[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 21:37:06 monarch_dodra wrote:
> On Tuesday, 18 September 2012 at 19:03:40 UTC, Jan Knepper wrote:
> > On 09/18/2012 03:48 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> >> ?? I don't have such problems with my computers, and I tend to
> >> run them
> >> for 5 years before upgrading. The HD failure rate is about the
> >> same as
> >> in the 80's. Of course, we no longer have to deal with
> >> floppies that get
> >> corrupted often.
> >> 
> >> The most common failure I've had are the power supplies,
> >> they're still
> >> as bad today as in the 80's.
> > 
> > Never had a power supply failure... But all my power supplies
> > can handle a lot more than they are used for.
> > 
> > The #0 failure I see is HD... :-( I have had the necessary
> > disks die on me in the last 20 years...
> 
> Neither have I... in the past 10 years (young dev here).
> 
> However, I've had 3 SSDs crap out on me in less than a month...
> out of 3... on 3 different computers. I'm on my fourth now. 4
> months running.
> 
> The worst part about an SSD failure is the utter and total lack
> of warning. One day, everything is green. The next day, the bios
> can't see it. Game over.
> 
> I've had friends ask me to "investigate" blue screens and
> intermittent errors. The HDD was dye-ING, but the data/os still
> salvageable. Not so with an SSD.

I have an rsync cronjob back up my home partition nightly so that the chances 
of losing that data are slim (though I don't back up all the rest of my data 
from my many hard drives unfortunately - it would take up too much space). 
It's saved me on a number of occasions from corrupted or lost data even 
_without_ hard drive failures. Regular backups are a must IMHO, though I think 
that most people consider it too much of a hassle to bother with 
unfortunately.

- Jonathan M Davis