Even though SSD pricing has become affordable and will likely continue to get more attractive, there will always be a use case for mechanical drives that SSDs simply can’t address.  Depending on the manufacturer, SSDs can only stay powered off for a certain amount of time before they begin to lose data.

I’ve seen reports that SSDs can lose data in as little as 7 days without power.

Mechanical drives can hold their data for a substantial amount of time before data loss begins – Usually on the order of many many years.

So it would seem, for archival and/or general backup purposes, mechanical drives will never be supplanted by SSD devices.

Spinning rust will be around a long time for backups and colder data storage and even LTO tape drives for backup as well! But SSDs on consumer kit is just fine and some external Hard Drive backup.

What I’d really like to see are more Hard-Drive/SSD hybrids and say 1TB of Solid State storage matched with 2TB+ on Spinning Rust and some sort of write through caching where data gets written quickly to  the SSD part and in the background(Via the drive’s controller) backed up to the spinning rust part for safer long term storage and retrieval. So some sort of hybrid drive that’s its own self contained tiered storage solution that manages the data stored on the drive based on usage and keeps the most often used data on the SSD part and the colder data on the spinning platters part.

Once USB 4 becomes ubiquitous backups will sure become relatively painless and most devices with plenty of bandwidth for rapid backups but as far as laptops are concerned SSDs are the way to go and M.2 in laptops really needs come standard with a minimum of 2, M.2 slots per laptop if possible.  SD cards/readers that are are also getting the PCIe and NVMe capabilities are nice as well.

The vast majority of NON-Enterprise users, use only a small portion of their drive capacity. Most of them well less than 100 G. Drives that are much larger than that just mean that effectively, they have no limitation.

In modern day PCs, almost all users cannot differentiate the performance difference between rotating drives and SSD’s except during startup. SSD’s provide a 15 to 30 second startup Vs. rotating drives 90 seconds. Once running, modern day PCs performance is so good that most users cannot see the difference in performance. Very few people start their PC’s more than once a day, so start up time savings are really incidental. Many PCs never get turned off so there is not startup time.

Backup drives are used about once a month if that often. They are almost never used to READ files and always to write. Whether it takes 45 minutes or 15 minutes to do a backup is not important to most people

So, I can see no logical reason to use SSD’s for most computers, and have big questions whether SSD makes any sense at all for backups

I would like to see some good quality study done on reliability and life expectancy of SSDs. I am particularly interested in this from a backup perspective.

It’s the shock resistance which is my main interest in using SSDs in portable devices. In my Intel NUC desktop mini-PC, the form factor pretty much requires SSD storage. I would not use SSD for archival storage, for the same reason I don’t use Flash Drives for archival storage of anything except Rescue Media. Not for actual data or system backups.

I left many SSDs or machines with them unplugged for months before knowing about the loss of voltage and I had 3 that were unreadable after, or they seemed to work fined and then just became unreadable after a month or two of use with weird issues.

Does anyone know if you can reinitialize an SSD that doesn’t seem to be readable anymore due to long time storage without power? Is the SSD effectively bricked or there is something to do to make it behave like a new one, even if it means loosing the data on it? Sometimes the SSD isn’t seen by the OS but it is seen by the BIOS, sometimes it is seen by the OS but doesn’t boot anymore.

Depends on what the storage device is being used for..

from my experience (excluding NVMe)
SSHD – are great choice for Virtual Machine use.

SSD – I still have an old OCZ Petrol Sata3 that hasn’t missed a beat in everyday use (Win7/ 8.1) general use on an old laptop.
I have also had SSD’s disconnected/removed from devices for months, only to fire up without issue.(linux and Windows)

HDD – spinners are excellent for backups/images (internal/external)

I still have a mix of half a dozen ATA100/133 3.5″/2.5″ HDD’s and on last check (late 2018 IIRC), all were fully functional/ without errors/noisy bearings after testing, and at least 7-8 years of non-use.(maxtor/seagate)

I think the article had insufficient coverage of the M.2/PCIe board memory.  It should be added to the cost table.

Last fall, I used a 1TB  M.2/PCIe board in my desktop computer build (to replace my 9-year old Windows 7 PC.)  I selected this board due to the technology’s wider bandwidth.  It was marginally more costly than a 2.5in SSD for that capacity at the time, but I keep my gear for eons.  To manage overall cost, I selected the just prior generation AMD CPU and installed on a gamer motherboard.  I also reused my old 19in CRT monitor and one of my son’s cast-off gamer video cards.

WSRangerRickT wrote:

I think the article had insufficient coverage of the M.2/PCIe board memory.  It should be added to the cost table.

That’s a good idea for an article about tracking SSD pricing as time goes forward. I will note that the price of M.2 and SSD form factors is very close now, with a gap of around 10%. PCIe continues to represent a premium for its complexity, but because the boards are larger they can accommodate heat sinks for better cooling, which alone might be worth the premium.