Tag: Storage

Hard Drive Transporter

So, I have a lot of hard drives lying around that I occasionally move from office to office and need effective way to store them in the meantime. I’ve tried a couple of different solutions, none of which worked very well, until running across Silicone Forensics’ Hard Drive Transporter. As you can see, on the outside this is a softshell case that has a window on the back for inserting a label:


On the inside, there’s a foam insert that snugly fits and protects a 3.5″ hard drive. Alternative inserts are available for 2.5″ and 1.8″ drives as well. These things can be had for $7.95/each, so they’re also a relatively cheap solution for moving or storing hard drives so that they have some protection.

SSDs – Write Endurance Myths

I happened to be reading a comment on another website the other day where the commenter claimed SSDs would never be viable alternatives to traditional magnetic hard drives until manufacturers solved the “100,000 rewrite cycle issue.” StorageSearch.com’s SSD Myths and Legends – “write endurance” attempts to put this claim to bed once and for all.

The main point is that most of the SSD drives being sold today have write endurances ratings in the 1 to 5 million rewrite cycle range. The 100,000 limit was the maximum available in the late 1990s, but has long since been superseded.

The upshot of this is that even using extremely data intensive applications that write and rewrite large amounts of data over and over again to and SSD, the user is looking at decades of such intensive use of an SSD before it fails.

This is why typically, SSDs released today have MTBF ratings equivalent to those of magnetic hard drives (not that there aren’t issue with MTBF as a guide to hard drive reliability, but rather that there is nothing about recent SSDs that will make them fail more frequently than their magnetic bretheren).