Posted on 08/04/2021 3:34:04 AM PDT by CptnObvious
The Dirty Ticking Time Bomb of Computing is About to Come Out!
The Disk Manufacturers all know it. The Operating System producers have all known it. But for decades the Dirty Ticking Time Bomb of Computing is about to come out.
It does not matter whether you are on a Laptop, Desktop, Smartphone or even a mainframe, the Ticking Time Bomb is on your system and you probably never knew it.
It is under the heading of SPARES. Specifically when your drive runs out of them.
And a couple of areas on your system disk. Sector 0. If sector 0 is bad, typically it's all over on the next boot. KAPOW!!
Your Smartphone is DEAD AND GONE. Your $1000 apple watch is Kaput. The Data on your PC system disk is GONE and not recoverable.
In a Nutshell, the Time Bomb is WHEN, NOT IF, YOU RUN OUT OF "SPARES" and the next SECTOR IS CRITICAL. KABOOM!!
It does not matter what type of disk it is. Whether it is a Hard Drive, Solid State Drive, or even the new NVMe Drives. THE TICKING TIME BOMB IS THERE.
For when the Spares are gone, God only knows what will happen.
And what the industry is praying for, is that you keep buying the new stuff so that the old stuff, which is wearing out, is gone in time before the TIME BOMBS start Going Off.
BUT THERE IS GOOD NEWS:
Much of the Solid State Drive industry has standardized the reporting of Spare Usage so that the operating systems can know before hand that the problem is approaching.
And the Operating System Vendors are getting ready to be able to watch out for the Time Bombs.
For instance, a Windows 10 major update 21H2, scheduled for the October/November 2021 time frame. Has a feature which can report the "Lifecycle %" left on an SSD. And I'm guessing they are referring to, is the Spares left on the Drive.
From there, it is only one step, to give a warning message "2% Lifecycle left on C:" or something like that.
Disk drives, in general, have been so good that few have experienced THE BOMB. And a Few folks have used RAID on their system volumes to protect themselves.
But this has been a silent killer, nobody wants to talk about. But is finally being addressed.
Sometimes, people with limited tech knowledge can read something and panic.
ARE YOU FREAKIN' KIDDING ME!
Was this guy ranting about the availability of free disk space???!?
I couldn't penetrate his concern, but if that is his problem, ..... well, I just don't know what to say. Imagine, back in the day, this guy's panic when one of his floppy drives filled up!!! lol
Get a spare auxiliary hard drive. Toshiba makes small ones which are about the size of a cell phone and easily plug in to your computer via a cable and have a large amount of storage space. They have them in the range of several tera-bites. Just a thought in case you want to back up our data.
Ping
Are spares like pcaps?
LOL
Don’t defrag SSDs.
I’ve lost a few hard drives - some were accessible via CDROM/USB apps to be able to recover data...but I back up all important files - some of them via USB as I modify them.
Why make a fact of life (shit wears out) sound like a crisis?
It is a real issue (despite the dramatic original post) and it's been known for decades. Anyone who's ever watched a drive repair or disk optimization program run "back in the day" saw when a spot on a hdd got marked as bad and relocated to a spare.
I still remember when it happened on 20Mb MFM drives in my old 80286. Consumers just don't see it happening because it's automatically handled by the hardware itself now.
There's also Smart H.D.D. which quickly and easily shows all the stats on a HDD/SDD/nVME drive you'd ever want to know.
Sounds just like Y2K all over again, except this time there is NO escape. Unless you replace your drives when they start getting worn out. Like you do with everything else you own.
What a load. More fear pron.
And thats true for every other object in the universe. Everything has an expiration date.
I can understand your fear. Just make sure you check and refill the oil in your hard disk every 3 months and the spares won’t dry out and go bad.
My xfs filesystem doesn't ever need defragging anyway.
What’s a “disk”? I’m 78 and vaguely remember them. I get by w/2 little 1TB circuit boards.
I almost impulse bought one. I’m surprised I resisted.
Long ago I took a SCSI programming course for work. The instructor asked the question, “When to you back up your hard drive.” The room was silent for a while and then he answered his own question with, “Every day after a crash.”
I didn’t realize that watches and smartphones had disk drives. They must be really, really small.
They are built into the low-level drive formatting. Your hard drive swaps it in, when it see a failing sector.
OSes do another level on top.
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