Analyzing the total cost of ownership when it comes to deciding whether to upgrade a Hard Disk Drive to a Solid State Drive centers on two important questions.

The key reliability issue of a Hard Disk Drive is that failures are usually not predictable, so users can’t really prepare for the drive’s failure and back up their data, or schedule replacement of the drive. Solid State Drives have a very low rate of unpredicted failures. They have a specified life time, as do all Flash based storage solutions, which is usually given in TBW, and users can track at any time how much longer their SSD will last. Another added benefit is that at the end of the SSD’s life time, the drive will fail, but only write access will be blocked. This means data can still be read out for the specified data retention period enabling the user to retain important data. The end result means applications utilizing a Solid State Drive storage solution have significant advantages in reliability, system efficiency, data integrity, and system maintenance.