Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Non Volatile Memories

 


Last Sunday I got a big scare - one of my newest external hard disk drives (HDD) let out a few scratchy noises and suddenly stopped working. Its LED light went out and the icon just disappeared from my desktop screen. Disbelief, panic!

I checked the plugs and ports, tried changing the USB port, tried restarting the system but the HDD just would not turn on. I had purchased this Seagate 2TB model just before Covid lockdowns! For a while, I just stared at the screen, shocked, confused, bewildered, wondering if I had just lost my collection of thousands of photographs, music, movies and other important documents.

Not sure of what to do next, iI checked for possible solutions online, hoping for some tips on how to resuscitate a cold metal box that held some of my prized collections and memories.

A YT video, "How Safe Is Your Data?" seemed like a good place to start. I was hoping to learn something reassuring from Christopher Barnatt, the acclaimed guru of Explaining Computers - on the lifespan of hard-drives, solid-state drives (SSDs), and other magnetic, solid-state and optical media. Far from being reassured, this video raised the panic levels!

Consider these facts presented by Barnatt -

  • Magnetic tapes can last up to 30 years
  • Most hard disk drives will last 3-7 years (!)
  • SSDs depend on type of cells and number of re-writes, but should last 5-10 years. However if left un-powered for 1-2 years, data may be lost!

  In other works, as with everything else in life, nothing is permanent. More so in the world of charged electrons - a hard disk drive just wears out of spinning in circles; there is nothing solid about solid-state memory; Non Volatile Memory (NVMe) may be the latest thing when it comes to packing in superlative amounts of memory into tiny spaces but it is still volatile!

I have three HDDs - one each from Transcend, Western Digital, and Seagate. The oldest one is from Transcend and I had purchased it online in Japan in 2010 (15 years old!), and it stopped working last year. I tried accessing it from older laptops and Macs but it just refuses to show up on the desktop even after powering on.

So what is the solution? According to Barnatt, the most durable option (30+ years) is to burn all your important files into optical laser disks (high quality DVRs - read only). This however demands access to specialized equipment. Optical drives have all but disappeared from the new laptops. So the next best option could be to have multiple backups.

 As a first step I urgently needed a full backup of all my photos. Since the total size across HDDs came to around 750GB, I decided to try out the new kid on the block - NVMe SSDs. One thing I liked in particular about this option was that unlike traditional HDDs, you could order these à la carte. You could get the memory chips from the company you wanted (Samsung /WesternDigital / Crucial / Seagate), choose the capacity that I could afford (higher the better + you need to leave some space free for maintenance) and fit it into a a box enclosure of your choice.

So, after doing a bit of research and checking some options, this was my final configuration - 

  • M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure from PI India (INR899) - comes with a GPT drive (GUID partition table), connecting cables (USB-C to C / USB 3.0), heat-sink sticker, pouch
  • Gum-stick card - 2280 Western Digital/Sandisk Blue 580 M.2 NVMe 4gen (INR5399) -- a YT video from PI was useful for making sure it was fitted in properly
  • Formatted on MacBook Air - exFAT (for MacOS+Win access) + GUID partition table (GPT seems more robust than MBR - master boot record) 

 So far the set up has been working beautifully. NVMe cards are so much more compact and seem sturdier than the clunky old HDDs! Now I hope the NVMe card will live up to its claim of being non-volatile.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

 
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