Best Large capacity SSD for Long Term storage

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

What about just using cloud storage? It's significantly cheaper and more reliable. Now granted you're gonna be limited by your internet connection, but it's the safest and cheapest option.

what about the patriot act? wouldnt that allow the government to check his stuff?

i know it sounds a bit crazy, but its been suggested to me by some computer technicians that i worked/talked with in tucson az.

 

[cw823]

that dosent even make sense! your data on the SSD is still there when you replace the power supply!!

if it goes out, just replace the PSU, and then re run the back up!

Sigh. So you're angry, because you didn't understand what I was saying. You can have 50 disks in your system with a complete copy of all your data. If your PSU goes out and shorts out everything to which it is attached, bye bye data.

 

[attack]

what about the patriot act? wouldnt that allow the government to check his stuff?

i know it sounds a bit crazy, but its been suggested to me by some computer technicians that i worked/talked with in tucson az.

Good point, I think hackers would be more of a concern through (either to his desktop or the cloud)...but privacy/security of content would be something to consider.

(don't turn this into a patriot act debate please...I know it's slippery slope not condoning it or berating it)

 

[DigitalMonkey]

This is slightly off topic. If you run two 250 gb SSD's on raid 0, will I run into any SSD reliability or longevity issues?

 

[attack]

This is slightly off topic. If you run two 250 gb SSD's on raid 0, will I run into any SSD reliability or longevity issues?

Well the SSD is not any more or less likely to fail, but you've more than doubled your chances that you'll lose your data. Because you're doubling the chance of a drive failure (since you have 2 drives, erither of which goes will be 100% data loss) and you run into the issue of a RAID controller failure which may or may not be recoverable.

 

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

Sigh. So you're angry, because you didn't understand what I was saying. You can have 50 disks in your system with a complete copy of all your data. If your PSU goes out and shorts out everything to which it is attached, bye bye data.

but nowadays dont power supply's just die RARELY/SELDOMLY taking the system with it?

im sorry to sound angry and mean but i have had, in all my entire life here on earth, one power supply die on me. but it didnt take the whole system with it, just had to replace it with a new one and it was back up and running like normal.

the only power supplys i know of that can take a system with it is allied. so far. but even the allied hasnt blown up on me. that 250 watter has been working fine for years on me.

in fact, why not use an external hard drive to back up his SSD? im pretty sure that would also be the safest route he could ever take. maybe use a personal home server? NAS?

 

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

Sigh. So you're angry, because you didn't understand what I was saying. You can have 50 disks in your system with a complete copy of all your data. If your PSU goes out and shorts out everything to which it is attached, bye bye data.

basically, what im trying to say is that i just see that as a lack of faith. yeah, its not a quality power supply, but at least it wont take the system with it when it dies. at least not with all PSUs

 

[cw823]

but nowadays dont power supply's just die RARELY/SELDOMLY taking the system with it?

im sorry to sound angry and mean but i have had, in all my entire life here on earth, one power supply die on me. but it didnt take the whole system with it, just had to replace it with a new one and it was back up and running like normal.

the only power supplys i know of that can take a system with it is allied. so far. but even the allied hasnt blown up on me. that 250 watter has been working fine for years on me.

in fact, why not use an external hard drive to back up his SSD? im pretty sure that would also be the safest route he could ever take. maybe use a personal home server? NAS?

Fine. Put all your faith on the one component that can destroy every single part of a system. Makes sense to me.

Offsite
Backup

FTW

 

[Janus67]

The thing is, you can't bank on it not taking the system with it. It just depends on how the PSU dies and/or how lucky you are. Everyone can hope that when/if one dies it doesn't have a short that causes the issue, but that doesn't mean that it won't - which is what cw823 is getting at.

My vote would be a NAS device, because I still don't think an SSD is needed for this kind of backup.

 

[someinterwebguy]

I'm gone for a few days and so many replies.

I have my secondary computer (the Phenom II X6 1090) with a 300GB Raptor that is rarely on, but has critical backups on it.

I also backup the critical stuff to blu ray and store it in my gun safe.

I have my dropbox and use it to backup my email/passwords (encrypted before uploading of course).

The data I want to have on this large SSD - which will likely be 256GB - is data such as ROMS, Music, etc, that I can technically replace if a drive dies. While I will be writing to the drive from time to time, it will be used for reading the most which, from my understanding, doesn't wear the drive down cell-wise.

I understand that SSD's are not perfect, I understand a power supply dying can destroy anything connected and, well, everything else that has been posted.

The point of my post, is that I wanted to know what was considered more reliable in the higher capacity range. The consensus seems to be that Intel/Crucial/Samsung are the ones to get and so I will go with that once the holiday deals come around.

I'm not going to get into backup debates with people. I say use what works for you, be diligent with your backups, and always plan for the worst.

I honestly appreciate EVERYONE's input!

 

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

The data I want to have on this large SSD - which will likely be 256GB - is data such as ROMS, Music, etc, that I can technically replace if a drive dies. While I will be writing to the drive from time to time, it will be used for reading the most which, from my understanding, doesn't wear the drive down cell-wise.

i dont see why you still want an SSD for storage...thats like making an Olympic runner hold your stuff.

 

[MRD]

I disagree with the Intel suggestion. I think the older Intels were great, but personally I do not trust any of the Sandforce drives, and Intel has moved to Sandforce now (anyone know if that's for all of them?) I believe in Intel hardware, but I do not believe in LSI/Sandforce.

I would look at either a Crucial M4 or an OCZ Vertex 4 (NOT a Vertex 3 or lower, as they are Sandforce based). The V4 is based on Marvell's controller with Indilinx firmware. V4 is probably higher performance, but the Crucial has a really long track record of reliability. However, due to a shortage of the consumer grade NAND OCZ usually uses, apparently the drives they made end of August of this year in the Vertex 4 series had enterprise grade NAND in them - but it's a crap shoot which you get if you order it. No way to know what's under the hood when you order it, and I don't know what the odds are.

