I wonder whether SSD technology is more long term persistent than hard drive technology. I ask because the last time an SSD quit on me, it was a "sudden death". No warnings, no indications, just dead when starting the machine. So, I already have a preference for hard drive for data and SSD for system software. So the question is: are the technologies described here just as gracefully declining as the current CMR hard drives are? And is the SSD still a "sudden death" drive, or is that a thing of the past?
@profounddamas Says:
Unfortunately they all fail miserably in a few years so you have to make quite some backups. Of all the pc components the hard drive is the one that fails the most. I had one that failed in less than a month.
@george-danfulger Says:
i believe the end wasn’t a true honest conclusion. I kept my data away for several years without plugging in my hard disk drive. probably by this time the ssd would’ve erased most of my data so the conclusion that hard disk drives makes sense when storing very large quantities of data and just being more cost effective is not a good one. it makes sense if you leave your hard drive unplugged for several years as well…because ssd’s….okay chief?
@george-danfulger Says:
on a smr hard drive or an smr hard disk drive? because i don’t believe there are ssd ‘s smr drives to say smr hard drive ….
@george-danfulger Says:
its that your way of saying good bye at the end of the videos?
@jgurtz Says:
The MTR for one of these large drives must be insane. Surely triple parity volumes must be required for operational soundness!
@Haploanddogs Says:
SMR drives do not have a slower sequential write performance.
They have terrible random write performance
@brookrichardson1373 Says:
This is peak ExplainingComputers. Something I already thought I knew a lot about, explained well, and I learned a few new bits.
@JohnToddTheOriginal Says:
I love these heavy-tech videos.
@JasonB808 Says:
It’s so refreshing to hear a true expert explaining computer technologies instead of those “Tech Tubers” that ramble about CPU temps and GPU frame rates and make bar graphs.
@owenbevans6062 Says:
No mention of MFM technology? I still have 2, 1 10mb and 1 40mb drive. Massive in size and storage when compared to the 5.25-inch floppy of the day.
@Amocles Says:
When do you think SSDs will be able to fully replace hard drives and make it impossible for hard drive manufacturers to compete?
@horusfalcon Says:
A very interesting overview of newer magnetic, laser, and microwave recording/reading technologies. Good stuff, man!
@danteerskine7678 Says:
13 years ago when I bought my LG Optimus l5, I got at the same time a micro SD card, it was a Silicon Power 32 gigs class 4 planar TLC NAND (it was made in China btw) and now in 2025, the card in question still works but it's a bit slow compared to the A1,A2, U1,Class10.... which led me to believe that flash memory can indeed survive more than a decade, even the cheaper ones. I haven't seen any micro SD and SSD failed on me, but I have 2 WD my passport HDD that died on me in only 6 months of use.
I would also stay away from SanDisk memory cards and Kingston USB flash drives as they're very bad products. Their SSDs are okay though.
@saganandroid4175 Says:
@explainingcomputers Your website said this was the best way to contact you. I'm an old SCSI fan. Just daisychain them like Commodore or Atari 8 bit drives! But I notice in windows it seems to call everything a SCSI drive, even if it's a, IDE, ATA, SATA hard drive. Vista, Win7, Win10, they all do it. What's going on??
@michaelwright2986 Says:
Very informative, as usual. I wonder, dare one ask about costs? Is it "Are you sitting down?" or is it "If you have to ask ..."?
@urbancyclingpdx Says:
Much more interesting than I expected!
@worldcitizenoss Says:
For long term backups HDs will always be the better option. As the data will be there much longer. The magnetic information will stay much longer then the electrical charge.
@matneu27 Says:
It reminds me when the first I pod with an 1Gb micro HD came out. Fun fact was that many people bought them to harvest the drive because they were cheaper than the single drive that could be used in the CF card slot of the digital cameras.
@grfrog Says:
These drives have outpaced backup media.
@dougb3647 Says:
I still remember a college professor I had, who was very excited one day in class, when he bought a 5Mb hard drive for only US$5,000!
