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So, I was recently hired on to a company that has shipped out several 24/7 always on servers with solid state drives. I understand that SSD longevity has been improved upon, however to my knowledge the drives are not going to last the length of time some of our clients want them too (10+ years in the worst cases), whereas conventional hard drives would.

The company I am part of decided to do this, and implemented RAID 1 as a data integrity failsafe, which I have no argument against; I’d recommend it for solid state or conventional drives.

I am concerned about the possibility that if—and when—we wind up needing to rebuild the RAID, we’ll need to match specifications, and a match may be pretty hard to find X number of years down the line.

So I’m thinking, if we bought a handful of solid state drives today, threw them in a closet and forgot about them, if 5 or 7 years down then line when we needed to replace one would the ones in the closet still be viable? I’m led to believe Solid State Drives are heartier than conventional drives in terms of physical reliability, so I think they would, but I thought I’d get a consensus.

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  • Um, that's what backups are for. You'd advocate running a server without making regular backups? And instead waste money on drives you'll likely never use, that are rapidly coming down in price? If you need to replace them in 5-7 years, the client is more likely to expect you to install something larger. But then, it's pretty inane to use SSDs in servers to start with. I suppose actually using server-class hardware in servers is out of the question?
    – Debra
    Jun 21, 2014 at 3:23

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Because there are no moving parts in the SSD drive, I would imagine that you should have no problem with long term storage. They should absolutely handle storage better than conventional hard drives.

But I'd confirm with the manufacturer to see if there are any recommendations on their part.

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