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.