Hi folks!
As of today my company changing policies regarding our company
data backup plans!
I never believed that i would write this, but this is true and I present my objective opinion about following issue:
You can’t trust SSD manufactures that your data will be stored in consistent and permanent matter on your SSD!
Way to many times it did happen to me or my employee's, in 4 years this is already a 2nd time where my system SSD on desktop office pc did failed beyond recovery!
(SSD VENDOR DOESN'T MATTER, I used
all famous vendors!!!)
Let’s look what a typical SSD offers:
This is obvious
and what did happen to me is marked with red color.
The
controller interface chip will eventually fail after certain and continuous write
and read operations.
The NAND chips would not help if controller broken!!!
Good luck of figuring out how data stored in those chips!
Let's think about what is wrong about SSD sustainable operation usage: there certain amount of read and write operations before only read operation physically available, then SSD should be automatically switched to read only mode allowing SSD user to access the data, which is stored in NAND memory.
Good that we at Orlovsky Consulting GbR invested good amount of capital for
running physical backups on premises.
Now it’s reasonable to make rhetorical question: is SSD a huge step backwards in regards of storage and maintenance of data?
How this possible you ask, we’ll have a look at HDD diagram:
As I marked with red lines, there only 2 possible breakage points with HDD: disk head or spinning disk.
I assume the HDD disk‘s which I bought were perfectly engineered for very long running lifetime and the
material tiredness did not happen, which
is good and more then I and the HDD manufacturer actually planned for. (This is really great!)
You probably say , yeah whatever, you have your
backups , why to bother?
YES, I DO HAVE BACKUPS
AND NOW EVEN MORE THEN BEFORE!
What about running business, which impact it, did have
on my company?
To recover a 1TB SSD drive it takes
almost 10 hours!
Have look at the picture from the recovery station.
It takes almost
one day (10 hours) to recover 1TB SSD disk!
During this time, you can't do anything, if you not in office or have no other means to access the data!
At my company we value and follow GDPR, this means we can't simply put client data in a public cloud, only one exception when a client gives a special written permission and specify what type of data may be stored in the public cloud, but this happens mostly never.
I hope now you do understand that this is a big issue!
The biggest chip manufactures saying, that they can’t meet the demand, only in 2025 in USA there would be a new factory to produce lots and lots of chips, but what will happens in 2022 , 2023 , 2024?
The slowdown of producing new SSDs and supply limitation of chips, would cause lots of problems for all who depend on SSD disks even so far that it would be very expensive
to run a business where data stored in SSD storage.
Probably only in 2025, when new factory
start to produce the chips a brief
relieve would be possible, but
for example in EU there would be very big Problem , even Germany currently does not building a
microchip production factory ,
the German government
planning it , but really the way how politics in Berlin works , I don’t
even think that in 2023 the actual building of a microchip factory would
happen.
So this is by any means not a small problem I can only imagine, how most biggest cloud providers would solve such problem, because even they would hit hard with SSD supply shortages and then we would see major outages of “CLOUD”.
What I and other smaller and middle size businesses will do about?
I recommend following: start to buy those “old” HDDs, they are not fast as SSD, but those “old”
HDD really more reliable,
then SSD.
The last models of HDD were perfect engineering work both material and on
hardware/software sides. Why ? HDD manufactures did solved all problems, as we all know about “grown
up” technology.
SUMMARY: from now on we all entering a danger zone, our data is not save, even with HDD it’s a trade off, but we would be safer with old tech , then with new and expensive one!
Till 2025 there is no hope for the market stabilization or improvement as far as it goes.
I even plan to speak with the new
German government representatives about this crisis, plans are good,
but the implementation it’s even better, here in EU we should not have only one
solution, but rather many.
Already German
car manufacturers experienced production breakage, because of microchips shortages.
We need to build more those microchip factories in Germany or even in EU it’s a matter of national security, I don’t wish that German nuclear power stations wouldn’t have enough hardware supply, just because that somebody in Berlin make a wish to be 0 debt budget or CO2 conform, it make no sense to me if you can’t run nuclear power plants, then to be 0 debt would not help.
EU is a big union, but Germany must be more on offensive side and motivate own EU member’s to act always when new emergency arrives, sure it’s not easy, but if stay together we would eventually be stronger and our production capabilities would be even better than it was before crisis.