Underpants to under-buy

Underbuying storage seemed to be endemic in that era. We used two digital typesetters - this was still two years before taking the desktop publishing plunge - one of which was still using a system based on 8in floppies. The staff carried these around with inexplicable reverence bordering on the holy. I would fantasise walking behind them in single file, swinging an incense burner.

The manager at the other bureau once gave me a tour of its server cupboard, a dimly-lit and air-conditioned walk-in room larger than my hallway, all humming and blinking and swirling with what looked like dry ice around our feet, as if Captain Kirk had relocated the bridge of the Enterprise onto the set of Saturday Night Fever, as he flourished dramatically and announced: "Here we have one hundred megabytes!"

Today, I work with files that are often bigger than 100MB each. Video rough cuts get thrown my way, typically turning up at 1GB per minute.

Thankfully, I am anal about backup and thorough with my data transfers. I carry a clutch of USB portable drives everywhere I go, looking like some kind of cybernetic rat-catcher. With all this, I can manage the limited 500GB or so on my notebook.

But what worries me now is that SSD storage probably isn't as rock-solid and reliable as I thought. Despite all the advantages that SSD wields over a spinning hard disk - resistant to knocks, no moving parts, no having to remember to spell it with a 'k' rather than a 'c', no squealing like the wheels of a rusty tea trolley - Flash memory has one serious disadvantage: if something major goes wrong with the drive, the result for your data is nothing less than catastrophic.

Ouch

If a hard disk starts going glitchy, I can usually back stuff off it before it's too late. If the disk dies, I can almost certainly find someone who can salvage much of the data from it. But if a SSD goes glitchy, the data vanishes up its own arse in an instant, completely and irretrievably.

And Flash tech has a fixed lifetime, or at least decreasing performance over time, so buying lots of it doesn't necessarily prolong its usefulness if you use most of it very often. My super-expensive SSD notebook could be effectively knackered in three years' time and utterly worthless in five, for all my attempts to future-proof it by over-specifying all the other components.

OK, this assumes I'm really hammering the storage at all hours of the day and night, and that the SSD controller is not doing its job. What's playing on my mind, though, is that the SSD unit in my notebook might not be easily replaceable, or even removable at all.

In the meantime, internal hard disks are getting easier and easier to swap out as the years go on, and the little buggers get cheaper and cheaper. Why was I so stupid as to put all my faith in a storage technology that's so fragile, short-term and expensive?

Flash, I love you. But we only have 14 hours to save the Earth. ®