<crystal ball mode>

SSDs, being nonmechanical, will probably have the price/byte ratio drop faster than any other storage medium. This will feed popularity and adoption which will only increase the trend. Consider a related medium: i bought an 8GB SD card for $9 last weekend. Not too many years ago i bought a 256KB card for about $45. That's a 160x improvement. Over about the same time period my magneto-mechanical drive purchases have gone from 250GB for $160 to 2TB for $80, only a 16x improvement.

SSDs, being nonmechanical will be much less susceptible to the vagaries of aging. While i've had some magneto-mechanical drives operate 15 years in constant use and some still readable after 20 years on the shelf, SSDs will probably last more than a normal human lifespan, possibly many times more.

</crystal ball mode>

Unless the price becomes at least reasonably competitive with hard drives, I think they will fade. Most people seem to be buying 60GB SSDs for their OS drive which is too small. The performance is only marginally better than many of the faster hard drives. And there have been premature failures in shorter periods of time than that of hard drives. But they are too new to gauge the life expectancy.

But for backup/archiving? HDDs all the way.

John

With SSDs, I'm less concerned about whether the data will last for my lifetime than whether the price will be competitive in my lifetime with my preferred archive media, hard drives. This article sheds doubt on the possibility based on shortage of fab capacity. New fabs are probably not going to be built for devices whose prices are falling too rapidly.

Full disclosure, I'm using a 120GB Corsair that boots this system.

" But the problems with storage limitations and data degradation has certainly deminished the reality of that as being an achiving solution."

Whilst optical media certainly has issues with capacity there's no question about its suitability for archiving if you pay for archival grade media which is certainly not cheap. The MAM gold disks will last 100 years, probably 300 years. If you've got deep pockets the Kodak medical archival CDs should last even longer but they're around $10 each and hard to find.
I'm pretty certain Sony were claiming 50 years for their BD media.
The other alternative is DLT tape but you've got a moderate investment to make in the drive. There's certainly an issue to consider about how long the drives to read the tapes will be around but there's a very considerable amount of material archived to that format so I suspect someone will be keeping enough machines around for a very long time.

As for SSDs, I'm not too certain about their ability to retain data for extended periods of time given the mechanism by which the data is stored.

Bob.

SSD's should NOT be used for archiving data. Primarily (as mentioned here) because they're cost prohibitive. Why would you use your most expensive (per GB) storage devices for archiving? That's completely backwards.

Secondly, SSD's can be prone to sudden failure and some models don't allow (or it's extremely expensive) recovery of data (some models encrypt data as it's written). If that's your archive copy and it suddenly goes away, you're in deep trouble.

SSD's should primarily be used as OS/Program drives, not for archival storage. They should be imaged nightly (as should any OS drive) to ensure you can quickly recover if case of failure.

Well, I'm sure convinced the SDD concept is great in that:

The positives:
1. I understand they use much less energy?
2. Therefore I would think they would generate a lot less heat?
3. The drives take up a lot less room (2.5 vs 3.5")?
4. I understand they are much quicker than mechanical?
5. Life expectancy? (Got a lot of digitized 16mm I hope to pass on)

The negatives:
1. Cost
2. Reliability (any evidence yet?)
3. Cost

TomG

Don't know about longevity - if the 50 years thing is accurate, then good.

Backups would seem a good use for SSDs. As yet the limited number of Write Cycles would make them dodgy for general HDD-type use....

geoff