I don't think the difference these days is anywhere near "an order of magnitude"
(Small "laptop" spinning drives don't use an awful lot of power either.)
However modern SSDs do tend to not produce a lot of heat...
So not only are they dead silent... but your fan will run less... so that's quieter as well.
"Reliability" is an oversimplification....
SSDs have a "write cycle life" - which spinning drives basically do not.
This is where each data site can only be written to a certain number of times...
And even that is not as simple as you might imagine...
For example, writes are done in blocks, so when you write a small file, the entire block it resides in must be rewritten...
This rings up the wear counter much more quickly than you think if you do a lot of small random writes (like in a cache).
(Better to use RAM, which has an unlimited write-life-count, for that.)
Here's a bit of perspective on that....
With a typical computer, and typical use, a 250 gB SSD may well outlast the computer.
(The one on the computer I'm typing this on has been used for years and is still doing fine.)
But here's a worst-case scenario...
Start with a 250 gB SSD...
Every day rip or download five 50 gB Blu-Ray discs onto it...
And every evening erase them, or move them somewhere else, to be ready for tomorrow...
At that rate the life expectancy of your consumer grade SSD will be about THREE TO FOUR MONTHS...
And you can double that for a "pro" drive.
You'd be much better off with a mechanical drive... or a bigger SSD... where you can spread the wear.
(Or just be happy with the great performance on your SSD... but be prepared to replace it when it wears out... )
SSDs are also comprised of a very dense collection of very compact electronics (in terms of chip architectures and such.)
Which means that, rather than just the drive controller, the entire drive is potentially more subject to "electronic failure".
(I don't know if numbers will prove this to be meaningful... but I can certainly remember the last time a USB stick "just stopped working".)
SSDs also have a limited retention life.
So, if you put your entire library on one, bury it in the back yard, and pull it out in twenty years, it probably won't read.
This is absolutely not an issue for day-to-day use but it is for archive use.
If you didn't know... the same is true for USB sticks...
USB sticks have a write-cycle life... so they "wear out with use"...
But they also have a data-retention life rating... the data you write on them "fades with time"...
A typical USB stick is rated to hold data for five to ten years...
So they are NOT what you should use for that copy of your treasure map you plan to bury in your back yard...
And the same is true for a typical SSD...
And that rating drops with high temperatures and a variety of other things...
I would ignore the horror stories about that... but magnetic drives have a longer track record.
(Ratings are all well and good but the latest SSD drives haven't been around long enough to prove whether they'll last five years or not.)
(Of course, since
NO form of data storage is absolutely reliable, you
SHOULD have backups anyway...
RIGHT???!!! )
Hi
donh50 -
The only reason I'd consider a SSD for music playback is that there is not room inside a Nucleus (nor the average NUC) for a "conventional" HDD. Also, spinning platters take an order of magnitude more power than do SSDs. This is a concern when trying to make a fan-less server.
And the "SSDs are not as reliable as conventional HDDs" is not entirely true, from what I've read. If you're writing to the disc regularly, then yes, conventional spinning discs are more reliable. But a music library is a "write once - read many" device. In that service, I've read that SSDs are at least as, and in some cases, more reliable than conventional drives. But I don't claim to be an expert on this, and am relying on what I've read online and in magazines.
Cordially - Boom