Technology

I've had a Samsung SSD die on me, I've had many WD drives die on me (also the last drive I've had die was a WD drive), I've had many Seagate drives die on me.

Buy enough drives, have them for a long enough time, and they will die.

Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.

Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)

So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh..check your backups I guess?

SSDs won’t hold data for much longer compared to HDDs

Realistically this is not a good reason to select SSD over HDD. If your data is important it's being backed up (and if it's not backed up it's not important. Yada yada 3.2.1 backups and all. I'll happily give real backup advise if you need it)

In my anecdotal experience across both my family's various computers and computers I've seen bite the dust at work, I've not observed any longevity difference between HDDs and SSDs (in fact I've only seen 2 fail and those were front desk PCs that were effectively always on 24/7 with heavy use during all lobby hours, and that was after multiple years of that usecase) and I've never observed bit rot in the real world on anything other than crappy flashdrives and SD cards (literally the lowest quality flash you can get)

Honestly best way to look at it is to select based on your usecase. Always have your boot device be an SSD, and if you don't need more storage on that computer than you feel like buying an SSD to match, don't even worry about a HDD for that device. HDDs have one usecase only these days: bulk storage for comparatively low cost per GB

Not sure whether we'll arrive there the tech is definitely entering the taper-out phase of the sigmoid. Capacity might very well still become cheaper, also 3x cheaper, but don't, in any way, expect them to simultaneously keep up with write performance that ship has long since sailed. The more bits they're trying to squeeze into a single cell the slower it's going to get and the price per cell isn't going to change much, any more, as silicon has hit a price wall, it's been a while since the newest, smallest node was also the cheapest.

OTOH how often do you write a terabyte in one go at full tilt.

Back then that was very impressive!

My dad had a 286 with a 40MB hard drive in it. When it spun up it sounded like a plane taking off. A few years later he had a 486 and got a 2gb Seagate hard drive. It was an unimaginable amount of space at the time.

The computer industry in the 90s (and presumably the 80s, I just don't remember it) we're wild. Hardware would be completely obsolete every other year.

Seagate in general are unreliable in my own anecdotal experience. Every Seagate I've owned has died in less than five years. I couldn't give you an estimate on the average failure age of my WD drives because it never happened before they were retired due to obsolescence. It was over a decade regularly though.

well until you need capacity why not use an SSD. It's basically mandatory for the operating system drive too

I stopped buying seagates when I had 4 of their 2TB barracuda drives die within 6 months... constantly was RMAing them. Finally got pissed and sold them and bought WD reds, still got 2 of the reds in my Nas Playing hot backups with nearly 8 years of power time.

That's how most technology is:

• combustion engines - early 1900s, earlier if you count steam engines
• missiles - 13th century China, gunpowder was much earlier
• wind energy - windmills appeared in the 9th century, potentially as early as the 4th

Almost everything we have today is due to incremental improvements from something much older.