(Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) data, which is generated by firmware that the manufacturer created for and installed in the specific SSD. The statistics in the CrystalDiskInfo report come from the SSD’s S.M.A.R.T. That’s much less than I paid for my Seagate ST225 nearly 40 years ago. As I write this article, Amazon sells this SSD for less than $100. The report tells me that I have a 1Tbyte Crucial MX500 SSD in my laptop and that it thinks it’s in good health, with 99% life left in it. The report on the SSD in my work laptop PC looks like this: It gives me a comprehensive report on my SSD’s health. In fact, with the right software, you can query an SSD and find out exactly where it is in its life cycle. However, because they’re not mechanical devices and because the wearout mechanisms of Flash memory are so well studied, because they’re endowed with wearout-protection mechanisms, and because they’re so well instrumented, SSDs generally have the good manners to fail on a schedule. The improved reliability is welcome, but that does not mean that SSDs don’t fail. SSDs have many advantages over HDDs including faster performance, lower operating power, and better reliability. Over the past several years, Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) have supplanted HDDs as SSD costs have fallen. These days, I no longer have PCs with HDDs. And failures do happen, catastrophically and without warning. With two motors and several heads barely separated from a fast-moving surface, there’s plenty of room for mechanical failure. The heads are mounted on a swing arm controlled by a servo motor.
(Actually, the magnetic coating material these days is cobalt, but the phrase “rust-covered” has stuck with me over the decades.) Read/write heads fly perilously close to the surfaces of these platters. They still fail, just not as often.Īn HDD is essentially a stack of rapidly spinning, rust-covered (iron oxide coated) platters made initially of aluminum and then later of glass. Hard drives became increasingly reliable over time.
Although such an early failure was somewhat unusual back then, reliability was a problem. Unfortunately, that Seagate drive failed after just one or two months. The ST-225 could barely hold one of today’s shortest compressed video files for YouTube but it represented enormous capacity back then, when IBM PC double-sided floppy disks stored only 720Kbytes. That’s a capacity of 20 MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes. It was a 5.25-inch Seagate ST-225 half-high, 20Mbyte hard disk drive (HDD). Many years ago, I ordered my first hard drive for my original IBM PC.
0 kommentar(er)
