Expected Life and Reliability of any Media Storage Device

[enim]

Everybody is welcome to join this party to share their experience on Expected Life and Reliability for various media like HDD, SSD, USB, CD, DVD, BD, tape-drive etc. any kind of media storage device.

I could only say I could successfully recoverd many data from badly... badly scratched CD.

[Kerry56]

HDD...never had one fail. I've always sold them or given them away before that happened.

SSD...only have one and its doing fine.

SD card...I've had them go wonky in the heat of my car. But so far they reformat and are fine.

CD-R...never had one go bad, but I only use Taiyo Yuden (genric cd-rw was toast after a few years, but that's a different animal)

DVD-R...different story. I've had some get very hard to read, and a couple that were completely trashed, but that is out of thousands burned. I've rarely used anything other than Verbatim, Taiyo Yuden and made-in-Japan Maxell.

BD-R...don't use Ritek made discs. That's it in a nutshell. I had six go completely bad over the course of three years. Initially, they read and scanned just fine. I have no such issues with my Verbatim and FTI Falcon discs.

[redwudz]

HDD: Probably ten failures in the last twelve or so years. Maxtors, Seagates mostly. WD, one or two. And a Samsung. But I've used quite a few over the years. I have about forty in the various PCs here at present. The last failure I had was my own fault when a power cord came out of a RAID 1 box as it was writing. I saved most of the data. I still have some old Maxtor PATA drives that have been performing for years.

SSD: No real failures, but my first 60 GB one gave me a lot of problems, but it was a very early model and much too small for an OS drive. The two 128 GB OCZ Vertex ones I have now have been flawless.

SD cards: Mostly mechanical failures when they fell apart or the write protect switch broke. I don't leave data on them for long.

CD-R: Since I switched to Taiyo-Yuden years ago, no failures. I don't use them much these days, so I have quite a few remaining.

DVD-R: TY silver tops, no failures. Plenty of failures with cheap media in the past. Never again.

BD-R: Verbatim discs only. No coasters with over a hundred burns using two Pioneer burners.

Tape Drive: LTO 200 GB. No failures, though I haven't used it in quite a while. SCSI interface, small capacity and slow.

USB thumb drives: Mostly mechanical failures. I had one that went through the washer and dryer twice and survived. Retired because of small size.

[hech54]

HDD - never had one "die". One became corrupt due to virus or user error.
SSD - never owned one.
SD Card - never had one die.
CD-R - never had one die.
DVD-R - only a few Princos have died(yes they worked/played perfectly for a while).
BD-R - don't own a Blu Ray burner.
Thumb Drives - never had one die.

[handyguy]

Cloud is the new thing.

[fritzi93]

HDD: Two outright failures out of a dozen or so, and those were a Maxtor 60 GB and a WD 80 GB. Both PATA and getting old anyway. I also have two Seagates that started acting flaky, along with alarming S.M.A.R.T. values. A format and a run with chkdsk fixed them and they've given good service for years more. Still have them in the office computer.

SSD: No failures with my two OCZs, a 90 GB and a 60 GB. I did have to do a factory reset on the 90 more than a year ago. The only explanation I can come up with is I had to reset the BIOS one time for an unrelated reason. And I neglected to re-enable AHCI.

SD card: Don't recall any dying. We use them in our cameras.

CDR: No failures that I can recall, though I haven't burned any in a while. CD-RWs are another story; several have failed.

DVDR: Plenty of duds, most of them CMCs. All of them "tossers", i.e. unimportant movie backups that could be re-done anyway. No duds with Verbatim DVD-/+R. DVD-RW, several failures. For DL discs, anything but Verbatim is trash, and I can say that from personal experience.

BDR: Here I'll echo Kerry. Don't use Ritek (RiData) for anything important. I *always* verify and for the first couple hundred, I also scanned them with OptiDriveControl. I thought, hell, these seem to be okay. No failures, supposedly. Then I discovered that several of those scanned discs won't play on 3 standalones, nor will they scan in a BD-ROM or BD-RW drive. And a couple later spindles have had several duds as well. I've also burned many CMC_MAG BDRs with no failures...yet. Anyway, these were all "tossers" too, so no harm done. Important backups are on Verbatims, and no failures there.

USB thumb drives: Two failures out of, oh, a dozen? They just got to the point they wouldn't erase/format any more.