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I realize this is more of a hardware question than a programming question, but I had a devastating SSD failure over the weekend and I use my computer primarily for programming... so it seems appropriate to ask this in a programming related forum.

I use subversion to check in my code, but regrettably I hadn't checked in code I was working on for about 5 days. Given that I do a lot of builds, tests and transfers, what's the best hard drive setup for me? I had assumed an SSD drive was more reliable than a traditional hard drive. Maybe due to my use it's not in general?

I just never want this whole system failure to waste my time again. So is RAID 1 traditional hard drives most appropriate? Maybe continue with SSDs, but use a particular brand/model?

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Seems likely this question is gonna get closed, but really, there's no right answer. Any device can fail. Use an automatically synchronized backup service. – jamietre May 31 '11 at 19:18
I'd just like to know what the most reliable storage setup is for a programming environment. I'm aware of backup services. – at01 May 31 '11 at 19:49
Why would anything more more or less reliable in one environment versus another, unless you're talking about extreme heat or something? Hard drives are rated in terms of MTBF (hours). I don't know about solid state devices but probably something similar. The failure rate for any storage device is extraordinarily low these days. Choosing a device in this way does not solve any problems because no matter what, a failure will be a rare, isolated event. The only answer is redundancy = automated backups. – jamietre Jun 1 '11 at 12:09
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closed as off topic by random♦ May 31 '11 at 20:10

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1 Answer

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RAID-1 is a good idea, whether for fixed-disk or solid state. That guards against single disk failures.

If you want to guard against accidental file deletion, explore file systems that provide a "snapshot" capability. (File systems supporting snapshots implement them as copy-on-write, so they are much faster than a backup, so you can make them more often.)

And of course you still want periodic off-site backups to handle big disasters.

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