ssd - Usability of solid state drives after long term storage without without power

08
2014-07
  • Sidney

    So, I was recently hired on to a company that has shipped out several 24/7 always on servers.. With solid state drives. I understand that SSD longevity has been improved upon, however to my knowledge the drives are not going to last the length of time some of our clients want them too (10+ years in the worst cases), whereas conventional hard drives would. The company I am part of decided to do this, and implemented RAID 1 as a data integrity fail safe, which I have no argument against; id recommend it for solid state or conventional drives.

    I am concerned about the possibility that if (when) we wind up needing to rebuild the RAID, we'll need to match specifications, and a match may be pretty hard to find xyz years down the line. So I'm thinking, If we bought a handful of solid state drives today, threw them in a closet and forgot about them, if 5 or 7 years down then line when we needed to replace one, would the ones in the closet still be viable? I'm led to believe Solid State Drives are hardier than conventional drives in terms of physical reliability, so I think they would, but I thought I'd get a consensus.

    • Answers
  • Jim G.

    Because there are no moving parts in the SSD drive, I would imagine that you should have no problem with long term storage. They should absolutely handle storage better than conventional hard drives.

    But I'd confirm with the manufacturer to see if there are any recommendations on their part.


    • Related Question

    windows 7 - Can I have a single solid state drive and a RAID array on the same machine?
  • jaminto

    To summarize, i'm looking to use a single solid state drive as my primary drive, and two conventional sata drives in a RAID 1 configuration for data. I am trying to install 64-bit Windows 7 onto this configuration. Is this possible?

    Here are the details: I built a desktop that has been running 64-bit Vista on two 500Gb in a RAID 1 array for a few years. I just purchased an Intel X25-M 80Gb Sata Solid-State Drive, and was planning on using this a my primary drive, and keeping the RAID 1 array as my data drive.

    I added the SSD drive and in the RAID setup, configured it as a RAID 0 array of only one disk.

    Then, I tried to do a clean install of windows 7 64-bit, but got stuck in the "Missing driver for CD/DVD drive" black hole of selecting driver files and Windows telling me that i don't have the appropriate driver for my hardware. The missing hardware is NOT a CD/DVD drive, since i'm installing off of my only CD/DVD drive. Plus at one point i was able to point it at a driver for my raid controller, and then my hard drives magically showed up as browsable sources for finding drivers for some other unnamed device that setup couldn't recognize.

    After a few hours of trying drivers (this was a very slow process) i decided to reboot and look at the BIOS settings. I'm using an ASUS M2A-VM motherboard which has an ATI SB600 RAID controller on board. I switched the "On board SATA Type" setting from "SATA" to "AHCI" thinking that since AHCI is an Intel thing, this would help. Unfortunately, this abandoned my RAID configuration, and my previously mirrored drives are showing up as separate drives when i boot into my current windows installation.

    Am i trying to do the impossible here? Should i just buy a separate SATA/RAID PCI card and plug the SSD into that?

    Any help would be greatly appreciated.


    • Related Answers
  • Andee

    Yes, as long as you have enough sata ports and set up the raid correctly. How to do this varies by vendor, and you may also have to fiddle with the hard drive priority order in BIOS.