> Failure on SSDs is predictable and usually expressed with Terabytes Written (TBW). Failure on spinning disk HDDs is comparatively random.
That wasn't my experience with thousands of SSDs and spinning drives. Spinning drives failed more often, but usually with SMART sector counts increasing before hand. Our SSDs never got close to media wearout, but that didn't stop them from dropping off the bus. Literally working fine, then boom can't detect; all data gone.
Then there's the incidents where the power on hours value rolls over and kills the firmware. I believe these have happened on disks of all types, but here's a recent one on SSDs [1]. Normally when building a big server, all the disks are installed and powered on at the same time, which risks catastrophic failure in case of a firmware bug like this. If you can, try to get drives from different batches, and stagger the power on times.
That wasn't my experience with thousands of SSDs and spinning drives. Spinning drives failed more often, but usually with SMART sector counts increasing before hand. Our SSDs never got close to media wearout, but that didn't stop them from dropping off the bus. Literally working fine, then boom can't detect; all data gone.
Then there's the incidents where the power on hours value rolls over and kills the firmware. I believe these have happened on disks of all types, but here's a recent one on SSDs [1]. Normally when building a big server, all the disks are installed and powered on at the same time, which risks catastrophic failure in case of a firmware bug like this. If you can, try to get drives from different batches, and stagger the power on times.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/hpe-says-firmware-bug-will-bri...