Hello, everybody. I’ve been looking for a new storage solution. I know, that HDDs are reliable and SSDs are for fast access, but I’ve been an HDD user ever since. I have an SSD, but I only have the OS on it. Likewise, I want to do some basic File operations, as writing documents or copy files. It would also be great if I could use it as a Backup kind of sorts device. It would be great if I could move my data from my old WD-Elements external HDD, quickly, to an intern HDD without any fuss. I just need a Storage medium that’s cheap and good. Do you have any recommendations? Thanks in advance!
SSDs are way more reliable than spinning disks, especially in a laptop that gets banged around. HDDs win in only one category: capacity per price.
HDDs are for cheap, not for reliable. Anecdotal, but my personal failure rate with HDDs is around 98% while my failure rate with all forms of flash media (including SSDs) is around 2%.
With 1 TB SSDs being available for as little as $20 (not particularly fast ones but still far faster than HDDs), I don’t see a use-case for HDDs at all unless you need dozens of TBs of storage.
Hard drives are not that unreliable, well, so long as you pick the right model.
BackBlaze’s statistics are here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/ - they run tens of thousands of inexpensive drives to run their cloud backup service. Some HDDs are much better than others.
That document also links to their SSD statistics (they don’t have that many SSDs yet, so the stats aren’t as good) but while SSDs tend to have lower failure rates, there are some models of SSD that have higher failure rates than HDDs. For example, one Seagate SSD they use has an AFR (annualised failure rate) of just under 2%, but one Toshiba HDD they use has an AFR of only 0.31%. (Another thing to be aware of is that Backblaze’s drives will all be in air conditioned data centres, not in the random temperature/humidity spreads of a PC in someone’s home).
If you look at the stats as a whole generally SSDs have half the failure rate across the board to HDDs, but it varies a lot by make and model. So be careful on which you pick, and take backups :-) For my money, all my PCs (desktop and laptops) are pure SSD setups. My server still uses spinning disks, mainly because it’s older server class hardware with a SAS array.
