News Some New Hard Drives Have Less Endurance Than SSDs

[Admin]

Modern HDD workload ratings formally make them less reliable than SSDs.

Some New Hard Drives Have Less Endurance Than SSDs : Read more

 

[basspig]

Mech hard drives have always been less reliable in my experience.

Until 2015, when I converted dozens of drives over to SSD replacements, I was seeing HDD failures every few months. Drives would just drop off the bus and become invisible to BIOS for no apparent reason. I was sending in drives for warranty repair every 3-4 months.

Since switching over to SSDs, I've had ZERO drive failures. Even the SSDs installed in 2015 are still flawless. I have scores of SSDs running across a half dozen workstations and servers. The other benefit is MUCH less heat and electric power consumption. My workstation idle consumption dropped from over 200W to 62W per machine, excepting the dual Xeon machines at 100W a piece.

 

[spongiemaster]

Mechanical hard drives idle at under 5W typically. Even if we assign a 0W idle for ssd's, a 140 W difference would still be over 25 hard drives idling. I have a file server at home with a 12 drive Unraid array, and there is no discernible heat exhausting from the system during typical usage. The only time it generates any heat is when the array is performing a parity check which involves all drives running full tilt for over a day. Either you have a really large array, or you measurements aren't accurate.

 

[cryoburner]

This "Annual Workload Rating" sounds like little more than a marketing number than anything, to encourage companies to pay a big premium for "enterprise" drives that are likely not actually much better than the consumer models in terms of long-term durability.

Seagate has an "Annualized Workload Rate" page which mentions that "Seagate reserves the right to limit warranty claims when drive usage exceeds specifications, as defined in the product manual." So, the drives may hold up far longer than the rating implies, but the manufacturer can deny warranty claims in heavy usage scenarios. So, it's very possible that the "180TB/year" models may have similar durability to the "550TB/year" ones, but they are giving them larger numbers to encourage companies to pay extra for them and ensure warranty coverage.

The article probably shouldn't be making clickbait claims like "Some New Hard Drives Have Less Endurance Than SSDs" when it contains no evidence indicating that. I was expecting to be presented with the results of a study showing certain new drive technologies to have especially low endurance, but instead all it bases that heading on are "controversial workload ratings imposed by HDD makers to diversify their product portfolio".

 

[basspig]

My drives all idled at 40-42°C and drew 14 W a piece. They were too hot to comfortable touch. These were WD Caviar drives mostly, from pre 2008.