SSD vs HDD for mass storage

The Voice

The Voice

The Voice

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I've ordered a 1TB Samsung 980 PRO M.2 as my boot and software (games, apps, etc) drive. I figured I'd take advantage of the PCIe 4.0 on my new system, and I needed a bit more storage anyway (my COD installation is about 300GB). My 2TB Seagate mass storage drive (basically used for docs, downloads, pictures, videos, etc), while nowhere near full yet, is about 5 years old and quite slow to write to these days. I don't think it's going to fail (yet - it's a HDD, after all), but with storage set to go through the roof ala GPU prices with CHIA mining hitting us, I figured now would be the best time to buy - I don't want to be scrambling and overpaying for storage like I had to for my GPU...

So, the question is do you think that SSD technology has matured enough where it can finally be used as reliable mass storage? I know that they have a limited number of writes, and will crap out eventually, but with zero moving parts that can fail, and insane R/W speeds it's simply too attractive an option to overlook.

If so, what are your suggestion in the 2TB range? I've always used Samsung EVO SSD's (longish warranties, brilliant reputation), but wouldn't be averse to something different.
 
Cooler running said:
The industry is certainly going the way of SSD's, HDD's will likely only remain widely available for another ~5 years or less.

Unless you need over 6TB of drives, I wouldn't go with any hard drives.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/wd-b...-solid-state-drive-wds100t2b0c-hd-56l-wd.html
Click to expand...

Cheers. The TBW of that drive is pretty low (600) vs something like https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-hard-drives/ssd/firecuda-ssd/ (2800), the latter looking more like a reliable long term solution - it also comes with a 3 year data recovery service, and a 5 year warranty. Though, I've noticed a price increase of £100 on the 2TB version since last night. Can't be happening already, surely?!
 
Yes. From an enterprise perspective, we're now using 8-12Tb SSDs. Considering the cost, you wouldn't even entertain using them if they were going to wear out in a year.

Whilst enterprise grade SSD are different to consumer grade SSDs, the premise of them (flash) is the same.
 
The Voice said:
Cheers. The TBW of that drive is pretty low (600) vs something like https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-hard-drives/ssd/firecuda-ssd/ (2800), the latter looking more like a reliable long term solution - it also comes with a 3 year data recovery service, and a 5 year warranty. Though, I've noticed a price increase of £100 on the 2TB version since last night. Can't be happening already, surely?!
Click to expand...

chia mining.

Another thing miners are ruining for the rest of us.
 
It depends how 'mass' your mass storage is. I don't run any HDDs in my PC with 5 TB total SSD storage, but I do run a 16 TB HDD on the network for local backups and some additional network usage. That's what I'd consider to be my mass storage.

I think SSDs are good/cheap enough these days that most people can probably go full SSD within their build. HDDs still have a place though, and I don't see SSDs overcoming that for quite some time. If you need some large bulk storage SSDs can get extremely expensive, so aren't all that viable, nor their performance even needed.
 
The Voice said:
So, the question is do you think that SSD technology has matured enough where it can finally be used as reliable mass storage? I know that they have a limited number of writes, and will crap out eventually, but with zero moving parts that can fail, and insane R/W speeds it's simply too attractive an option to overlook.
Click to expand...
Reliability of SSD's isn't an issue, they are better than hard drives which have mechanical parts. Unless you have some specific workload that causes a lot of writes then you're unlikely to get anywhere close to the rated endurance over 10 years. It's the price that makes them unsuitable for mass storage, SATA SSD's are usually around £80/TB whereas large hard drives are around £15/TB. That said, I wouldn't consider 2TB as mass storage, if that's all you need then an SSD is likely a better option for noise and reliability.
 
I've been using SSDs as my main storage on my PC for 5 or so years now with no issues. I do have HDDs as external storage for backups/media however as they're still cheaper when you need a lot of storage space.
 
I use a mixture of SSD's and HDD's.

My HDD's are either WD Black or WD Enterprise drives, HDD's still have benefits for large writes that I do a lot of.

I've had SSD's die, but never had one of my WD Black or Enterprise drives fail once.
 
The Voice said:
The TBW of that drive is pretty low
Click to expand...

It's fairly low TBW, but the price to performance is unmatched. If you want a high TBW the ADATA SU 900 is fantastic, but has been difficult to find for the last 8 months, as I think it's now out of production. The SU 800 is great too, I use the higher end ADATA drives when I want something that will last in the SSD space. The SU800 was great up until last month when for some reason the drive doubled in price.

Even so though TBW can be an expensive stat to buy, IMO it's a better idea to just replace SSD's more often instead of buying high end drives.
 
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