No. Premium flash (Write Endurance optimized flash) is far far far superior to HDD's for endurance and reliability. And modern flash controllers are far better

No. Premium flash (Write Endurance optimized flash) is far far far superior to HDD's for endurance and reliability. And modern flash controllers are far better at providing granular and detailed health statistics of cells/devices and allowing you to recover data from failing devices as well as far far faster at rebuilding or recovering data for array rebuilds/resilvers. In the context of flash replacing HDD's, HDD's have already been regulated to Write Few, Read Many (WFRM), or even Write Once, Read Many (WORM) usecases, and flash has largely replaced spinners where write endurance is an important feature. This is true for consumers and enterprise. As such, a low write endurance flash drive isn't necessarily an inherent flaw. You have to be mindful that you can't just drop it into your databases as a hot spare (not if you expect good results anyway), but similar special use considerations are made for SMR spinners, so that's not exactly an atypical restriction, and is a flaw that still heavily favors flash. Technically you can probably do more writes to an HDD than you could a 100 P/E cycle Endurance flash drive (that's 1/10th the endurance of a typical QLC NAND flash cell), but the HDD will be orders of magnitude slower and cost you several times as much in electricity just to idle, not to mention under load (again, we're talking capacious flash, not NVMe speed demons that suck down power). Given the usecase in question is specifically in scenarios where writes are already severely limited, the reduced write endurance of such NAND cells isn't really a drawback, especially given how much better they are at providing granular drive and cell health data to monitor device and array health, and how much faster/easier it is to do rebuilds/recovery with flash than spinning rust. EDIT: To quantify how good flash is these days: Nearly all consumer flash and most non high-endurance enterprise flash drives typically have 0.5-1 DWPD of endurance. Entry level QLC flash (eg samsung 870 QVO) can be as low as 0.3 DWPD [0] but that's still pretty good compared to HDD's. DWPD Means that if you have a 1TB drive, you can write 500GB to 1TB everyday to that drive for 5 years before the drive fails. This is an MTBF, not a minimum lifespan, so YMMV but that's still very good. [1] Meanwhile, HDD's are too slow to even do 1DWPD for the 20TB and up capacities, period. (keep in mind throughput for spinning disk degrades as physical data as allocated closer to the inner ring of the platter, so those >200MBps seq figures are unrealistic for full disk writes unless you plan to short stroke your drive which massively reduces capacity). And if it's SMR? lol. Even if you do short stroke them to give them the best possible chance, you're looking at about 15TBs maximum written per day theoretical for the best 3.5" spinners out there. Additionally, the main impetus for spinning disk failure is mechanical, not degradation of write medium like in flash, so while it's hard to do apples to apples testing, if your real world write workload works out to less than half a total disk per day, even basic bitch bargain bin flash that sabrent scraped off samsungs fab floor will last you the better part of a decade in 24/7 use. Let's not forget that HDD's will continue to degrade at idle by virtue of being mechanical, whereas the SSD will suffer very limited if any degradation in the same idle case. High End Consumer/Entry level enterprise flash is 1-3DWPD. [2] High Endurance enterprise flash is 5-10DWPD. [3] The Endurance champion however is 100DWPD [4] TL;DR: So setting money aside, HDD's really only beat SSD's (even cheap QLC ones) in small capacity (<10TB) usecases. For a lot of consumers, that makes HDD's an easy pick, especially considering HDD's are still cheaper per teraybte typically. Otherwise, SSD's are better in pretty much everyway except for price, and SSD's are improving far faster than HDD's on that front as well. [0] Samsung 870 QVO: https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/internal-ssd/870qvo/ https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/internal-... [1] Micron/Crucial MX500: https://www.crucial.com/ssd/mx500/CT2000MX500SSD1 https://www.crucial.com/ssd/mx500/CT2000MX500SSD1 [2] Samsung 980 Pro: https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/internal-ssd/980pro/ https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/internal-... [3] HGST SS530: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/data-center-drives/ultrastar-ssd-sas-series/data-sheet-ultrastar-dc-ss530.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... [4] Intel Optane P5800X: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/201840/intel-optane-ssd-dc-p5800x-series-3-2tb-2-5in-pcie-x4-3d-xpoint.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/201840/...