD connection and the flash memory which holds the data. (USB memory sticks are prone to this type of failure also). So the data might still be in the SSD but only hardware specialists would have any hope of retrieving the data by bypassing the faulty controller.

A quick internet search for ‘SSD Failure Rates’ also makes for some interesting reading...

So the problem with SSDs is not that they fail - it’s the way that they fail. So Backup, backup and backup - and you do check your backups are valid from time to time don ‘t you ?