With the growing need for external storage devices like external hard drives and SSDs, an important question comes up – which type of storage is more reliable for long-term data storage? External SSDs and HDDs each have their own advantages and disadvantages when it comes to factors like speed, physical durability, lifespan, and data integrity. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll look at whether external SSDs or HDDs are more reliable for real-world use.
What is an External SSD?
An external SSD (Solid State Drive) is a type of storage device that uses flash memory chips to store data, unlike a traditional hard disk drive that uses magnetic disks. SSDs have no moving parts, making them more shock and vibration resistant. External SSDs connect to computers and devices through USB, Thunderbolt, or other interfaces.
Some benefits of external SSDs:
- Much faster read/write speeds compared to HDDs
- More resistant to physical damage due to drops, shocks, vibrations
- Faster start-up times
- Completely silent operation
- Lower power consumption
What is an External HDD?
An external HDD (Hard Disk Drive) uses spinning magnetic disks to store data. Data is written and read by a mechanical arm with a read/write head that moves over the disk platters. External HDDs connect to devices through USB, Firewire, eSATA, Thunderbolt, or other interfaces.
Some benefits of external HDDs:
- Significantly cheaper per gigabyte compared to SSDs
- Available in much larger capacities than SSDs
- Mature, proven technology
Reliability Factors to Consider
When it comes to choosing an external storage device, reliability is a top concern. Some key factors that determine reliability:
- Physical durability – How prone is the device to damage from shocks, drops, vibration, dust, moisture, and other physical hazards?
- Component lifespan – How long can the electronic components inside the device be expected to function before failure occurs?
- Data integrity – How well does the device maintain the accuracy and consistency of stored data over time?
- Write endurance – How much data can be written to the storage before it begins to fail?
Let’s compare external SSDs and HDDs across these critical reliability criteria.
Physical Durability and Lifespan
One of the key advantages of external SSDs compared to HDDs is physical durability and component lifespan. External SSDs have no moving parts and utilize flash memory, making them much more resistant to damage from physical shocks, drops, vibrations, extreme temperatures, and other environmental hazards.
External HDDs rely on delicate mechanical parts like actuator arms that can break down over time. The mechanical nature of HDDs also makes them susceptible to damage from drops, shocks and vibrations. SSD components like NAND flash chips have up to 10 times longer functional lifespans than HDD components.
The table below compares the physical durability of external SSDs versus HDDs:
| Physical Durability Factor | External SSD | External HDD |
|---|---|---|
| Shock resistance | Much higher – no moving parts | Moderate – sensitive moving parts |
| Vibration resistance | Much higher – no moving parts | Moderate – sensitive moving parts |
| Drop resistance | Much higher – no moving parts | Moderate – sensitive moving parts |
| Dust and debris resistance | Higher – enclosed design | Moderate – exposed moving parts |
| Moisture resistance | Higher – no air gaps | Moderate – risk of condensation |
| Component lifespan | Up to 10x longer than HDDs | 3-5 years typical |
It is clear that the lack of moving parts gives external SSDs a strong advantage over HDDs when it comes to resisting physical damage. SSDs can withstand much more intense shocks, vibrations, moisture, dust, drops, and other hazards without failing. Overall, external SSDs are significantly more durable and longer-lasting storage devices.
Data Integrity
The accuracy and consistency of your stored data over long periods of time is critical for any storage device. External SSDs leverage NAND flash memory technology to provide excellent long-term data integrity and retention.
NAND flash stores data in a way that avoids mechanical degradation and magnetic field interactions that can corrupt data on HDD platters. As long as the NAND chips avoid errors during the write process, the stored data remains accurate for many years.
External HDDs have more potential points of failure that can interfere with long-term data integrity. The mechanical nature of platters and read/write heads makes them vulnerable to progressive degradation from friction and wear over time. Data loss can occur due to head crashes,motor failures, debris, or electro-magnetic interference.
Without proper backups, external HDDs are more likely to experience irretrievable data loss and corruption over the 3-5 year lifespan of the device. SSDs provide much more reliable long-term storage of accurate, intact data.
Write Endurance
The total amount of data that can be written to a storage device over its lifetime is known as write endurance. This is an important metric for reliability – the larger a device’s write endurance, the longer it will last before failure.
