SSD drives have been getting cheaper, so been looking into it.
The whole “SSD’s lose their data if they’re unplugged” is a bit of a moot point especially if your plan isn’t to bury it underground for centuries. That said personally I’d still go for HDD mainly because you get 4+ times the storage for the same price. If you only need a terabyte or so and the amount of data isn’t going to grow then sure, SSD works just as well.
Thank you. Yeah, I had seen comments about the unplugged issues but then people saying that it isn’t an issue now. I also wondered for like saving video game content from OBS that I am going to end up deleting for clips I don’t need is SSD or HDD preferred for that if there is going to be a lot of saving and erasing videos? Assuming price didn’t matter and more just on longevity of the drive.
SSDs have a write lifespan. Once you write ~400TB or whatever it’s rated for on a consumer SSD it dies. HDDs can take a lot more writes before dying.
Once you write ~400TB or whatever it’s rated for on a consumer SSD it dies.
Not really. Tests and my experience show this is just a pure warranty number. Meaning the manufacturer guarantees that the drive will do at least this many writes without failing and it reaching it also voids your warranty. However, you can usually expect 2x as many writes, although 10x and more is also not unheard of.
HDDs can take a lot more writes before dying.
They are actually often not rated for a ton of reads and writes. But once again this is more of a warranty thing and HDDs are usually unmetered so…
HDDs are not unmetered warranty wise. My new 18TB Seagates has a something like 150TB/year write endurance (TBW) if I want to keep the warranty.
The Seagate Ironwolfs 18TB have a Workload Rate Limit (WRL) of 300TB/year, as do some WD models. Unlike SSDs this WRL includes not only writes but reads as well. (page 2, end) If you do a monthly scrub you already have 216TB of reads so it can be safely assumed that a lot of customers blow well past these numbers. This limit is in use since the 2TB drive area and simply does not fit 9x larger drives. ServeTheHome talked about this years ago.
Huh good to know, thanks!
To piggy-back on this post, how often do SSD’s and HDD’s need to be powered up, yearly, if they are in cold storage? Is it necessary to read and re-write all of data of the drive?
SSD data retention highly depends on temperature: write while they’re hot (50C), store/read them cold (20C), for theoretically up to 50 years retention. I’d still keep a checksum, scrub and recover periodically. Rewriting the whole drive every few years might also be beneficial (uses up a rewrite cycle, but should reset the retention period). Under ideal conditions, rewriting periodically every 10 years, theoretically an SSD with 500 R/W cycles could last for thousands of years (the plastic will likely degrade first).
