Interesting article from Ars Technica:
Basically, starting at Year 5, HDD failure rates skyrocket compared to SSD. Something to think about in our hardcore recording and storage world!
Interesting. My strategy over the past 8 years has been to have a SSD for boot and spinning drives for storage and replace the drives around the five year mark. This has worked well for me. I don't see changing unless SSD's reach cost parity with HDD's.
I record to SSD and move to mass storage when DVR is idle.
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And yet the “shopping list” for a RPi4 server still includes a hard drive on the Channels site. I encountered a zillion problems until I switched from a hard drive to an SSD.
After my last external HDD failed 3 days after my server failed, I gave up on them ever again. SSD is definitely more expensive now, but I'm leaving myself open bays and checking open box deals every once in a while. Longterm, especially with Microsoft basically requiring SSD for boot drives, that price will come down while storage space will go up.
Heck, I'm old enough (not @psperry old, but still old enough to yell at kids to get off my porch) to remember upgrading my computer to an 80 MB HDD and how much that cost in early 1990s dollars. So basically, it's going to be a slow, but steady, upgrade process.
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Yeah. I’m not a big fan of out of the box external drives— especially in a always-on server setting. They really aren’t designed for that and probably fail more often in that scenario. I got a decent enclosure with a cooling fan and the best drives I can afford. I’ve never had a failure when set up that way. I back up religiously anyway. But SSDs are clearly the future, assuming Taiwan stays online. I’m four years out from my next refresh. Will see what makes sense then.
Sata SSD's might also be a thing of the past.
There's no doubt that heat and power cycles drive up HDD failures, and large copy operations are heat makers. When I'm moving a lot of files I always make sure to provide extra ventilation to the drives in use. I love that SSDs have no moving parts, but they do seem to run a tad warmer than HDDs and they are also not immune to failure.
Back on the subject of HDDs, BackBlaze has produced some good reliability data on various makes. Based on my own experience and BackBlaze's data, the last 6 large HDDs I've purchased were HGST Enterprise drives. Enterprise drives are more expensive but they are built for durability and reliability, so I am comfortable purchasing refurbished drives of this type that usually have another 5-year warranty attached to them.
I’m proud to be old. It’s the most inclusive group there is. Race, gender, orientation—don’t matter. Just have to be old. If you’re not, you should get off my lawn!