hedwards: it's just extremely expensive and may require disassembling the disk in a clean room
Alaric.us: This would price such an operation out of the reach of the vast, overwhelming majority of people, making it impractical and effectively inaccessible. Personally it wouldn't hurt my bottom line to pay $10,000 for the recovery of critical data, but percentage-wise I am closer to an exception than the rule. Be as it may, the more sensible course of action would be to bank on reliability as opposed to recoverability. And even that is a supremely bad idea.
What I'm trying to say is that there is simply no substitute for the periodic backing up of critical data. Depending on anything else (be it the reliability or the recoverability) is nearly equally foolish.
I'm not saying that it's affordable, just that it's at least possible. Really, if the data is that valuable, it should be backed up properly both locally and somewhere else.
But, that being said, if for some reason those backups turned out to be bad, there's at least some possibility of recovering the data from a HDD. It may require a clean room or component swap, but it is possible.
With SSD basically, it doesn't much matter how much money you spend as the data is just gone due to the way that the disks are set up.
I'm really not sure why anybody is continuing to argue the point. It's really beyond debate that it's possible to recover data from an HDD when it's really not possible with SSDs and in many cases, you don't even need expensive services.
hedwards: One thing to keep in mind is that if you use an SSD for anything important that it's imperative that it be constantly backed up because when one of those goes tits up you lose all of your data, not just some of your data like you'd have wtih a typical HDD.
Probably not a dealbreaker, but it is something you have to plan for and really, you ought to have proper backups anyways. Just that you don't necessarily get that last chance like you often do with HDDs.
timppu: I don't know if SSDs give warning signs beforehand, but yeah quite often you can also tell beforehand that some HDD might be becoming unhealthy, like it starts becoming VERY slow, or giving extra sounds you didn't hear before, or simply S.M.A.R.T. warns you that it is getting unhealthy. I saved data from one friend's HDD when SMART started complaining about the HDD on every boot up.
Admittedly, I recall once having zapped a HDD instantly, I guess it was some static charge when I put the HDD resting on the metallic PC case, its circuit board probably got zapped. I guess the data itself was still intact on the platters themselves, but I decided not to try to salvage it for money.
It's definitely possible for that to happen, although in practice the drives tend to give warnings like weird sounds or SMART errors. Or just data corruption.
Personally, I use a mirrored ZFS set up to pretty much eliminate that, but it's overkill for most folks and not supported on all operating systems.
Anyways, I'm out, it's become a bit of a distraction with other people responding without reading what I've said and there's really not much point in that my only point was that you have to be doubly or triply careful about having backups as it's more or less impossible to recover things off these disks once they go up. And even just trying to recover files after they've been deleted can be a lot tougher.
F4LL0UT: I'm using an SSD as my primary drive that contains Windows and most applications (I keep games on my secondary HDD for now, though). I'm so used to my SSD at this point that I'm barely aware of how fast it is anymore but when I did the swap, the change was extremely noticeable. The system is ready to go in a few moments and applications that I keep on the SSD load lightning fast. A particular example that illustrates this extremely well is Cubase, the music software I use. It used to launch for what felt like forever, I guess now it's ready in like ten seconds? Also loading instruments, which are typically several hundred megabytes, sometimes more than a gigabyte in size, happens in a matter of seconds now, where I often had to wait for like half a minute or longer on my HDD. I never measured the exact times but that's how it
feels. And I guess the felt responsiveness of the system is ultimately what really matters, right? I might start installing certain games, that have long loading times and I know I'll keep playing for weeks or months, on my C drive.
Anyway, there's no way I'll go back to HDDs and it's only a matter of time until I'll go full SSD for my entire system. The only reason I haven't done so yet is that with the aforementioned music software + games I need about 4 TB in my system. I recommend
at least 250 GB for a system drive that holds Windows and the most commonly used applications. More depending on one's particular needs.
Ah yes, becoming used to the speed. I wasted so much money during the '90s because my standards for how fast things should be kept on increasing.
Most likely, we'll eventually be using SSDs for virtually everything. But, we're not there yet.