Aren't the revodrives 2 striped drives in RAID0? I could be way off on that, but if that's true, then either failing would cause loss of data. I think of Revodrives more for super high speed apps, not super high reliability, but I've never owned one and could be wrong on that.

 

[deathman20]

Only thought a single line of Intel is Sandforce, rest are intel controllers. Easy way to tell... speeds are slower on Intel hardware and don't have 500/500 for read/write as listed.

 

[Bobnova]

I wouldn't trust any SSD nearly as far as a mechanical.

On the subject of PSUs, they still die sometimes, and they still fry everything sometimes. It's less common, but it does happen.
An eSATA external drive that has its own independent power supply should be fairly safe from such a thing. SATA and eSATA are differential based communication systems so there isn't a solid copper line to fry the drive with. The independent power supply insures that even if the main computer PSU goes kaboom the drive doesn't eat 120VAC.

Off-site is even better, as that protects from house fires and such as well.

The PSU is a single point of failure, as such it is dangerous if you're serious about protecting your data.
For that matter the APC is a single point of failure as well, so keep an eye on it.
External drives that are USB and/or powered by your computer are just as vulnerable to a PSU going POW as internal drives, plus they can be knocked over and killed that way.

A very high quality PSU (ideally (IMO) a review sample from a known-good reviewer) is very important.

Revo3 drives are two or four SF drives in RAID0. I would not trust them for truly important data.
Revo and Revo2 I don't remember.

Ideally a NAS with an optical link, if you're rolling in money

 

[MRD]

Intel used to use their own controllers exclusively. I thought they were moving entirely to SF as they are faster. However, if you can find original Intel controllers, I would consider those reliable too. Not very fast - but reliable (faster than a HDD).

I don't really consider Intel due to cost normally. OCZ and Micron/Crucial are usually more economical, and I think as long as you get the Marvell silicon, you're good on reliability.

Same concern on the Revodrives - RAID 0 is not a good approach for reliability. It is for speed and max throughput - which the Revodrives have a lot of - but it's not for reliability. I don't know if you can configure a revodrive as RAID1 - if you can that would be reliable, but I've never heard of doing it (and you'd lose half the capacity).

 

[someinterwebguy]

The mentions of cloud storage have made me consider getting some cloud storage as a backup in lieu of an additional hard drive at this point in time. I'm still looking at getting an additional external Western Digital Mybook 3TB (changed my mind on getting a mechanical drive due to the passionate input of people in this thread) in a few months.

I love my dropbox, but at 2.5GB, that's not a lot of storage for backing up bigger files like my email and digital pictures/videos. I see they offer sizes starting @ 100GB for $9.99/mo.

Any recommendations for cloud storage?

I'd prefer free (who doesn't?), but low-cost will fit the bill as well.

Thanks again!

 

[someinterwebguy]

Just realized that I get a free 5GB of cloud storage from Amazon.

Still interested in larger storage sizes though.

 

[deathman20]

Just realized that I get a free 5GB of cloud storage from Amazon.

Still interested in larger storage sizes though.

I swear there is a site out there that allows for huge amounts of pictures to be stored online for free. Course they probably can use the pictures for there purposes then.

I know google allows up to 20,000 songs to be uploaded to there service. That can take a chunk of HDD space and make it smaller.

 

[someinterwebguy]

I swear there is a site out there that allows for huge amounts of pictures to be stored online for free. Course they probably can use the pictures for there purposes then.

I know google allows up to 20,000 songs to be uploaded to there service. That can take a chunk of HDD space and make it smaller.

I didn't know that Google music allowed you to store 20,000 songs - Seriously thank you! My current collection stands at a little over 12,000 (including a huge amount of FLAC from all the CD's and vinyl records of mine that I've ripped over the years) so this is backup for the whole enchilada.

I only wish this was here back in '06 when my external drive fell off my desk and I lost my music (didn't have money for extra drives back then and hadn't backed up all my music to DVD). I lost a bunch of Dennis Miller monologues from the last few months his show was on there air - funny stuff.

I had been ignoring cloud everything for a while because I like to wait until things settle down rather than jump right in. Now that I've been looking into it - with pointers from people like yourself - I'm impressed with what is available for free at this point in time. My music collection is 136GB because of all the FLAC audio I have, so it is quite a relief to have an off site backup for such a large amount of data. This will also free up some space on the microsd card that I use with my Transformer, since I can access my music from google instead of deciding what songs to have on the card.

 

[attack]

I didn't know that Google music allowed you to store 20,000 songs - Seriously thank you! My current collection stands at a little over 12,000 (including a huge amount of FLAC from all the CD's and vinyl records of mine that I've ripped over the years) so this is backup for the whole enchilada.

I only wish this was here back in '06 when my external drive fell off my desk and I lost my music (didn't have money for extra drives back then and hadn't backed up all my music to DVD). I lost a bunch of Dennis Miller monologues from the last few months his show was on there air - funny stuff.

I had been ignoring cloud everything for a while because I like to wait until things settle down rather than jump right in. Now that I've been looking into it - with pointers from people like yourself - I'm impressed with what is available for free at this point in time. My music collection is 136GB because of all the FLAC audio I have, so it is quite a relief to have an off site backup for such a large amount of data. This will also free up some space on the microsd card that I use with my Transformer, since I can access my music from google instead of deciding what songs to have on the card.

Checkout a program called gladinet, it allows you to map drives to various storage services (amazon being one of them).

I was working on this before I deployed so I could move everything to the cloud...and I was leaning toward amazon storage for their price.