SSDs maybe not a good idea for rarely used machines

[Cox Orange]

Some of us have SSDs in their Machines. I had one, too in an ibook G4.

I was a PowerPC enthusiast (i.e. "fan") for years and spend a lot of time upgrading, maintaining several machines, buying some, playing around with them and selling them from time to time (not as a business, but as a private person) or plainly just enjoying them. Long after the initial purchase of my first used beloved iMac G3 DV (fruit colours 2000, slot loader) in 2001 and the EOL of PowerPCs.

Today I only fire up my PowerMac G4 once a year for retro gaming.

Recently there has been a thought coming to my mind: SSDs have the habit of loosing data (and some models reading data in with <5MB/s), if they have been not powered up for several months (i.e. get no power).
I was asking myself whether it was wise to use a SSD in a PowerPC that one only fires up very rarely.

 

[barracuda156]

Some of us have SSDs in their Machines. I had one, too in an ibook G4.

I was a PowerPC enthusiast (i.e. "fan") for years and spend a lot of time upgrading, maintaining several machines, buying some, playing around with them and selling them from time to time (not as a business, but as a private person) or plainly just enjoying them. Long after the initial purchase of my first used beloved iMac G3 DV (fruit colours 2000, slot loader) in 2001 and the EOL of PowerPCs.

Today I only fire up my PowerMac G4 once a year for retro gaming.

Recently there has been a thought coming to my mind: SSDs have the habit of loosing data (and some models reading data in with <5MB/s), if they have been not powered up for several months (i.e. get no power).
I was asking myself whether it was wise to use a SSD in a PowerPC that one only fires up very rarely.

Never heard about losing data as something specific to SSD, but perhaps it is a questionable investment (in terms of money, time or both), if a Mac is used once a year. And a horrible way to store unbacked valuable data.

 

[iStorm]

Valid point, but I don't think traditional HDDs would be any better either. They suffer from bit rot as well (losing their magnetic bits if it's not powered on for the low level system to fix/re-write them), plus you have all the mechanical parts to worry about after being motionless for a long period of time. Either way, hard drives generally aren't designed for long term offline storage. If it were me, I'd probably stick with SSD...less things to go wrong, imo.

 

[Makosuke]

Here's an AnandTech article from a few years ago discussing the potential for SSDs to lose data when unpowered for long periods of time:

The Truth About SSD Data Retention

www.anandtech.com

Short version, unless the room you store it in is very hot, it's probably not an issue you'll ever run into, especially if you power the drive on once every year or so.

As far as comparing to HDDs, I'm not sure how much of an advantage there is there--on one hand, HDDs don't have any inherent tendency to lose data when powered off, but on the other the bearings do degrade with age, and I've had more than one experience with powering up an old HDD that had been on the shelf for years and it either failing to start entirely, or dying after the first power cycle.

If I were planning to put it in a safe somewhere for years and tape or optical media weren't an option, I'd probably use an HDD, but otherwise I doubt it makes a significant difference.

Valid point, but I don't think traditional HDDs would be any better either. They suffer from bit rot as well (losing their magnetic bits if it's not powered on for the low level system to fix/re-write them)...

Curious if you have a link discussing this; SSDs do all kinds of background housekeeping when idle, but I was not aware that HDDs did any such thing unless they actively read the bad data block in question. That's exactly why large RAID arrays get scrubbed periodically, to catch "cold" bad blocks (either from write errors or cosmic ray magnetic disruptions) and regenerate parity for them.

 

[Hughmac]

Have you backed up your SSD to a bootable external firewire drive with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper?
That is one of the best ways of preserving your data in case of HDD or SSD failure

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Cox Orange]

Well, I aside from forum discussions here and there on the net, I also read recommendations on websites of data recovery service companies to avoid SSDs as longtime backup media, if not powered for longer periods.

translated from german: "In principle, all flash memories are rather unsuitable as long-term storage ("data grave", archive...), since the memory signals can lose intensity after an indefinable period of time without regular power supply and thus fragments of data could be lost, so that said data is incomplete and therefore incorrect or will be defective. However, if the SSD is used regularly, there is nothing wrong with it at first."

Just to not leave the impression of me being a bit stupid, or let's say careless

unbacked valuable data.

Have you backed up your SSD to a bootable external firewire drive with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper?

of course. This should be a given

and I was not so much talking about unbacked valuable data in my case
I was more talking about having a clean install of the OS plus a few games, one can install again, if it gets lost. But the "pain" and anoying "hazzle" one has, when you have to reinstall this stuff, even if it is not a lot and no valuable data plus the time left, when you're searching (maybe hours) for the reason why the system is still usable, but acting strange, because one small file of the size of a few byte is corrupt that the system or the application is trying to access.

