This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Just throwing this out there for anyone shopping for storage drives. BackBlaze does a pretty good regular writeup on the drives they use and how they perform, how reliable they are, etc. It's very informative and a fun read (if you're into nerdy stuff).
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/
It's funny how the loss of storage space can be valued diffently. If it's 3TB of of video footage for a newspaper, that's weeks if not months of work and money lost. But it could also just be the last 3 Call of Duty's with patches.
Randomly disconnects = chance for data loss
Though the filesystem plays a role. I have a full metal body Sandisk USB stick that still overheats after a while and then disconnects (has a heatsink on top now) but ext4 handles that fine. I know that Fat32 has no journaling and NTFS is a tad bit sensible to disconnects. Don't know about exfat.
My external SSD I put together with a “nice” enclosure started dropping to 5MB/s on any machine. I don’t trust most external SSDs anymore.
I DO trust my RPi case with built-in m.2 USB adapter thingy, as it’s running full speed in that thing, no issues with speed dropping.
I'd like to know more about this adapter thingy.
Oh it’s AMAZING. It’s an expensive case for the Raspberry Pi 4 models, called Argon. It’s 45USD or so. BUT! It CHANGES THE SHITTY MICRO HDMI PORTS INTO TWO REAL HDMI PORTS!
It also has a little slot for an m.2 SSD inside it, and a tiny USB connector to make it work with a Pi. You can super easily boot from SSD and use a microsd as extra storage. It’s like 10x faster than microSD, it’s wild.
I had bought a different case (that honestly I love) but when I read about this one, I fell in love. Only problem is it only takes SATA m.2 drives, which happened to be the kind in my shitty enclosure.
NAS w/ RAID...
I use mine for desaster recovery.
Using tineshift to take hourly snapshots of my laptop computer.
I don't think my laptop and the drive fail at the same time so I think my use case is safe even with these risky drives.
I purchased a 2TB one of these SanDisk "extreme portable" drives in 2018, and 2 more 2TB drives in 2019. Purchased each one roughly 6 months apart. Knock on wood...so far no problems at all with any of the 3. But, drives do often fail (I've had several fail over the years). One general rule of thumb I have when shopping for drives is I never buy the model with the highest storage capacity for the product line. It's just a dumb superstition I have, but it seems like the higher capacity ones (like 3TB and above) are the ones that have failed on me in the past.
"I trusted all my important data to a single point of failure and now I'm screwed".
So, yes, I respect that SanDisk's drive may have a manufacturing defect and that sucks but they have to share the blame for this. Seriously, drive mirroring is a thing and every single OS supports it out of the box. A proper RAID system is a thing and even better. Adding duplicate storage, be it cloud, another NAS or backing up to tape is even better still. It's the 21st century, you should know that by now if your literal job is based on storing data.
