Hey everyone,
I travel a lot and I have 2TB SSD and a 2TB HDD and most important documents backed up into cloud as a 3rd spot.
I want to unload the 2TB HDD backup with something lighter if possible and looked into MicroSD cards.
I’ve often read about MicroSD being less reliable than other storages but I did some reading and I came up with a plan and want to pass it by people who actually know their stuff for a sanity check:
I’m planning to replace 2TB HDD with 2 1 TB MicroSDs. I know it’s not cost efficient and it may not be worth it but I really want to try it unless it’s super stupid even outside of the cost factor.
Two points of concern:
I heard MicroSDs biggest weakness is the limited writes before it breaks?
I heard MicroSDs cannot be without power for a long time.
Plan:
My plan is to write the backup once (one write), and never use them as working drives but still power them up every couple months.
When backing up, I currently delete all of my HDD and just copy everything over, but I heard there are programs that detect the changes and differences and just update those, I’m hoping those will not count as full rewrite and not do a big hit on MicroSD life.
If I do it like that, would MicroSDs be near similar reliability as other storage methods?
(And also, I feel little stupid for asking, but you can encrypt MicroSD in Disk Utility in Mac just like any other drives, right?)
Thanks for the help.
I would heavily suggest not doing this. HDDs are significantly more reliable than flash storage when it comes to long-term, power-off data retention. Period. There’s a relatively little-known fact about SSDs and flash storage where they aren’t actually rated to sit around with data on them for all that long. The voltages stored inside of them degrade and the data is slowly lost over time if they aren’t powered on. The enterprise SSDs that I work on are rated for 3 months - as in, set it on a shelf for three months, and after that, if you don’t power it on, it isn’t guaranteed that all of your data will still be there. And this is talking about ultra-redundant, enterprise SAS SSDs. MicroSDs don’t have any of that redundancy. (And yes - this implies that setting a bunch of important flash drives in a safe for ten years is not a great idea. That is true! It’s unlikely that you will experience data loss, but it’s more likely than with an HDD)