SSD’s are fast. That’s for sure.
However, some things need to be considered:
- If left without power for longer periods (from weeks to years) they might lose all data. That’s in the JDEC specs, but hardly anyone reads those. So, don’t use them for archival of data.
- Data recovery is pointless if they fail.
- Power consumption isn’t always lower.
- Heat also isn’t always lower.
- You might think they are immune to magnetic fields, but some are more susceptible than classic hard drives.
- Slow-downs and corruption do appear more than with classical drives. And, what’s really scary: the bigger the disk, the more failures.
The average user might not notice any of this, but if you’re running them as a cache to a storage array you will notice them after weeks.
Audio is a bit in between. A user who mainly plays audio will be very happy with an SSD. If you record lots of small sessions every day and transfer those to another computer, erase and start again the next day, your SSD might be defective in under a year.
When you run database applications on a server, SSD’s might simply be slower and less reliable.
Intel used to be the superior brand. No failures, no slow-downs. But the others did catch up reasonably fast. And newer drives keep appearing almost weekly. That’s one of the big problems: you never really know what you’re buying. The first generation Samsung SSD’s was very good. Then Samsung updated the controllers and users started seeing slow-downs. A fix has been out for a while, but not for all models. And for some users, the fix isn’t working. Samsung is not a bad brand, it could happen to every other brand too.
I run some storage devices with lots of disks in them. In the caching area these have all been replaced with SSD’s. In the storage area, however, spinning disks still rule. And that’s not because of price. It’s because of the risk of total loss of data without any chance of recovery. SSD’s get replaced every six months. We simply can’t afford to have one of these systems go down as hundreds of servers and thousands of applications depend on them.
On my personal laptop, i have a hybrid disk*. It has 8 GB of flash storage and 1 TB of spinning storage. It’s fine, it’s not as speedy as an SSD, but it’s also not as expensive and it’s bigger. The controller on these disks moves data around. Files that are often accessed will be cached on the flash part. It works well, but doesn’t speed up startup. Why’s that? It 's because I don’t start up the machine often enough. There are no real problems with it, but…
Disk cloning tools (CCC fi) succesfully clone the disk, but I can’t get the result to boot. I have only one of my data recovery tools that can read/recover this disk.
I’ve also seen unexplainable dropouts in recordings with SSD’s , but that could be a problem with first generation controllers or the OS.
Oh, and Apple’s hybrid disks (Fusion Drive: classical HD + SSD JBOD) don’t work at all for audio or video recording.
EDIT:
*Seagate no longer makes those.