Either way, hard drives generally aren't designed for long term offline storage. If it were me, I'd probably stick with SSD...

Well, very expensive enterprise grade SSDs are quipped with a small "battery" to avoid unpowered states and therefore data loss. On the other hand I remember back then when Hitachi was still in business they recommended powering up external HDDs used for backup every month once to keep it magnatized.

 

[barracuda156]

On the other hand I remember back then when Hitachi was still in business they recommended powering up external HDDs used for backup every month once to keep it magnatized.

Hitachi is still there.

 

[Makosuke]

Well, very expensive enterprise grade SSDs are quipped with a small "battery" to avoid unpowered states and therefore data loss. On the other hand I remember back then when Hitachi was still in business they recommended powering up external HDDs used for backup every month once to keep it magnatized.

On the batteries (or more often ultra capacitors) on enterprise grade SSDs, those have nothing to do with long-term data retention. It's so that if the drive abruptly loses power, it has enough juice left to finish any in-progress writes (flushing the cache to storage), which avoids both data corruption and the loss of data that was already "written" to disk (the cache) but not yet moved to permanent storage. Even consumer SSDs have a method of making sure that at least nothing already written gets corrupted, although they will lose data in the cache.

An interesting Micron paper explaining it in great detail:

https://www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/documents/products/white-paper/ssd_power_loss_protection_white_paper_lo.pdf

If you have a link to something from that Hitachi recommendation, I'd be really interested to see it (I failed to Google up anything), since as far as I understand how magnetic HDDs work, they only do any magnetization when the data is actually written (or if error correction hits a read error), so just powering it on would do absolutely nothing unless you read the whole drive contents to try and catch and recover "weak" blocks.

 

[Makosuke]

Hitachi is still there.

Hitachi the company is, but they sold their hard drive business to Western Digital in 2012, and I believe even the HGST branding was phased out a few years back.

 

[oofio2461]

HHD suffer data rots, and can suffer data loss from disks being damaged/broken

 

[HiVolt]

I've got several older pc's that have SSD's in them, and dont have this issue at all. some are powered up once a year or less.

As long as you use a decent SSD brand, shouldn't be an issue.

 

[Ethosik]

I have some old external SSDs that I haven't powered on in very long time. They still work fine, I just tried them.

 

[spnc]

It's a good idea to have, at all times, a TimeMachine backup (ideally, on two separate disks, which you can alternate and change location every day in case of fire/burglary etc.) and Dropbox as well to keep your internal drive data super safe and synced at all times.

Plus an image of your disk with Carbon Copy Cleaner every week for instance, to be stored on another external disk (and you can sync the image on your Dropbox as well but you'll need a very fast optic internet connection like 10GB/sec in my case, to backup my local MBP 8TB SSD + unlimited Dropbox Business plan).

That way, you're triple safe!

 

[RokinAmerica]

My 17" MSI laptop from 2016 only has an NVMe and a SSD. I used to used it daily pre-covid. Once that hit, I went full time wfh and used my home desktop. Then at the beginning of 2021, I built this pc.

Not until about a year ago did I pull out my laptop and fire it up. No data lost, no issue. I now use it weekly just to have an additional pc if needed, but while I also have heard that for the last 12 years, I have not had this issue.

Regardless, I have multiple backups of all my data, photos, music, work docs, etc. But yeah, no such issue on my lappy.

 

[barracuda156]

Hitachi the company is, but they sold their hard drive business to Western Digital in 2012, and I believe even the HGST branding was phased out a few years back.

Okay, git it. I think I saw Hitachi branding on G-drive products, but did not monitor ownership transitions.

 

[Amethyst1]

I think I saw Hitachi branding on G-drive products [...]

Hitachi bought Fabrik before their HDD business was bought.

 

[Cox Orange]

If you have a link to something from that Hitachi recommendation, I'd be really interested to see it (I failed to Google up anything), since as far as I understand how magnetic HDDs work, they only do any magnetization when the data is actually written

You are right of course! My mistake and a bad one. Badly paraphrasing words not literally citing what I remembered.

But the power up every 30 days part was correct. I already tried to find it via archive.org for you, but couldn't find something. But I have an idea where I can look still. Give me some time. I will come back to you.