@francisverhelst9375 Says:
Just a short message: i get annoyed constantly by an ad for your member videos on youtube. I don't know about others, but i am cancelling your channel right now !
@ff1077 Says:
Now i can finally arm my homelab a lot easier, now that i know what to look for. Other internet guides didnt explain it well enough for me to understand, and this helped quite a bit.
@allanrichardson1468 Says:
The furniture sized drives (IBM called them DASD, or direct access storage devices) had an interesting old school access arm geometry. In which the access arms were aligned with, and moved in and out in alignment with, the radius of the platters in one direction. Since the arms, when reading the outermost track (and more so when removed from between platters to mark the pack removable), almost doubled the radius in that direction, they were located in one corner of the cabinet.
Because of the larger distances (each platter about the size of a large pizza) the arm had to travel, and the fast movements and sudden starts and stops, the cabinet had to be stabilized to survive the vibration.
Floppy disks kept the same concept, but moved much slower and had smaller “platters,” making the vibration issue much less of a problem.
But the geometry adopted for PC hard drives was genius. Like the tone arm of a phonograph, the tone arm is approximately tangent to the edge of the platter, and swings in an arc that is approximately along a radius of the platters. This requires much less energy to move the arm, and produces almost no vibration. All the subsequent improvements are pure gravy!
@Jackpkmn Says:
I wish manufacturers were less cagey about labeling SMR vs CMR drives. They are good at different things so its important to know. You have to really dig into the model numbers to figure it out.
@supra107 Says:
3:15 Ah yes, the 32 gigabyte Western Digital drive from 2004. :D
@NoEgg4u Says:
@16:03 -- Regarding conventional drives being more cost effective than SSDs. Up front costs do bear that out, by a significant margin.
But SSDs consume far less power.
I have no idea how long it would take for SSDs to become more cost effective for an equal amount of storage to HDDs. It depends on each location's electrical costs.
If you have free (or near free) electricity, then running HDDs will be an easy choice. But if you have expensive electricity costs, then maybe it makes sense to have a high SSD expenditure up front?
And then there is the cooling factor, which uses electricity. Thousands of HDDs release a huge amount of heat.
I used to do Chia processing. The scores of HDDs was enough to heat my apartment. I live in New Jersey, USA, and I rarely turned on my heat during the winter. But in the summer, it was brutally hot, requiring me to keep my AC blasting non-stop.
My electricity costs were 4x what I was paying, prior to Chia. I can only imagine what huge data centers pay for electricity. It must be hundreds of $thousands each month. Across their data centers, globally (for the truly huge companies), they are probably paying $millions each month.
@johnbillings5260 Says:
The larger the drive, the scarier a crash would be. 😮
@monkeymanstones1 Says:
Well, at least I'm one of the sub'sub' who gave a like's.
@garyburke301 Says:
I work for a large US corp supplying server and storage hardware.In my 25yrs experience dealing with storage hardware related failures, the best piece of advise I can give to prevent HDD/SDD/NVMe failures and increase the life of these storage devices. Is to keep your HDD/SDD/NVMe and Storage controller firmwares up to date. In a mechanical HDD for example,the firmware controls the motors, read/write heads etc. 99% of any Storage bugs found after production are resolved by a simple FW update. I have seen large RAID and non RAID virtual disks completely fail with data loss that could have been prevented with a simple firmware update as part of a scheduled maintenance update. Please Please Please...keep your storage device firmware up to date
@StrandedClone Says:
Dude I still love this channel so much, the intro and everything. nothing has changed, in the absolutely best way possible.
@rigurat Says:
You should make a chapter 2 explaining bit patterned media.
@relaxingnature2617 Says:
excellent video
@alexwade9921 Says:
Fascinating video, thank you. The HMAR reminds me of a 1990’s ‘floppy’ technology that was a rival to Zip Disks. There was a thing called MO, which I believe stood for ‘magneto optical’. Apparently it used a laser to heat and improve the magnetic coercivity of the media before being written. As I recall, it also used a laser to read in some weird way? The disks were supposed to be very resistant to corruption.
