this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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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.