 

[eyoungren]

And a horrible way to store unbacked valuable data.

I don't think that if you're only booting a computer once a year, you're storing valuable data on that computer's drive. If the data is that valuable, you need to access it, which would mean turning the computer on more than once a year.

In any case, @Cox Orange has acknowledged that the data is backed up.

It's a good idea to have, at all times, a TimeMachine backup (ideally, on two separate disks, which you can alternate and change location every day in case of fire/burglary etc.) and Dropbox as well to keep your internal drive data super safe and synced at all times.

Plus an image of your disk with Carbon Copy Cleaner every week for instance, to be stored on another external disk (and you can sync the image on your Dropbox as well but you'll need a very fast optic internet connection like 10GB/sec in my case, to backup my local MBP 8TB SSD + unlimited Dropbox Business plan).

That way, you're triple safe!

I used to do TM backups but I developed several problems. One, due to changes between OS over the years, it's somewhat difficult to get both PowerPC and Intel Macs to reliably backup continuously to the same network location. And I am NOT going to have external secondary drives attached to every Mac I use just for TM backups. Two, you can't move the backups without destroying either the backup or the process or both. Third, if you have a network drive that tends to sleep then backups don't occur. Which starts a whole recovery process or a complete refusal of TM to do it's job without trying to make another complete backup. It becomes a mess.

So…I have daily backups using Carbon Copy Cloner to sparse disk images (sparsebundle is a whole different ball of wax problem) on my NAS. I can freely move those around if I need to and simply change the destination in CCC if I have to. CCC continues to work.

Weekly backups are done via CCC to sparse disk images stored on Dropbox. Other than the initial backups done a couple years ago this does not take much time. I have a Dropbox Pro account (not business) with 4.1TB of storage. The backups folder is excluded on every Mac using Dropbox except my Mac Pro. The drive I have Dropbox stored on is 6TB, 2TB more than my storage space for Dropbox. So, I don't have any problems here.

Maybe you having a Dropbox Business account is a limitation if you need a 'very fast optic internet connection'? I do just fine with my ISP, which is cable and 1Gbit. My home network is 1 Gigabit.

Additionally, I have several other backups that CCC does for various data I don't want to lose. Those go to my NAS and periodically I will drop them into the Dropbox backup folder manually (this data is less critical).

 

[spnc]

I don't think that if you're only booting a computer once a year, you're storing valuable data on that computer's drive. If the data is that valuable, you need to access it, which would mean turning the computer on more than once a year.

In any case, @Cox Orange has acknowledged that the data is backed up.


I used to do TM backups but I developed several problems. One, due to changes between OS over the years, it's somewhat difficult to get both PowerPC and Intel Macs to reliably backup continuously to the same network location. And I am NOT going to have external secondary drives attached to every Mac I use just for TM backups. Two, you can't move the backups without destroying either the backup or the process or both. Third, if you have a network drive that tends to sleep then backups don't occur. Which starts a whole recovery process or a complete refusal of TM to do it's job without trying to make another complete backup. It becomes a mess.

So…I have daily backups using Carbon Copy Cloner to sparse disk images (sparsebundle is a whole different ball of wax problem) on my NAS. I can freely move those around if I need to and simply change the destination in CCC if I have to. CCC continues to work.

Weekly backups are done via CCC to sparse disk images stored on Dropbox. Other than the initial backups done a couple years ago this does not take much time. I have a Dropbox Pro account (not business) with 4.1TB of storage. The backups folder is excluded on every Mac using Dropbox except my Mac Pro. The drive I have Dropbox stored on is 6TB, 2TB more than my storage space for Dropbox. So, I don't have any problems here.

Maybe you having a Dropbox Business account is a limitation if you need a 'very fast optic internet connection'? I do just fine with my ISP, which is cable and 1Gbit. My home network is 1 Gigabit.

Additionally, I have several other backups that CCC does for various data I don't want to lose. Those go to my NAS and periodically I will drop them into the Dropbox backup folder manually (this data is less critical).

Very interesting thank you for explaining your process.

 

[spnc]

I don't think that if you're only booting a computer once a year, you're storing valuable data on that computer's drive. If the data is that valuable, you need to access it, which would mean turning the computer on more than once a year.

In any case, @Cox Orange has acknowledged that the data is backed up.


