Re: The choice isn't really about reliability
Depending on what you're doing with it, reliability can become more important and speed isn't always critical. Losing a disk doesn't just mean losing the data on it; I'm sure anyone running a storage business is aware of that and has redundancy. It means the cost in time and money to allocate a replacement disk and add that to the array holding the data. It means an eventual call to a technician to remove the failed hardware and replace it with fresh devices. It means buying replacements faster. There are reasons people care about that.
You don't always need speed, either. In my personal machines, the boot disk is always an SSD because speed is very important there. In my storage server, it's mechanical drives. I can deal with it taking a couple more milliseconds to fetch a file I've moved over there, and if I couldn't, I wouldn't be using a network link anyway. This allows me to have more storage in it than I could afford if it was an all-SSD setup (when I was buying disks, SSDs were running about 4-5 times as expensive per terabyte than HDDs). Although my primary consideration was financial cost, I'd definitely consider reliability more than speed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
