Are SSD's a meme?
Am I the only one who still is apprehensive about SSD's?
I've seen more friends with dead SSD's between 2010 and now than I have HDD's.
>Been given four dead, totally un-readable SSD's (three Samsung, one Intel) from friends who wanted me to help them recover data
>All SSD's were being used only for the operating system (2x Win10, 1x Ubuntu, 1x Debian)
>Most writes were going to secondary HDD's
>All were being used in desktops with reputable power supplies and motherboards (e.g. corsair PSUs, Asus/Gigabyte/Asrock)
>None even got enumerated on a SATA bus
These were home built gaming PC's, not servers. I suspect that the controller chips failed, rather than the NAND.
In that time, I was also brought one HDD with several bad sectors but lots of recoverable information that could still boot to a desktop. This was installed in a modern (2016) chinkpad T460, and was a WD blue 1TB 7200rpm drive.
More anecdotal evidence:
I have an Amiga 500 with a 1991-vintage SCSI Seagate Barracuda 1GB HDD (in an A590 module) that still boots workbench, and have yet to experience corrupted files on it. It doesn't use SMART so I can't guarantee it's entirely good still, but it sure seems to be.
I also boot my desktop/server from a 2005-vintage Seagate 500GiB disk which still reports zero SMART errors. This desktop/server has been running off of this HDD since 2005, and is currently the second oldest piece of hardware in it (after a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 soundcard).
The only hard disk I have ever owned since new that has failed was in an iPod Classic 160GB, which I dropped multiple times.
I mean, I get that they are faster when they work, but everything I've seen indicates that they're the equivalent of buying a fast car that lasts two years and then blows up regardless of driving style instead of a slower car (say, a Volvo 240 or an old Jeep CJ) that lasts >25 years if you don't crash it into a tree.