Can power outages harm ssd/hdd badly?

Discussion in 'SSD and HDD storage' started by IceVip, Aug 5, 2014.

  1. IceVip

    IceVip Master Guru

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    The block that i live in has been recently having more and more frequent power outages.
    Thing is i got some valuable stuff on my hdd, so my question is
    since my pc is on every single time there's a power outage, can i loose
    all of the things on my hdd/ssd? talking about a clean wipe, literally not
    recoverable.
     
  2. mbk1969

    mbk1969 Ancient Guru

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    File system can be corrupted. Partitions layout can be too (but less possible than file system). And HDD can receive mechanical injures which will lead to complete damage.
     
  3. anticupidon

    anticupidon Ancient Guru

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    Every modern/old hard disk drives have TVS diodes wich are implemented to protect from power surges,but even so ,nothing is 100% safe.
    More, even that TVS diodes are burned ,they can be replaced and data is there.
    Never heard of a power surge capable of wiping data from a hard drive(mechanical).SSD are a different breed so, i don't know that much.
     
  4. IceVip

    IceVip Master Guru

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    Okay well, my windows is on a ssd that has rapid mode enabled, every power outage makes it dump the whole ram in the ssd and i gotta delete it manually which is annoying but hdd was what i was concern more about, since u've never heard of a case that the whole data was wiped then i guess i wont be that unlucky.
    But honestly what the hell are those guys doing with the electricity, I'm living in the capital, where there has to be no power outages.. its not like I'm in a village or something.. geez.
     

  5. BarryB

    BarryB Guest

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    Buy a UPS if you're worried about your data!!
     
  6. IceVip

    IceVip Master Guru

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    Those things are not cheap at all here, technically speaking the cheapest one
    to handle my pc after a power outage occurs costs around 100 euro..
    I have no idea if that's worth.
     
  7. BarryB

    BarryB Guest

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    If you're having regular outages and your PC is shutting down abnormally, eventually something is going to get corrupt!! Either do regular backups so you can recover in case your OS/DATA do get corrupt or buy a UPS so you can have it shutdown your PC gracefully when the power goes off!
     
  8. Tree Dude

    Tree Dude Guest

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    I work in IT. Had a bad power regulator cause power spikes an area of the building. Lost 2 hard drives over the course of a week before maintenance finally fixed it (only had about 5 people in that area).

    If your data is that important you should have some kind of backup. Invest in a cloud backup service or buy an external drive to copy data to (making sure it is plugged into power only when performing the backups). Nothing is 100% safe, hard drives die randomly all the time.
     
  9. sykozis

    sykozis Ancient Guru

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    Consumer grade UPS is designed to handle infrequent power outages. Before buying a UPS, you need to determine how much power the system actually draws from the outlet. If the power supply draws more than the UPS can output, then you risk damage to the UPS and power supply.

    The best advice is to buy an external harddrive and regularly backup important data to it.
     
  10. allesclar

    allesclar Ancient Guru

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    power outages can potentially harm all forms of electrical equipment connected to it.
     

  11. Cry

    Cry Guest

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    Would you rather spend 100 Euro on protecting your data & hard drives or loose your data and possibly your drives?
     
  12. haz_mat

    haz_mat Guest

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    Power loss doesn't typically damage the mechanics of the HDD, its usually the associated surge/spike that destroys the electronics. Desktop and laptop HDDs are designed to park the heads either on the landing zone or in the case of laptops the heads will park on their 'ramps' that lift the heads from the platters. As the platters spin down and the actuator has lost power, the heads still have enough air time for the parking magnet to do its job and draw the actuator arm to the correct power-off position.

    So really all you need is a good surge protector to prevent the damages from the power spike. Certain SSDs, however, are known to brick in the event of unexpected power loss - so check up on that if you own one.

    Filesystem errors can usually be corrected in chkdsk - ntfs is pretty good about dealing with errors these days. If your MBR somehow gets corrupted (locking you out of even booting to windows) - you can repair that from the console on a windows install cd by running fixmbr. If you're actively working on important stuff, save often and have a backup on an external drive of some sort.

    I own both a Toshiba and a SanDisk SSD, along with several HDDs, and I've had many outages without any sort of damage other than freaking out for a second if I had something important open at the time. Everything is behind a decent surge protector, and where I'm at in southern California we have occasional 'rolling blackouts' in the summer along with power cuts from all the construction in the area.
     

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