Dang…down the rabbit hole a bit more…maybe I should just put two 2.5" 7500 5TB Barracudas in. That would solve my X-Plane ortho problem for sure…and is way cheaper than two SSDs for a lot more storage (at the cost of performance I suppose…but how fast do I really need to grab data off those drives?)
These look to be the right form factor too…7mm 2.5"…(nevermind…those are 5400 drives…back to searching…)
Decisions, decisions…
Really interesting read. Did I read this part right:
“Intel doesn’t have confidence in the drive at that point, so the 335 Series is designed to shift into read-only mode and then to brick itself when the power is cycled.”
Why would it brick itself after a power cycle? Shouldn’t it just stay read only forever (well, relatively speaking again…I know once power is removed SSDs apparently can lose their data over a long period of time)…
To be honest, I am not sure why they do that. It’s stupid to think that if a power outage or something interrupted you trying to salvage the data, it’d be gone.
However, that’s all well into the end-of-life stage, and they should alert you prior to getting to that anyway.
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If you need storage and performance, put two disks in RAID 1. The drives are duplicates, so you read from both at the same time, speeding things up. You also gain redundancy - losing one disk you operate at normal speed, you replace it - wait for it to re-clone and back to business.
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You can also eliminate disk reads by having anough RAM. My DCS does far fewer reads now that I have 32GB. I can F11 fly the map so it’s all loaded into RAM then just enjoy.
I don’t really need the redundancy (I say that now…GULP). I have a Synology DiskStation with two disks in RAID 1 (6TB drives) - that holds all my irreplaceable stuff (pictures, videos, etc…). I pretty much save everything important there, so if I lose a HDD or SSD on my main computer, I might lose some stuff that I’ll cry over, but nothing really major. Given that this new PC is pretty small form factor, I’m trying to squeeze the most gaming storage data into the box, and have storage out of the box (external drives). I guess. LOL…I’m all over the place with it. First new computer I’ve bought in quite some time, so trying to just get it all the way I want it before I dive in to loading software and stuff…
Yeah, I went with 32GB in the new MSI that is coming. Yay!
After researching 7200 RPM 2.5" drives I feel I’m back in the same boat of perhaps just wanting to put a pair of 2TB SSDs in those bays since the price of the 7200 RPM 2.5" drives is nearly the same… 
Those drives were worn out by the time they failed. They had to give them major loads for a long time to reach them. Us lowly mortals will take many years of normal usage to even approach those numbers.
Generally speaking, the desire for increased space, faster storage, or both has limited the useful life of the majority of my drives long before they die. The exception was my lousy IBM DEATHstar that lasted a year and one WD drive (out of many) that lasted 18 months.
As long as you avoid the dirt-cheap no-name brands you’re probably ok.
+1 on the Synology Raid system. We have one of those - I call it the Toaster.
I used to work in the HDD industry - and the very large drives like ~10 terabytes always caused me concern. There are maybe up to 10 platters in those big HDDs, 20 heads…, lots of stuff to go wrong.
Yeah. Speaking of The Toaster…it is about time to go ahead and make an off-site backup of it. Usually once a year or so I copy the Synology to an external hard drive and then lock that one in a fire-safe. I envy people who have online backups like Carbonite…but I’m stupidly nostalgic and have saved all the videos of my son and our vacations over the years. Maybe someday in the retirement home Discobot can serve them up on my 200" OLED wall screen…
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