I've debated beginning to upgrade my server storage from mechanical to SSD's but the worry still persists in my head about data degradation. The drives would have large amounts of data (video files, photos, documents, etc) that don't get read at all frequently. Am I worrying too much about data loss over time of not being written and read to or has this issue largely been taken care of with today's modern drives? I'd hate to invest in new SSD's then go to read a file many years down the line only to find it's corrupted or no longer there.
Thoughts on the evolution of this type of storage anyone?
Unfortunately data degradation over time hasn't really been taken care for all NAND processes. Samsung's 840 "fix" was more of a workaround that simply hides the issue by more aggressive rewriting of stale data, whilst other newer 16nm TLC drives (eg, BX200's) have been seen to slowdown after a few weeks too. I started a thread on potential 850 EVO slowdown's after 6 months or so, and while I thank the few who contributed, my ultimate conclusion is there still isn't anywhere near enough data to make any conclusion. Tech sites who should have been doing this stuff have been a total waste of space, each falling over themselves to copy / paste the same 550MB/s CrystalDiskMark speeds on 2 minute old data...
The only drive I'll ever take seriously for fairly durable data storage is the 850 PRO (40nm, MLC), and the price of that is still 10x that of a HDD and obviously hasn't been dropping recently either despite Samsung's move from 32 to 48 3D layers. In fact I think SSD's have hit a wall over the past 6 months - low-end planar TLC drives being cheap for a reason, Crucial's TLC drives continuing to fall through the floor after previous excellent MLC generations, whilst high end Samsungs are really not dropping in price at all, probably due to complete lack of competition. Likewise for NAS usage cost for cost you could have 4x 3TB drives mirrored and still have change to spare for the price of a single 2TB 850 PRO. Makes zero sense given any serious data storage plan will obviously require more than one drive. And there's still no big speed-ups when moving large files if Gigabit network bandwidth is the intermediate bottleneck. Or if the bottleneck for playing media files back is simply "human" speed (you can only watch movies and listen to music so fast).
So my answer is no, HDD's are not going away anytime soon certainly for secondary / critical data storage. I agree with BonzaiDuck in saying they're great speedy boot / gaming / cache drives (and I wouldn't go back to HDD for a system drive), but given the current "durability race to the bottom", I also wouldn't touch most SSD's for secondary / long-term / cold storage of mostly unchangeable data, or server / NAS use. I don't even think NAND technology itself is a suitable solution for that. A few years' back people would laugh at dirt-cheap sh*tty brands of optical disc that couldn't be read back after just 2-3 years, or discovering that cheap old IDE HDD in the back of the cupboard after 8 years and finding the data still reads back fine, yet expensive SSD's that "guarantee" data for only 12 months unpowered and require huge amounts of ECC guestimating reading back data they wrote mere weeks ago is supposedly the "new norm"? How far that bar has been lowered...