[SOLVED] Longevity of Different Types of Storage Drives ?

[Dylan Beckett]

Hi

I'm building a new pc after being out of the loop for the last 10 years and wanted to find out the pecking order for reliability/longevity for the main different types of storage today?

So I'd like to know how things compare in regards to how much/many times you can write to the drives, which drives last the longest in general with normal use, any particular quirks good or bad with specific items etc? Whatever you think is relevant or interesting?

So for
PCIE NVME
M.2 SATA
Regular old SSDs
Old School HDDs
Also External HDD versions of these different drives too? (how good are these now days compared to 10 years ago and compared to SSD and old school HDD's for general storage or for Backups?')

Do things like PCIE 3.0 vs PCIE 4.0 make much difference in these kinds of factors like longevity etc?

Anyone got a rough idea of price per gig for the above?

If I want some drives purely for backups - will SSDs work better/last longer/be more reliable for a longer period than old school HDD's?


BTW why would you use a M.2 SATA instead of an SSD if they are the same speed?
Does this last/function much better over time? Any other reason?

Anything else of note?


Thanks for your help



Cheers

 

[USAFRet]

Longevity == right up until the moment they die.
No matter what type.

Current market pricing, HDD is less $$ per GB than solid state.
SATA SSD is less $$ per GB than NVMe SSD. (but not by much)

External or Internal HDD is irrelevant. It is literally the same hard drive inside the case.


Longevity.
I've had HDDs die after 5 weeks.
Others have lasted 20 years.

SSD, I have 2 that are turning 7 years old and show no signs of fault.
Another died 33 days past the 3 year warranty. (But they gave me a new drive anyway)


Do NOT depend on "longevity" to protect your data.
A comprehensive backup routine is the only real way.

 

[hotaru.hino]

The cloud storage company Backblaze writes quarterly reports regarding failure rates with storage drives. This includes the models they used. You can use this as a data point, but not as absolute evidence that one type of storage is better than another.

In any case, the latest quarterly report (Q3), they made a note that even though they've seen fewer SSD failures than HDDs, the HDDs that were failing were approaching 5 years old. So they expect the failure rate of SSDs to rise with age.

Also note that they use storage drives in a much different environment that you'll be using it.

But basically it's what @USAFRet says. Life expectancy is a crapshoot.

 

[Lafong]

I'd guess most people buy the latest and greatest NVMe M.2 drives for speed reasons, but practically speaking as an owner of one, I appreciate the direct no-cable connection to the motherboard. I'm rarely conscious of the added speed.

Drives can fail for unexpected reason...the first 2.5 inch SSD I had became useless when I looked down on and saw the copper cable connection tab laying on the carpet. $150 in the toilet. I swear I hadn't even touched it, so I really don't understand why it had been working OK if that fragile.

I used to hear about data effectively rotting on a standard spinning drive after a few years. I never really investigated how valid that is and I wonder if SSDs are subject to that same issue if just left in a closet with data for years.

I used to read the Backblaze reports. I remember them being impressed with certain Hitachis, but the drives in their database were quite large (2 plus TB as I recall) and were never what I would use as a boot drive.

 

[USAFRet]

Questions like this will bring out single instance brand loyalty (or hatred)

"I had a Seagate, and it died! Never again"
"I have an WD, and it hasn't died yet. WD all the way for me"

blah blah.
Nonsense.

My last 3 dead HDD's have been:
Seagate (a couple of years)
WD (5 weeks)
Toshiba Enterprise( 7 months, but the jury is still out - It is still at Toshiba for 'Failure Analysis')

In all 3 of these, and the 3 year old dead SanDisk SSD....my backup routine saved 100% of the data on them.

 

[Dean0919]

Both HDDs and SSDs died in my life. Let's start with SSDs...

• First SSD which died after an year was 120GB of some not well known brand, I believe it was called PQL or PQ1 or something like that and it was a period when SSDs were a new thing (when sandforce controller was a bummer). Second SSD that died also fast like 1 or 2 years after was Kingston 120 or 128GB SSD. Don't remember exact model, but I think it was A400. However after that, my next SSD was Crucial m550 if not mistaken, again 120 or 128GB and that SSD served me very well. It's still alive probably, I just gave it to my friend. Also, I bought 250GB Samsung evo to my wife and it's been at least 3 years and so far it's doing a great job.
• I have seen more dead HDDs, but mainly at my work, not in my house. However, recently my 4TB HDD died all the sudden and I have several HDDs at home that are old and still alive, but very slow and overworn. Loss of my 4TB HDD made me very sad. I had a lot of movie rips there. What's most disappointing is that I wasn't even using that drive often, maybe once in 2 or 3 months to watch one movie or put a new movie there. So, basically it didn't have a lot of use, was just sitting in the system, but it still died. Disappointing...

Seems like none of those storage types are reliable, but I personally think that SSDs can be more reliable (I might be wrong though, it's just my personal opinion). At least, I know that I won't be buying HDDs for my build anymore. I was buying them because they were cheap and thought there were more reliable, but now, I see I wasn't right. So, why bother with them? And on the top of that, they're slower than SSDs. I plan to buy 1TB SSD later, probably Samsung evo.