Music collection is typically “write once, read forever”. It’s hard to estimate the lifetime of such read-only SSDs, but it’s measured in decades, if it’s regularly powered on and read entirely. If it’s not powered for years, you’re going to risk data loss due to thermal noise flipping bits randomly beyond the built-in ECC capabilities. If you keep it powered on, you still need to regularly scrub it (i.e. read all data) to force the firmware to fix and write back flipped bits. Some firmwares may do this periodically by themselves, but it’s a black box, so you must do it yourself to be sure.
I wouldn’t recommend relying on a single drive for long-term storage of anything that’s worth more than ~$1000 - neither with SSDs nor HDDs. Freak accidents can happen with any component. You PSU can go rogue and fry your SSD, etc.
The best option is most likely a single local drive with continuous mirroring to a cloud service. The drawback is the ongoing cost of the cloud, and the possibility of partial data loss, because cloud mirroring won’t be instantenous when saving bulk data.
A local RAID1 array is cost-efficient, but doesn’t save you from black-swan events like floods or house fires.
I had a SSD fail not long ago. It was used regularly, but one day I noticed that reading a large file failed. I went into panic mode and stopped using it and attempted to copy everything to a new drive, but copying many of the large files failed. These large files consisted of things like music which had not been edited for years. This sounds like neither of your scenarios - not thermal bit flipping, and not overwriting. How common are failures of this sort?
Frankly, we have no idea. If the manufacturers know, they're not telling us. I've seen dozens of failed SSDs and their failure modes are completely different from rotating disks and almost always lead to complete or significant data loss with little to no warning.
What numbers we have show that failure rates are low, but honestly I would give it another decade or two before using SSD for persistent data storage (of important data without backups to rotating disks). I don't think we're there yet.
I think you're missing that there is no such thing as 'not edited' on a SSD. Data gets moved around by firmware all the time in order to ensure wear leveling is applied equally all over the drive. This is the exact kind of failure you should expect on an SSD.
While backing up to a cloud is good, and gets the data offsite, bear in mind the chance of losing data there.
The primary issue is not the 10 to the minus X failure rate they quote, but the much more likely chance that you will lose access to the data for some reason. For example, the account is hacked, someone closes the account, or the account just deleted/restricted by the provider.
But I’d say it’s unlikely that your local copy and the cloud backup would get destroyed at the same time.
Also, when I said “cloud”, I meant a proper cloud service with an SLA like S3 Glacier, not Google Drive which gets wiped if your Google account is disabled for uploading a YouTube video with background music.
I wouldn’t recommend relying on a single drive for long-term storage of anything that’s worth more than ~$1000 - neither with SSDs nor HDDs. Freak accidents can happen with any component. You PSU can go rogue and fry your SSD, etc.
The best option is most likely a single local drive with continuous mirroring to a cloud service. The drawback is the ongoing cost of the cloud, and the possibility of partial data loss, because cloud mirroring won’t be instantenous when saving bulk data.
A local RAID1 array is cost-efficient, but doesn’t save you from black-swan events like floods or house fires.