OK, let’s have fun with those pesky neurons in our neurotic brains…
Ted once mentioned in a post about “bit rot”… Hard drive bits will degrade over time… the magnetic field can weaken. This can result in slower access as the error-correction kicks in or, over time, downright failure and data loss. Why is this important? Two reasons that I can muster up from the depths of my neurotic dreams: 1) Music loss, and 2) Jitter or other noises in the drive from “over-working”. Yea, I made that last one up but hey, could happen eh?
I think this is important given music files are very static… once written to the drive(s), they are not re-written or moved and may sit there for years. Let’s be honest, for those of us with big libraries, it may be years before a music file is read… all the while, the bits may rot. Your music collection could be dying and you would not know it. Spinning and solid state drives… the same. This includes the latest tech.
See the video below from Dave Plummer that describes the issue and a very old program that is still being updated to this day that “fixes” bit rot and keeps your data magnetism strong. SpinRite. Your just let it run, and it re-writes data in a special way and repairs problems.
Yes, compact discs (CDs) do deteriorate over time, although the rate of deterioration can vary depending on factors like the type of disc, storage conditions, and manufacturing quality. CDs can experience disc rot, UV damage, heat damage, and physical scratches that can lead to data loss or unreadability.
Similar to “bit rot” but like HDD data, probably a 20 year process to even get close to hearing it.
It’s simply unnecessary to defrag a SSD. Any cell can be read at the same speed as any other cell unlike a spinning hard disk where reads/write occur more quickly at the outer region as it’s moving faster under the read/write head and the additional latency to move the head to read the next segment or block, and jump to another and so on.
Modern SSDs (anything from about 2015 or so) are highly unlikely to ‘wear out’ too. They have wear leveling and over-provisioning features and life is measured in TERABYTES written per day! Home users simply can’t sustain the use rate to wear them out in less than ~20 years at which point they will be long since obsolete.
Bruce is right, although technically SSDs do not store data by magnetic state change. However, NAND flash used in most common SSDs can lose data over time via charge leakage. I’m not sure what the nominal timeframe is, though, or under what conditions.
One of the nice things about a NAS is there is no single location for any bit. it is written on multiple drives. In my setup, two drives can fail and all I need to do is swap them out and they get rebuilt with no data loss.
But then again, backups. I have my music backed up on no less than 5 systems in two homes. So I have zero fear of this rotting problem.
NASs do not protect you from this issue. I use NASs for music and many other things in my home system and feel they are the most trustworthy storage system going… RAID 5 BTW.
A NAS only knows a bit has weakened if you accessed it. If you have files you have not accessed for years, you may have data loss. Yes, it has to happen accross multiple drives, but it can happen. Keep in mind, we are not talking about disc failure here, but data location degradation.
One way to protect is to simply access the files although this is not foolproof. What happens if a drive has problem accessing data, it retrys and retrys… once successful, it rewrites that data elsewhere and marks that sector as bad and will not reuse that sector. But this process is dependent on there being enough charge or quality to get a read and it depends on the quality of the firmware to manage these issues.
The best way, according to David Plummer, is run SpinRite that literally re-writes all data in place… more that that but keeping it simple… thus leaving the bit in place and fully charged. It pumps up the data… and if there is a problem with that sector, it rewrites and removes that sector.
Ditto. CDRs have gone bad on me, but so far, no CDs. Even the oldest one still in my collection, S&G’s Bridge over Troubled Water (hyperlink not intentional ).
CDs have a very robust data correction system that hard drives or solid state drives don’t have. Redundant data is written (more complex than that) across data words. This is to address a scratch. If there is a dropout, the firmware can look ahead and behind and reconstruct that word. So your CDs may play fine, but you are not aware if the error correction firmware is working hard underneath the covers. The cost to this approach is storage density… CDs are not data dense like a hard drive. This is OK as CDs are designed for a particular use case like CD strewn on your car floor. CDs are not directly comparable to hard drive storage.
Nope, RAID doesn’t do anything for bit rot but many file systems do like ZFS mentioned and BTRFS used by Synology at least, along with many FSs on enterprise systems none of us would run at home do have scheduled or background scrub routines that read, compare checksums and potentially re-write data to avoid the rot.
Bit rot? I learned something new, and it has nothing to do with bed rot.
I am going to start listening to my 4TB+ (growing too) music storage one by one, and I hope I will finish listening to all of them before I am rotting away.
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