I usually change after 5 years, games get cheaper as well if you wait a bit.
Do you really need all that space?
I do because I am going to run loads of virtual machines
Iāve had some Samsung SSDās for over 10 years, and Magician says theyāre still in great shape. Just sayinā.
An indepth testing regime hammered (not with hammers) a bunch of top SSDs some years back, Sasmsung 850-Pro outlasted the lot. I stll have a couple in play too.
Please do not use them drives for anything critical. SSDs when they fail they usually fail in a bad way.
And you should run them in a RAID of some description (you probably are)
Get used to migrating servers from time to time, every few years, keeps you on your toes. Yes RAID for sure.
I once lost a website domain and database, in two parts, first I neglected domain renewal warnings, then when that was too late I lost the wp database through pure negligence. Nothing to do with ssd or hdd failure, just me.
Soā¦ failure is not just hardware eh!
That is great
I have some also around that age for home use and yes they are doing ok still
But home use and enterprise use are 2 very different things.
I think the whole āSSD hypeā question really comes down to matching the tool to the job. Choice, need, and expectations.
A bit like tyres:
- A horseācarriage wheel runs for years with a simple rubber strip on wood. Slow speeds, light loads, almost no stress. Longevity comes from how little is demanded of it.
- A normal road tyre handles heat cycles, wet roads, potholes, and daily driving. It balances grip and durability and lasts thousands of kilometres before age or wear takes it out.
- A truck tyre is built for heavy loads and long continuous hours. It prioritises structural strength and heat management so it can carry tonnes of cargo day after day without failing.
- A Formula 1 tyre is the opposite: extreme grip and precision for a very narrow operating window. Incredible performance, but only for a handful of laps before the compound is done.
The storage types behave differently itās not all the same
- HDDs rely on a spinning platter and a mechanical arm. Great for long sequential reads/writes, but slow at random access because the arm must physically move each time. In heavy vibration environments (industry) these drives wont last long unless measures are taken
- SATA SSDs use flash memory and can read from multiple locations at once. No moving parts, low latency, and far better at mixed workloads, though flash cells have finite write cycles. yet they often are much more resilient to environmental factors like dust and vibration.
- NVMe connects directly to PCIe lanes, removing the SATA bottleneck. Much higher IOPS and lower latency, ideal for workloads with lots of tiny reads/writes happening constantly.
Quality is a thing too. Cheap road tyres often use more filler and plasticisers, giving less grip and faster wear. Better brands use stronger carcasses and more stable rubber blends. Same idea with flash based storage: TLC vs QLC, controller quality, firmware, and wearālevelling all affect endurance and consistency. Not all SSDs are equal, even if the label looks similar. And just like tyres, the right choice depends on the workload.
- A simple home PC doing browsing and banking works fine on an HDD. SSD/NVMe just adds responsiveness, and whether thatās worth it is a personal call.
- Gamers often choose SSDs for faster loading and texture streaming. Not required, but increasingly desirable.
- A small Virtualmin server hosting a couple of hobby sites can run on HDD or SSD. SSD simply makes mail, logs, and PHP feel snappier.
- A busy server with 30ā50 sites, constant email checks, crawlers, and users hitting pages all day is a different story. That workload generates thousands of tiny operations. HDDs struggle unless you add specialised controllers and caching layers. NVMe gives you the needed IOPS and latency without the complexity, and often ends up cheaper over time.
And the āhypeāā¦ Anywhere money can be made, marketing will push the newest and fastest option. The real challenge is matching the right tool to the right task, understanding the actual strengths of each technology, filtering out the hype, and choosing what genuinely fits the workload rather than what the ads shout the loudest about.
Steven
I think most people here know the technology of different storage media
Did you have to get AI to write that post explaining it?
great quality reply, thanks for the feedback
Steven
You are most welcomed 
BS and marketing are evidently not restricted to companies. There is nothing wrong with NVMe SSD, as shoulders pointed out, and my regular SSDās are working just fine, thank you very much. Drive failure is why there is redundancy and backups, especially in a sever setting.
That is great you have a winning setup. No BS is not restricted to companies, anyone can BS, BUT companies are mostly the ones advertising to the consumer.
Hate to be harsh but anyone running a server for business and does not plan and implement it for redundancy and backups, well they should not be in business.
Backups are as easy as 3-2-1
Totally agree.
I donāt understand how people are not seeing a huge difference. My CrystalDiskInfo benchmarks:
1MB sequential SSD vs. HDD: 557 vs. 71
4KB random SSD vs. HDD: 34 s. 0.5
Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series 256 GB and WDC WD20EURS-63S48Y0 2000 GB, both SATA. Stats for reads, but write numbers showed the same kind of difference.
SSD are much faster, donāt suffer from file fragmentation and NVMe can do up to 4 operations at once.
This may be more about context. Will the user clicking on a link see any obvious/noticeable/meaningful difference? Will you files download faster? Will your email client seem āzippierā?
It is true that my benchmarks are on an aging desktop machine. My intuition is that for a single transaction on a server, the difference would be dwarfed by the network overhead, but under a heavy transaction load, the difference would start to show. And when I search āssd vs hdd performance on a serverā, it looks like all the answers favor SSDs.