Solid State Drives – Not suitable for long term storage

SSD’s are slowly but surely replacing their mechanical counterparts, the HDD, in modern computers, they offer more storage per square-inch and can read/write data to and from memory significantly faster than the spindle and articulator arm of a standard HDD, and of course, they are not prone to shock and data head crashes.

So all good? well, yes… but….

SSD’s are essentially a block of electrical gates used to represent the binary of your data, and those electrical gates can loose their charge if they are not regularly refreshed. this process is speeded up the warmer the drive is, so if you copy your backup onto a SSD then store it away in a cupboard, it could be that in 3 months time when you come to recover a file from the drive, that there’s been sufficient loss of charge that the data is irrecoverable.

SSD is a Solid State Drive – it’s an alternative storage device that can be used in place of a more traditional HDD. It is made up of memory chips, just like a USB flash drive, and is designed to fit in the same space, with the same connectors as a SATA HDD

HDD is a Hard Disk Drive – the traditional storage medium for computers since the 90’s. It’s made up of a platter covered in magnetic material (think of it like a much more techy version of a 7 inch record covered in sticky back plastic with iron filings on it) and a actuator arm (think of the record player arm and needle) that moves over the fast spinning disk reading the data.