RE: SOME PEOPLE NEVER CHANGE.. DON'T BE ONE OF THOSE!
The thing with a mechanical hard drive is that you stand a chance of data recovery, but when an SSD goes I have found it's dead, with 99.9% chance of recovery and no amount of freezing it will help LOL! I advise people when I see potential problems and give people a cost, and then it's up to them. When they do have an issue, my sympathy is now long gone, with the only satisfaction being that I had taken the time to advise them at some point that this would happen, but they chose not to listen or be proactive.
I remember going to a job for another client who is a solicitor and also involved in politics as well now, and the PC was an ancient old thing that had developedbadd blocks, but the data was semi-salvageable.
I was basically threatened that I had better get the pictures back because they were of his wedding... Would be interesting for me to bring that up considering this same person has decided to become a bit high profile over here in Scotland these last few days... saying people are against him.... with his attitude I am not surprised!
Yeah, the magnetic disks themselves are going to be pretty reliable. But you may have to pay for an expensive data recovery service to get to the data on them. I've probably had a dozen hard drives fail on me personally since I started using hard drives (around 1993). Only once or twice have I been able to coax them into giving up the data. I guess the typical failure modes of a mechanical hard drive are that either something electronic fails, or something physical fails (stepper motor or whatever). In either case at least most of the data is probably still locked away safely on the magnetic disks themselves and can be recovered with the right equipment.
I don't know about SSDs. It seems unlikely all the memory chips would fail at once so I would assume that with the right equipment data could still be extracted from working ones somehow. But I guess there's a lot less you can attempt without specialized equipment. I would think though that eventually SSDs would be a lot more reliable than mechanical hard drives. There should be less to go wrong with solid state. I've never had a CPU or memory fail in a computer under normal circumstances. Just hard drives and power supplies. A couple of motherboards but I'm pretty sure those were the power supplies' fault too.