It really depends on the HDD failure. If you have the spindle failure (at least one disk separates from the axle even a bit), nobody can recover the data. If you have head touching the disk, the head is destroyed and the are of the disk that the head touched is destroyed and recovering any data from the rest of the drive will require head swap in a clean room laboratory by a skilled engineer. If bearing fails, all the data is lost etc.

It’s true that the most common failure mode of HDD is PCB failure which is typically pretty cheap to deal with because you don’t need a clean room for data recovery. You still need some soldering and a working donor board. With SSD, the PCB failure is the only possible failure mode so it should have at least equal lifetime unless there’s a software bug (in drive firmware).

SSDs have multiple failure modes, too, so you shouldn’t trust that neither SSD nor HDD fail without losing all data at once. Sometimes SSD fail into read-only mode so you can still read all the data but you cannot write anything on the drive.

And if your oldest drive has 23500 hours, you’re just too young or lucky. I have a HDD with about 24000 hours which failed and another HDD with 52136 hours that’s still working fine. And all my SSDs are also working fine.

Always keep backups and remember that you cannot expect to keep a piece of data unless you have at least three copies of it with one of the copies in offline storage. For non-important data, lesser amount of copies may be okay if you’re willing to lose the data if you’re unlucky.

May be. The advantege of HDD’s is that you can recover the data, on an SSD, it’s just “near” impossible.

My 1st HDD from 2013 is still working strong, only 192 bad sectors and stopped there, at 23.500 hours on, more or less. And i have more than 12 Seagate drives, no one left me yet.

Time interval between each row
May be 1 min 5 min ?

Regards
Ganesh
9740806542

That’s not entirely true. Even in my very limited experience, I’ve had an SSD fail on me in a way that allowed me to recover the data in full before it completely gave up the ghost. The drive had completely failed in that it no longer booted Windows successfully, but using Linux recovery tools, I was intermittently able to access the drive until it remained operational enough for me to backup all the data stored on it.

While I don’t underestimate the difficulty of a typical SSD recovery, there are certainly SSD recovery services which can help recover data from a variety of different failures, and no doubt as the technology continues to mature, they will find better ways to recover from more types of failure.

Nothing beats having a recent backup on hand, of course.

The write limit is just the warranty limit. It doesn’t say that the drive couldn’t fail earlier. Nor it is a hard limit for the drive either. The “problem” with SSD drives is that they can only fail electronically – in most cases the drive seems to be totally fine until it suddenly fails and all data on the drive is lost. HDD drives can have the same failure mode but they also fail far more often due mechanical problem, and those often have some non-fatal signals before finally giving up (e.g. more seek noise, poor latency, random read errors). As a result, some people feel that HDD drives have smaller probablity of losing data.

In reality HDD drives fail more often because they have both electronic and mechanical failure modes. The typical failure mode is just different.

Motor problems are the last thing you’ll see, don’t worry (Just don’t drop the hard drive). Most SMART errors are just a preview of something worse to come. You’ll never predict what a single HDD will do.

For ex: I have a hard drive (ST500DM002 “Made in Brazil” lol) that contains 8904 bad sectors and increasing ONLY at IDLE mode. I need to keep it busy. It’s probably a firmware error, but it’s working strong… It could be the slider slowly scratching the surface too, but only at idle? I don’t think so.

Why do you guys still buying SanDisk crap?

SSD’s will last until their “write TB limit”… The rest is as HDD…