On 05/05/2014 11:47 AM, Richard Pieri wrote:
Any medium can fail with no warning.
Indeed, though disks frequently (usually?) degrade with warning. SMART monitoring can note ECC-errors, for example. And other key components tend to have "lifetime" reliability, i.e., CPUs and RAM and motherboards are usually replaced while still functioning. Fans sometimes die early, but usually make a hellish noise first as a warning.
Flash is a bit unique in that it has an advertised finite life in write-cycles (scarily small number per-cell with modern flash) and though firmware cleverness extends this, they have still been observed to die with no warning. Very unnerving. Very trendy, too: are Mac notebooks even available without SSDs these days? Does Apple have some magic exemption to these flash problems? Very unnerving.
Good backups have always been the go-to recourse for these occurrences.
The term "backup" tends to refer to having historical copies of data, usually with a notable delay in how long it takes to restore the data.
I would suggest that with flash, hardware redundancy (external to whatever proprietary hocus-pocus is already in a flash product) is wise. Something present and immediately bootable.
In my case (1) limiting the use to a regime that is not so stressful to flash and (2) having a ready backup boot device, should address that. Unfortunately, if it does fail on me, a human presence is probably needed to reboot things. Just my personal basement server, so I think I can live with that.
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