It used to be you could find a box of photos or keepsakes that you inherited to look back on how things were or when you were a kid. Now, most of that is stored on phones, and most parents probably don’t think to share or save them in a way to be passed down in the future.
They certainly can give you warnings, sure. If its something the drive can detect. Too many times, the articulating arm inside will hang up and tick as it moves back and forth, causing the disk to never initialize and therefore is dead. Other times, I’ve had to buy PCB boards on eBay to try and salvage a drive that has a power issue.
I’ve got SSDs from 2011 (Kingston hyper X 120GB’s) that were configured in RAID0 and ran from 2011 when I was beta testing Windows 8 until I upgraded to bigger drives in 2016. I needed some data off of those a few years ago maybe 2023/24 and hooked them up, they not only ran just fine, but still showed 96% integrity or life span or whatever.
I’ve had HDDs that were 100% functional and then stored in a plastic bin, in my basement that’s heated/cooled and humidity controlled, and hook them up and just don’t read at all.
I’ve been in IT for about 20 years (professionally at least) and seen all sorts of weird things happen to mechanical drives, and would trust data being burned to a DVD-R at 8.5GB per double layer disc over HDDs for long term storage. As a matter of fact, I’ve got an old 256MB micro SD card from one of my first smart phones that I bet still has photos on it from the 1.3MP camera.
I’ve been in IT professionally for longer, and I’ve seen and experienced far more flash drives and SSDs just drop dead than HDDs without warning.
This isn’t controversial btw. You can google it, ask professional backup companies, etc. Drives that depend on holding a charge, which degrades over time, are not recommended for long term storage because long term storage is a known issue with them. They’re the wrong tool for the job.
No, HDDs will not always alert to impending failure - but SSDs and flash drives never will. Which do you think is preferable, “not always” or “never”.
Also when a mechanical drive fails you can usually fix it and recover your data. With flash/ssds, again, you never can.
As for burning to discs, yeah that’s even safer - but not generally viable due to the tiny amount of data they store, and the fact that basically no one has disc drives anymore.