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Comment by carbon0234 | Hacker News Reader

> were never reliable

They absolutely mog the cancerous garbage that is NAND flash memory in terms of data retention. The fact that you can pick an 1980s floppy from the junk room and read it is telling. Meanwhile your average TLC SSD will probably get wiped in 3 years if kept in the drawer, and a QLC will get wiped in 1 year.

Reliability wise floppies are also better: flash memory leaks electrons naturally and gets shredded by radiation events, with temperaure accelerating these processes. Meanwhile magnetic disks are not altered by any normal magnetic field you could produce at home.

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Survivorship bias. Floppies failed all the time. Flash can be unreliable if you’re talking about the cheapest or abused the wrong way, but flash SSDs handled wisely are much better than hdds , which in turn are much better than floppies.

If you compare the thumb stick that came free from a convention then compare it to a floppy that came free with a magazine. And in the end neither matters because they’re both cheapest possible junk, not fair examples of the tech.

Similarly, the cheapest led bulbs (put in poorly ventilated fittings) have crappy lifetimes, but that’s not the techs fault, it’s because they weren’t engineered to last, they are cheap crap. Well designed leds placed sensibly are vastly better than bulbs, but that’s hidden by the cheap end of the market

> but flash SSDs handled wisely are much better than hdd

In cold storage, a hdd should last longer than an ssd

That is the first I ever saw the term "mog" used outside of bodybuiy/looksmaxxing.

More info here: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mog

This is just flatly false. You're comparing a worst case SSD with maybe 10% of its writes left to an extremely lucky floppy disk that hasn't died to binder hydrolysis, mold and fungal growth, warping or demagnetization. And you also completely made up that you couldn't generate a strong enough magnetic field at home to corrupt one - you absolutely could especially since rare earth magnets are not that uncommon and are more than enough to kill a floppy.

You could destroy a floppy by printing the filenames on it with a ballpoint pen. They were shit.

There's flash, and then there's flash.

Say, the Siemens PLCs I earn my living programming uses SD cards which range from 64kB to, uh, 128MB, methinks.

They still work after decades, so clearly, you can get long term reliable flash storage; just don't expect to be able to store your 4k holiday videos on them.

NOTAMs, on the other hand? Go ahead!

> just don't expect to be able to store your 4k holiday videos on them.

SanDisk's Extreme Pro range will disagree with you on that front. I have never seen a worn out card out of that range.

"mog"?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/mog

Fun fact, mogging is 2026 word of the year.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/nov/03/mogging-crow...

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