Lifespan of ssd and hdd

[Vegeta_1]

what is the lifespan of hdd and what of ssd.
who do you think will be the last surviver and work better during the time if i buy a ssd and a hdd.

 

[kanewolf]

HDDs have a mechanical lifespan. Are you planning on having them powered on 24/7? An SSD powered on 24/7 doesn't use up its lifespan because you aren't writing to it.

Your question doesn't have a definite answer. It depends how you use them.

But, in general, for desktop usage, I would say an SSD will outlast a mechanical disk. If you have a specific use-case, then the answer might be different.

 

[Lkaos]

HDDs have a mechanical lifespan. Are you planning on having them powered on 24/7? An SSD powered on 24/7 doesn't use up its lifespan because you aren't writing to it.

Your question doesn't have a definite answer. It depends how you use them.

But, in general, for desktop usage, I would say an SSD will outlast a mechanical disk. If you have a specific use-case, then the answer might be different.

Considering the lifespan of a HDD being about 120k hours MTBF, using it 24/7 would make about 13 years ...i dont believe the SSDs will last more than that, despite what circulates on the net...

 

[kanewolf]

The failure rate of HDDs increases significantly after 5 years power on. I would not be comfortable with more than 7 years on a mechanical drive, for both reliability and size/efficiency reasons.
WD only gives a 2 year warranty on the Blue drives. That says that WD doesn't believe the drives will be 100% for 5 or more years. WD doesn't even publish MTBF numbers any more.

I will stick with my solid state will out-last statement. If you are talking enterprise drives in a data center then it may be a different answer, but for desktop usage -- SSD.

 

[John_485]

Believe it or not Kanewolf, I have a WD Black Caviar that I bought in 2008 that's still going strong to this day. That's ten years of use and I leave my PC on 24/7. Western Digital makes (or used to make) amazing hard drives for the price point.

Just read this : https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/solid-state-drives-outlast-pc-hosts/

 

[kanewolf]

Believe it or not Kanewolf, I have a WD Black Caviar that I bought in 2008 that's still going strong to this day. That's ten years of use and I leave my PC on 24/7. Western Digital makes (or used to make) amazing hard drives for the price point.

Just read this : https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/solid-state-drives-outlast-pc-hosts/

Although this is an OLD thread, I will say that any specific drive may last 1 day or 10 years. Only with thousands of samples can an estimate be made. The 5 year inflection point for drive failure has been statistically identified in several research papers. My own experience with a data center with 5000+ drives agrees. You see more frequent failures after 5 years of run time.

I will also reiterate my statement that the vendor warranty is a good indication of what the vendor is expecting for longevity. It costs them money to replace drives under warranty. They want to minimize that.

 

[John_485]

The experiment that was done (in the link) was anecdotal, as it was statistically insignificant, but the results were interesting none the less. Even in the experiment they had two Kingston Hyper X3K drives, one died while the other went on to be one out of only two that went up to two Petabytes (Samsung 840 Pro & Kingston Hyper X3K), proving how the manufacturing process can effect the outcome of such an experiment.

The 5 year inflection point for drive failure has been statistically identified in several research papers.

I wonder, would this be considered planned obsolescence, and anything we get after the five-year warranty should be considered a gift? Either way, their experiment seemed to support your view that an SSD would indeed outlast a HDD.

I have a question for you, as you seem to know more then I do on this subject. I own a little Toshiba 120gb OCZ Trion SSD and recently analyzed it with Defraggler. I was surprised to find that it was heavily fragmented (low occupancy = 52%) but reported to be in good health, why is that?

Thank you.

 

[kanewolf]

Since there is no rotational delay or seek delay on SSDs, fragmentation is not an issue. Having data spread out is actually a good thing because it helps uniformly wear out the solid state memory, which does have a finite write life.

 

[John_485]

Since there is no rotational delay or seek delay on SSDs, fragmentation is not an issue. Having data spread out is actually a good thing because it helps uniformly wear out the solid state memory, which does have a finite write life.

Sorry for the belated reply man, busy couple of days for me.

I was totally unaware of all that. I just assumed the way the data was stored was similar to a hard disk. I recall reading something about electrons, gates or tunnels (I think tunnels?) and the electrons eventually getting stuck, etc. but wasn't sure about how it all related to fragmentation. The next drive I buy will be an SSD. I imagine I'll pick up an M.2 as they're supposed to be faster then the standard 2.5" drives, correct?

I also noticed something I had never noticed before in my BIOS today (AMI --- MSI Z170A Gaming M5). In the UEFI GUI it shows a bar with a light (which can either be on or off) for RAID. Apparently I'm using a RAID setup without knowing it, how is that possible? Is it automatic nowadays? Honestly, I don't remember doing anything specific when I built my machine. I did just install another Western Digital HDD (1TB) to compliment my older WD Black Caviar a few days ago. Maybe that has something to do with it?

Thanks.