Hello, everybody. I’ve been looking for a new storage solution. I know, that HDDs are reliable and SSDs are for fast access, but I’ve been an HDD user ever since. I have an SSD, but I only have the OS on it. Likewise, I want to do some basic File operations, as writing documents or copy files. It would also be great if I could use it as a Backup kind of sorts device. It would be great if I could move my data from my old WD-Elements external HDD, quickly, to an intern HDD without any fuss. I just need a Storage medium that’s cheap and good. Do you have any recommendations? Thanks in advance!
SSDs are quite reliable and way faster than HDD over time. Only use HDD if your backing up data and even yet, there are mdiscs for data archiving.
I use HDDs for long term and larger storage… my home partition, working partitions and the OS itself are on distinct SSDs.
It would be great if I could move my data from my old WD-Elements external HDD, quickly, to an intern HDD without any fuss.
Take the casing off and remove the hard drive, install it in your computer. Done.
SSD only. HDD is on the way out. Most HDD’s are too slow and unreliable.
IMO, its just about how much storage you need and how much money you can spend. 1TB SSD cost almost the same as HDD. Higher capacity will make SSD much more expensive while HDD is getting cheaper.
Go with SSD if you can afford it, but none of them is reliable. Backup is your friend
HDDs are for cheap, not for reliable. Anecdotal, but my personal failure rate with HDDs is around 98% while my failure rate with all forms of flash media (including SSDs) is around 2%.
With 1 TB SSDs being available for as little as $20 (not particularly fast ones but still far faster than HDDs), I don’t see a use-case for HDDs at all unless you need dozens of TBs of storage.
Hard drives are not that unreliable, well, so long as you pick the right model.
BackBlaze’s statistics are here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/ - they run tens of thousands of inexpensive drives to run their cloud backup service. Some HDDs are much better than others.
That document also links to their SSD statistics (they don’t have that many SSDs yet, so the stats aren’t as good) but while SSDs tend to have lower failure rates, there are some models of SSD that have higher failure rates than HDDs. For example, one Seagate SSD they use has an AFR (annualised failure rate) of just under 2%, but one Toshiba HDD they use has an AFR of only 0.31%. (Another thing to be aware of is that Backblaze’s drives will all be in air conditioned data centres, not in the random temperature/humidity spreads of a PC in someone’s home).
If you look at the stats as a whole generally SSDs have half the failure rate across the board to HDDs, but it varies a lot by make and model. So be careful on which you pick, and take backups :-) For my money, all my PCs (desktop and laptops) are pure SSD setups. My server still uses spinning disks, mainly because it’s older server class hardware with a SAS array.
By the time enough longevity data has been collected to be really useful, obsolescence is becoming a factor. And even if the same model number is still being sold, the hardware inside may have changed and all of the data may not be directly relevant.
Sticking with a reputable product line and assuming that past performance is relevant doesn’t always help, either… I remember the Deskstar Deathstar drives fiasco, and got bit hard by it.
Of course anecdotes are of very limited usefulness, but I had exactly the opposite experience. The HDDs that failed on me, failed slowly with SMART errors that gave enough time to make a backup, and never failed completely. On the other hand I had a cheap SSD die completely and without any warning after only limited use, and experienced bit rot even on reputable vendors.
tl;dr choose what you want but make backups
