datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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SSDs have a write lifespan. Once you write ~400TB or whatever it’s rated for on a consumer SSD it dies. HDDs can take a lot more writes before dying.
Not really. Tests and my experience show this is just a pure warranty number. Meaning the manufacturer guarantees that the drive will do at least this many writes without failing and it reaching it also voids your warranty. However, you can usually expect 2x as many writes, although 10x and more is also not unheard of.
They are actually often not rated for a ton of reads and writes. But once again this is more of a warranty thing and HDDs are usually unmetered so...
HDDs are not unmetered warranty wise. My new 18TB Seagates has a something like 150TB/year write endurance (TBW) if I want to keep the warranty.
The Seagate Ironwolfs 18TB have a Workload Rate Limit (WRL) of 300TB/year, as do some WD models. Unlike SSDs this WRL includes not only writes but reads as well. (page 2, end) If you do a monthly scrub you already have 216TB of reads so it can be safely assumed that a lot of customers blow well past these numbers. This limit is in use since the 2TB drive area and simply does not fit 9x larger drives. ServeTheHome talked about this years ago.