SSDs have extremely finite lifespans since the writing process irreversibly degrades the media, while in HDDs wear theoretically happens only on power cycling and they otherwise have no intrinsic limits on how many write operations they can handle.
Hard Disk also (usually) give some hints before dying; noises, growing number of bad sectors, slowness, etc, while SSD (also usually) die abruptly without giving any warnings or leaving time for recovering files. That wouldn't be a problem in data centers where redundancy and backups do exist, but in desktop machines virtually nobody keeps backups, so it can make a world of difference.
> in desktop machines virtually nobody keeps backups
Unless you are me, who has had tough lessons at The School of Hard Knocks, with postgraduate degrees from The College of Getting the Shit Kicked out of You.
> Also, both MS and Apple nowadays make it pretty easy to keep rolling backups to an attached a USB HD.
Re Apple: this is true only for desktops or laptops. If you want to back up your iPhone you need a Mac to work with a local storage solution. And you cannot configure the Mac to use the HD to store the phone backups directly: the folder the Mac uses cannot be a symlink nor can it be configured. You have to sync all of your phone's data to the Mac, then sync the mac with time machine, which means your Mac needs to be large enough to store all of its data, plus the iPhone's.
I would love to know more about that. I've got a laptop for which there is plenty of storage on a NAS connected via wifi, but the laptop itself has the same size storage as the phone so can't actually backup the phone.
> while SSD (also usually) die abruptly without giving any warnings or leaving time for recovering files
I had SSDs dying gradually and HDDs dying abruptly too. I think this is just the difference between the controller hardware failing or the firmware encountering some unrecoverable condition vs. failure of the storage medium.
That said, there still is the difference that HDDs retain data much longer, flash cells leak charge over time. So for long-term storage HDDs are still a little better, but "long" here means many years, so you're still in the domain where you're risking age-related failure, redundancy will be required either way.
Mechanical failure is very common on PCBs, especially ones with thousands of solder pads and aging solder joints.
I keep a plastic lap pad under my laptop when carrying it around horizontally. I see people just letting the whole torque of the laptop bend the motherboard and it hurts me. Those laptops will one day not POST because the CPU, RAM, or GPU will have a pad lifted off the PCB.
AFAIK, SSDs usually give one warning before dying, and that's suddenly becoming irreversibly read only. They might not always survive a reboot (which certainly would be the first thing I'd do if my OS suddenly reported a drive as RO) but you usually do have a time window to get your data off safely.
An SSD randomly giving the ghost is one of my greatest fears when it comes to desktop computers, because there's no way to get any data off them when they die. With spinning rust you can usually send the drive to an expensive data recovery company who will likely transplant the platters and send you a copy of what's on disk, but if a flash chip is slightly damaged because of a short or whatever, you won't have such luck.
Yes, I know, I should make more backups, but every time I thought I'd gotten everything safely backed up, I found a file or folder that I forgot to include.
An ssd becoming read only, and having random read errors happens when it is overheating aswell.
I’ve had an nvme reaching temps 70+ celsius, because the geniuses who designed the mobo put the socket right where cpu hot air flows..
I aged a couple of years when the machine bsoded and then told me windows files are missing. I thought everything is gone, but fortunately when the ssd colled down everything went back to normal.
Had to put an extra fan in the case, and disable couple of cpu cores though to make the system stable.