@loopingfreak Says:
Christopher. I LOVE YOURE VIDEOS!!! keep it up. youre doing AWESOME!!!! :D
@reinoud6377 Says:
4:05 are there also drives with multipe heads?
@reinoud6377 Says:
@explainingcomputers Chris, could you make a video on hoe to accelerate old PCs with a bios with say NVMe or at least with technology far far faster than standard SATA SSDs?
@rameshkanojiya52 Says:
Thank you
@martinwilkinson2344 Says:
Fascinating to see how much effort and technology is still (for the moment) being put into refining a fundamentally old storage technique. Similar to the internal combustion engine's massive levels of refinement of a pretty crude idea over a century into something almost unrecognisable now. And who would have thought our hard drives would have included lasers and microwaves!
@Raptor50aus Says:
Very informative as always Chris. We have come along way since I was started in the pc industry and the first MFM hard disks (Miniscribe) 20MB which required inputting a sheet list of bad sectors when formatting them from new.
@stagggerlee Says:
I have a 5MB CDC hard drive. I assume, after watching the video, contains a small gnome writing on tablet paper using a #2 pencil, and reading back with a flashlight. Lasers and microwaves and helium, oh my!
@nathanrussell2158 Says:
Remember hard drives being rated in megabytes? Doesn’t seem like it was that long ago. 30 some terabyte drives wow.
@wiwingmargahayu6831 Says:
wow and peace be upon you sir from me
@volodimirsci Says:
I remember 20MB HDD in my IBM PC/XT - very big step vs diskette.
@paulkarch3318 Says:
Very useful exposition.
@BanCorporateOwnedHouses Says:
One of my favorite tech channels on the internet. Thanks Chris.
@robyn6521 Says:
The best explanation of SMR!
@elddisguy Says:
The laser assist hd puts me very much in mind of the way the recordable minidisc audio format introduced by Sony in the 1990's worked.
@joopterwijn Says:
Chris, for sure I expected a smal notice to the use of Kibibyte versus Kilobits to express the storage capacity of hard drive. When you read the capacity on the label it is written in let say Kilobyte (a powers of 10 bytes). When formatted your operating system shows the storage bits capacity in (mega)MB/(giga)GB, but actually use the wrong label! they should use the right GiB (gibibytes) but show GB gigabytes. The format value is expressed in a power of 2 number.
1 KB equals 1,000 bytes; 1 kibibyte (KiB) equals 1,024 bytes. 1 megabyte (MB) equals 1,000 KB; 1 mebibyte (MiB) equals 1,024 KiB.
This is one of the reasons you have ‘less’ storage after formatting what most people expected.
@meowthx1985 Says:
I still use HDDs and sometimes SSHDs for storing huge files, video editing, and giant file compression, like Kdenlive, Handbrake, and 7-Zip. I find it annoying and awkward that SSDs don't like writing and erasing data too often, as finding SLC and MLC SSDs is hard to come by. Seagate's HAMR technology works fine on my Seagate HDD, and my SMART app CrystalDiskInfo says that its health is good after running it for 2 years.
Speaking of apps, I get annoyed and hate the hassle of installing unnecessary apps and bloatware into my PC storage NVMe. Of course, we can uninstall apps that we have not used for ages to clear more storage space, but I find utilities like CCleaner with its Registry Cleaner disconcerting. I heard that Registry Cleaners aren't recommended because of how they could corrupt the reg keys and make the PC slightly unstable, which would cause more embarrassing BSODs.
This is why I focus on installing - or rather downloading some portable utilities, like BleachBit, SpaceSniffer, CrystalDiskInfo, HandBrake, and CPU-Z, in order to save my NVMe from depleting its Write/Erase cycles and from adding too much junk into my PC. Of course, using portable apps is better by having it downloaded into a USB pen like my Lexar UHS-II 32GB or even on an SD card.
And as for HDDs I can hope that newer ones will store more data and maybe work longer, but they cannot match the robustness and speeds of SSDs
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