this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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That’s cool and all, but the only reason I would want that capacity is to store stuff that I would want to store for much longer than a lifespan of an SSD. Only HDD’s have that kind of lifespan. Like a gigantic video library/archive. I guess these aren’t for me.
But if they drive down the price of high capacity, HDDs, all the better. 
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I remember that SSDs lifespan mainly depends on how much you overwrite the drive. For 128TB, it should take you a very long time to overwrite the entire drive, let alone couple hundred or thousand times to kill the drive. I know that bit rot also happens on SSDs, but that applies to HDDs as well, and good drive maintenance practices should alleviate the issue. Though for archival purposes/cold storage, tape drives are probably better.
The lifespan of your data isn't nearly as long as the lifespan of the cells storing your data. Due to leakage of of power from the cells, and the more and more dense these cells are being packed (leading to smaller differences between what voltage maps to what binary value), SSDs have issues with bitrot. With a disk this size you would need to have data regularly checked and refreshed (rewritten) to ensure the data being stored was still correct and not corrupted.
All storage has issues with bit rot. There haven't been any studies to show that SSD is disproportionately affected.
In 2016, HDDs were more reliable (MTBF).
In 2022, for the first 5 years, SSDs are looking more reliable. With more of a constant failure rate (1%/yr), than the increasing failure rate of HDDs after 5 years.
(Caveat: not just bit rot, but general failure data.)
There's a caveat there. We've had some new tech in SSDs come out very recently, new enough not to be in those charts will still have to see.
What is bit rot?
When bits of data on a storage medium goes bad for seemingly no reason. If you've ever had a library of files and all of a sudden there's a file that won't open even though you haven't touched it.
If they are loading the drive up with media for archival purposes how much overwriting are they going to be doing, anyways? Theoretically the drive should last a very long time for that purpose.
Right, but if the point isn't for the drive to be actively used, and instead just hold data for archiving, then there's little reason to spend more money to get an SDD for that purpose when an HDD will hold that data just as well and for much cheaper.
The benefits of SSD over HDD are almost entirely in performance, so if SSD can develop further to provide a tangible benefit over HDD for long term storage, and do it for cheaper, then we can fully move away from it. But I don't think we're quite there yet.
SSD lifespan is expressed in terabytes written (TBW), wherein yeah they can sustain so many writes to the flash chips before they can't anymore.
Really depends on the content, type of use, architecture, and the file system. You’re not wrong, some situations would take centuries to wear this guy out.
It’s not for you. It’s for enterprises, but I can drive down the prices of shit you would use. No noise, better performance, less energy; it’s a win-win.
Yeah, that’s what I figured
HDDs typically don’t last as long as SSDs due to their mechanics failing. Data is there but it just won’t spin. I’ve yet to have an SSD actually fail. Every HDD I’ve ever owned, save one, has.
This has not been my experience at all, nor is what I know from general knowledge— that, due to rewriting, SSDs become unusable within 3-5 years, whereas the typical lifespan of an enterprise HDD is 5-7 years, perhaps longer.
In my own use, SSDs of mine seem to crap out around 5-ish years, whereas HDDs get 7+, and the $/GB ratio makes it a no-brainer, esp for video library/archive storage where it’s mostly read/write no rewrite and long-term storage with no need for very high-speed access (like for editing 4/8K).
I buy enterprise HDDs that never spin down and last forever— they use more power, but I don’t pay for that. SSDs wear out just by reading and writing and become unreadable over time.
If I were editing giant chunks of video in 8K, and needed enormously fast cache rates and transfer speeds over thunderbolt 4, obviously, I’d go with the SSDs, especially if I had a studio I was working for that could afford to replace them when they were out. But that’s not my use case.
I had one fail three weeks ago....but I been using it nonstop since 2013. Yeah, it was 128gb
I've had at least 8 SSDs fail in various ways personally.