I used to do TM backups but I developed several problems. One, due to changes between OS over the years, it's somewhat difficult to get both PowerPC and Intel Macs to reliably backup continuously to the same network location. And I am NOT going to have external secondary drives attached to every Mac I use just for TM backups. Two, you can't move the backups without destroying either the backup or the process or both. Third, if you have a network drive that tends to sleep then backups don't occur. Which starts a whole recovery process or a complete refusal of TM to do it's job without trying to make another complete backup. It becomes a mess.

So…I have daily backups using Carbon Copy Cloner to sparse disk images (sparsebundle is a whole different ball of wax problem) on my NAS. I can freely move those around if I need to and simply change the destination in CCC if I have to. CCC continues to work.

Weekly backups are done via CCC to sparse disk images stored on Dropbox. Other than the initial backups done a couple years ago this does not take much time. I have a Dropbox Pro account (not business) with 4.1TB of storage. The backups folder is excluded on every Mac using Dropbox except my Mac Pro. The drive I have Dropbox stored on is 6TB, 2TB more than my storage space for Dropbox. So, I don't have any problems here.

Maybe you having a Dropbox Business account is a limitation if you need a 'very fast optic internet connection'? I do just fine with my ISP, which is cable and 1Gbit. My home network is 1 Gigabit.

Additionally, I have several other backups that CCC does for various data I don't want to lose. Those go to my NAS and periodically I will drop them into the Dropbox backup folder manually (this data is less critical).

Yeah I had 1 GB/sec back in 2012 in Switzerland they developed this early, then moved to 10 GB/sec. But 1GB/sec is actually more than most people need, still as of today. I'm just worried that, when Apple will release 16TB SSD drives, I'll need to upload daily CCC backups of that size, which might end up being broadband heavy. Hopefully 10GB/sec will be good enough then, and apparently Wi-Fi 7 will deliver peak rates of over 40 Gbps, a 4X increase over Wi-Fi 6E - so that'll be awesome!

 

[eyoungren]

Yeah I had 1 GB/sec back in 2012 in Switzerland they developed this early, then moved to 10 GB/sec. But 1GB/sec is actually more than most people need, still as of today. I'm just worried that, when Apple will release 16TB SSD drives, I'll need to upload daily CCC backups of that size, which might end up being broadband heavy. Hopefully 10GB/sec will be good enough then, and apparently Wi-Fi 7 will deliver peak rates of over 40 Gbps, a 4X increase over Wi-Fi 6E - so that'll be awesome!

Are you doing complete CCC backups each time then?

I just have CCC set to backup only files that have changed or been added and delete files on the destination that are no longer on the source. That keeps a complete backup with changes. My needs do not require sequential backups or a full backup each time.

My ISP is now offering 2GB plans, but I just upgraded five years ago from Fast Ethernet equipment to Gigabit. Not a single computer I own has anything faster than Gigabit ethernet. I'd have to replace my networking equipment and a modem that's only about a year old, upgrade PCI cards, etc, etc. Not going to happen anytime soon.

Additionally, while I do work from home, the company I work for has the same ISP as I do. My ISP does not offer gigabit business plans, so right now my personal speeds are much faster than what the company can get. Which means there's no real point in upgrading. Maybe in five years or so.

 

[spnc]

Are you doing complete CCC backups each time then?

I just have CCC set to backup only files that have changed or been added and delete files on the destination that are no longer on the source. That keeps a complete backup with changes. My needs do not require sequential backups or a full backup each time.

My ISP is now offering 2GB plans, but I just upgraded five years ago from Fast Ethernet equipment to Gigabit. Not a single computer I own has anything faster than Gigabit ethernet. I'd have to replace my networking equipment and a modem that's only about a year old, upgrade PCI cards, etc, etc. Not going to happen anytime soon.

Additionally, while I do work from home, the company I work for has the same ISP as I do. My ISP does not offer gigabit business plans, so right now my personal speeds are much faster than what the company can get. Which means there's no real point in upgrading. Maybe in five years or so.

Yeah I can't be bothered with selective backups. Isn't too complicated to do that in CCC? I never tried that.

I do full backups and only keep the two most recent at all times.

 

[eyoungren]

Yeah I can't be bothered with selective backups. Isn't too complicated to do that in CCC? I never tried that.

I do full backups and only keep the two most recent at all times.

No, not complicated at all. You just tell CCC which files/folders to copy on the source and depending on your version of CCC either customize the settings on the destination or turn Safety Net off.

 

[orionquest]

Meh I won't even worry about it. You have a back up, and you probably have the game installers archived someplace as well. Then you have the recovery sources if the drive fails, which from the disscussion could be any drive be it SSD or spinner. It's an inconvience more then something to concern about.