NAND flash memory cells in SSDs can only withstand a finite number of write/erase cycles before they begin to wear out and get damaged. However, modern SSDs are designed with techniques like wear leveling to distribute writes across many NAND cells, extending overall write endurance.
High quality external SSDs today commonly offer write endurance up to 500TB-1PB for consumer models and up to 10-100PB for enterprise models over the device lifespan. This allows for writing hundreds of terabytes before wear would cause device failure.
In comparison, HDDs do not have an inherent write endurance limit. As long as the mechanical components remain in working shape, HDDs can withstand virtually unlimited writes. However, due to the shorter 3-5 year lifespan of HDD components, their effective write endurance is lower than SSDs.
In summary, while HDDs have essentially unlimited write tolerance in theory, their mechanical failure over time gives SSDs the advantage in write endurance in practice.
Real-World Reliability Data
Industry studies of real-world return and failure rate data provide insightful statistics about the comparative reliability of external SSDs versus HDDs.
Backblaze conducted a large analysis of over 100,000 HDDs of varying sizes and models deployed in data centers. They found an annualized failure rate of just under 2% for external HDDs. Most drives lasted between 3-5 years before failure.
Another extensive study on SSD reliability by Intel showed annual failure rates consistently under 1% for SSDs used in server environments. Most SSDs lasted 5-7 years before failure.
Both SSDs and HDDs saw higher failure rates in the first year, followed by steady annual failure rates afterward until end of life. Overall, external SSDs showed almost 50% lower annualized failure rates compared to external HDDs.
While these studies focused on enterprise or server-grade drives which are designed for 24/7 operation, they highlight the fundamental reliability advantages of SSDs over HDDs. Even consumer-grade external SSDs can be expected to outlast consumer HDDs in terms of years of usable service life.
Maintaining Your External SSD or HDD
While SSDs offer more resilience and reliability by design, there are still some best practices you should keep in mind to extend the lifespan of any external drive:
- Avoid excessive shocks, drops, vibrations that can damage internal components
- Do not disconnect or remove the drive during reading/writing
- Keep the drive away from liquids, dust, debris that could enter the enclosure
- Avoid high temperatures which accelerate component degradation
- Periodically scan the disk for errors using built-in utilities
- Make sure to safely eject the disk before disconnecting from your computer
Following these precautions and handling your external drive with care will help minimize the risk of failure.
For HDDs, some additional measures include:
- Avoid moving or using HDDs while they are actively reading/writing
- Allow proper airflow around HDD enclosures to reduce overheating
- Use surge protectors and stabilized power sources to protect the drive electronics
- Replace HDDs after 3-5 years to avoid mechanical wear-out
Should You Buy an External SSD or HDD?
So should you choose an external SSD or HDD? Let’s summarize the key differences:
Durability and lifespan – SSDs are far superior due to having no moving parts, better shock/vibration tolerance, and longer-lasting components.
Data integrity – SSDs maintain stored data accuracy much longer than HDDs due to the nature of NAND flash memory versus magnetic platters.
Write endurance – Consumer SSDs can withstand hundreds of terabytes of writes, while HDDs have no limit in theory but shorter practical lifespans.
Failure rates – External SSDs have almost 50% lower annualized failure rates compared to HDDs based on real-world data.
Capacity and price – HDDs offer far larger storage capacities for much lower cost per gigabyte.
For most users, the dramatically better durability, lifespan and long-term data integrity of SSDs make them the clear winner for external storage. The only exception is if you need very high capacities (10TB+) in a cost-effective manner, where HDDs may make more sense.
Conclusion
While HDD technology has been around for decades and offers large capacities cheaply, modern external SSDs provide superior speed, physical resilience, lifespan, and long-term reliability. Durable external SSDs prevent data loss from shocks, vibrations, extreme temperatures, degraded components, and other hazards much more effectively compared to mechanical HDDs.
With terabyte-sized SSDs becoming affordable and high-capacity HDDs plateauing at 10-20TB, external SSDs can meet the storage needs of most consumers. Reliable external SSDs are ideal for photo/video storage, backups, file transfers, gaming, and everyday external storage requirements.
Thanks to rapid advances in flash memory capabilities and SSD technologies, the age of spinning hard disk drives is giving way to flash-based solid state drives. For most external storage use cases today, external SSDs provide better reliability and peace of mind knowing your data is safeguarded from both physical and logical threats.
