Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss Facebook’s Star Wars themed effects, Samuel L. Jackson on Alexa, Google Maps better lit streets, Amazon’s threat to brick and mortar stores, stores reshuffling staff to prioritize online order pickup, and more.

Bob in El Paso, Texas asked: “With the holidays coming up, I’ll be taking a lot of pictures and I also have a bunch on my phone I’ll need to store. I’m concerned about the new technology in SSDs versus the old technology in hard disk drives. I’m trying to find out which is more reliable and that will last a longer time and will satisfy my need to store a lot of pictures.”

Bob, statistically SSDs are expected to have a similar shelf life as HDDs. HDDs have an obvious track record, so you largely know what to expect, SSDs are a little newer, but modern SSDs haven’t had significant lifespan and reliability problems.

The truth is that you shouldn’t rely on either, though. In fact you shouldn’t rely on any single anything regardless of what the technology is.

If you want to safeguard your pictures for the long haul plan on making lots and lots of copies. Online storage is generally good since it already relies on redundant servers, but it may not be cheap, HDDs are cheap and you really don’t need the speed of an SSD for accessing pictures unless they’re very, very large, so you may want to consider external HDDs as an option.

Since you’re worried about failures and want to hang on to your pictures you should look into RAID arrays if multiple drives are within your budget.

There are different types of RAID array but several allow automatic redundant copies so if one drive fails another will have a copy you can still use, all without having to manually make the copies yourself.

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