Flash Drives or SSD?

[James105]

So my external HHD died this morning during an operating system update, I do have a back up.

The mac mini I use as a roon server has 4 thunderbolt/USB-C ports and I'm considering buying a couple of thumb drives as apposed to a SSD, just so they sit out of sight.

Question is long term reliability of the flash drives compared to "real" SS drives?

 

[Jasonovich]

So my external HHD died this morning during an operating system update, I do have a back up.

The mac mini I use as a roon server has 4 thunderbolt/USB-C ports and I'm considering buying a couple of thumb drives as apposed to a SSD, just so they sit out of sight.

Question is long term reliability of the flash drives compared to "real" SS drives?

If this question was asked in the PC domain, I would recommend SSD sata or SSD NVME m2, because you get superior read and write access and often greater storage capacity. In the world of PC, data is critical and continuity and reliability is essential.
In the sphere of music reproduction this isn't as critical. USB flash drives or SD cards are cheap, you can buy a couple and copy the same stuff on different drives, if one gets corrupted, you can whip out the other one from the draw.
Personally, I rather have the longevity and storage capacity of SSD any time.
If you're buying USB flash drive, it's best to avoid the generic ones. Stick to Kingston, Scan, Samsung etc.
Don't be swayed by, its 4 gigabytes and only £20.
Often with those, it's formatted in ExFat and you can't change it to NTSL or any other format and they use clever software, you think you have 4 gbs, the properties show this but you find you're having trouble copying beyond 180 mbs. Please avoid the non brand USB flash drives 😊

 

[davidf]

I’ve had more issues with USB/flash drives than I have HDD and SSD drives. Actually very few with the latter.

 

[James105]

I've bought a couple of flash drives one for the mini one as an easy back up they're scandisc I've got quite a few of those I use daily for file transfer so they done a lot of read/write cycles.
My back up disc was a mess lots of "orphaned" songs, different bit rates, multi disc albums split up so I've got a lot of cleaning up to do.

My plan going forward is buy a SSD as a Master in use disc and I'm also adding albums from TIDAL into roon so I'll have alternate copies on hand. Of course there four or five storage boxes as last resort