SSD vs HDD - life span

[fingerssteve]

Are you saying that when an SSD fails, it just fails to write anymore? So if I get a hybrid drive with Win 7 installed on the SS part of the drive and nothing else, should it continue to work for a long time?

 

[nukemaster]

All hardware can fail.

SSDs and hard drives can both have controller failures. For this reason you will see users swapping the board on a hard drive. This is not as easy to do on a SSD since the flash is part of the same board.

SSD flash wear-out takes a long time under normal use for most users.

The best thin I can recommend is to backup often. Be it a second hard drive or archival grade optical or even magnetic storage. Never trust that a drive(SSD or HDD or SSHD) will not fail at some point.

 

[runswindows95]

The Hybrid drives don't have that big of a SSD part to install the OS. The SSD part on the Seagates is only 8GB, and Windows won't see that as a separate drive. The SSD part is really a bigger cache drive. Far as reliability, I always go with this advise because you'll never know when a drive will fail: "If you really want to keep the file, back it up three different ways, and back up regularly."

 

[huilun02]

The SS part of hybrid drives is more of a cache than proper storage. Although in theory if the mechanical part fails, whatevers on the SS portion would be easier to recover given the drive is willing to start up at all.

Any part of a drive fails you'll want to dump it really.

And SSD's do not necessarily have a shorter lifespan than traditional mechanical drives. An SSD's lifespan is more determined by the number of read/write cycles it can endure. In fact I regard SSD's to be more reliable because it is not prone to mechanical failure and bad sectors/data corruption that occur on physical disks.