Share files with dual boot Win 11

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Have new Computer that came with Win 11 pro. & plan to dual boot with Linux.
I’ve read that HD’s at this time are more reliable (last longer) than SSD’s so plan on putting all documents on the HD. (Operating sys are on SSD)
What is the best way to format the HD so that I can share the docs between Windows & Linux.

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You have been misinformed. HDDs are no more reliable than SSDs in home / SOHO use. (Where have you read this?)

Stick to a single SSD and make regular backups to an external disk.

cheers, Paul

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egad wrote:

I’ve read that HD’s at this time are more reliable (last longer) than SSD’s so plan on putting all documents on the HD.

Backblaze’s most recent drive reliability report  indicated that in their experience in their data center (many thousands of hours of experience with each drive), the SSDs they used are slightly more reliable than HDDs. They have tested a broad variety of hard drives from various manufacturers, but just a few types of SSDs (none of the ones I use were tested… SK Hynix and Samsung. I wonder how those would fare).

Some people suggest using HDDs because they believe that HDDs typically give warning before they die, whereas SSDs supposedly just die suddenly with no warning. Others suggest sticking to HDDs on the premise that a hard drive can sometimes fail in such a way that a data recovery service would be able to save some or perhaps all of the data from that drive, whereas with a SSD, it would be harder.

These both represent a foolish way of looking at protecting data.  If you have a good backup plan, a drive that dies suddenly and that can’t have the data recovered is no big deal, but on the other side, if you do not have a good backup plan, using a hard drive rather than an SSD offers little protection from catastrophic hardware failure. You’re still rolling the dice and hoping for the best instead of proactively working to preserve the data while you still have time.

I don’t have any statistics in front of me, but I have experienced a number of hard drive failures over the years, and the “sudden death” variety, where a hard drive goes from being (as far as anyone knows) in good shape to being completely dead in an instant, has happened about as often as the failures that give warning signs. The most recent hard drive failure I had was of the “sudden” type.

In the case of those failures where there was some warning, there was often still some data loss, as the warning often comes in the form of increasing numbers of unrecoverable (hard) errors, and whatever was in the spots on the drive where the hard errors took place is simply gone.

It’s also not necessarily true that SSDs always die suddenly. They, too, can have failure modes that can be detected in SMART before all of the data is lost. I haven’t personally seen that yet, but it has been described in articles like Tech Report’s SSD torture test series.

You never know what an unexpected mishap or hardware failure will involve, with SSDs or hard drives, which is why you need backups on any drive that contains any data of importance.

The same is true of the bit about data recovery. While some hard drive failure modes lend themselves to data recovery, not all of them do. Even if data recovery is possible, it is a significant expense, and it does not always get all of it back. If you’re planning ahead for the possibility of failure (which you are, if you are pondering using one drive type over another in case of future drive failure), you can improve your odds a whole lot more by using backups rather than hoping the HDD will warn you before it dies, or if it doesn’t, that the data will be recoverable by a recovery specialist for a price that is many times the cost of the drive itself.

Hardware failure is only one cause of data loss, of course, and selecting a hard drive rather than a SSD will not do anything for you in the event of a ransomware attack or other deliberate malicious action, a failed Windows update or other software glitch, or simple user error that results in the accidental deletion of a needed file.

egad wrote:

What is the best way to format the HD so that I can share the docs between Windows & Linux.

Linux can natively read and write NTFS, the standard Windows filesystem type, so if you wish, you can keep the data on an NTFS volume and have it usable by both OSes. Doing it in reverse (using a Linux filesystem format in Windows) will not work, though, as Windows is unaware of Linux filesystem types unless additional software is installed.

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