Any question answered...

Thinking of moving our portable hard drives over to SSD. Have had a few spinning drives fail on shoots recently so want to minimise repeats of this. Longevity isn't an issue. If we can get 2-3 years from an SSD that's fine. Just can't have it taking a knock and stopping working. Are SSDs the answer?

We've used these religiously since they came out and before then we used the originals (without the ATC casing).

https://cvp.com/product/g-tech_gt-gdevatctb1tb?gclid=CjwKCAjws6jVBRBZEiwAkIfZ2gwpgicbSSHBIMwW6ehJkNoSR-hOnMoL3DdSI_Oex4Eba7NVwSvDORoCrpQQAvD_BwE

We use them mainly as the ev cartridge unplugs and plugs straight into our ev RAIDs which are a big part of our workflow. There are also various ev adaptors for other media (RED mini mag/atomos ssd caddy/firewire/cfast etc. The ev system works great for us and I don't want to ditch that just yet as we've invested a lot into it. However we've had two of the 1TB ATCs fail in the past month (never had one fail before in the years we've had them).

Despite the two failures, I still rate GTech over LaCie etc (many many more Lacie failures in the past). So in terms of SSD I'm looking at either:

https://www.jigsaw24.com/pws/ProductDetails.ice?ProductID=X079AAM

...meaning we can continue to use them in our ev RAID workflow. 1TB coming in at 280+VAT. However I'm not sold on their build quality and we'd end up putting them in the ATC case which means they're bloody massive.

Or:

https://www.jigsaw24.com/pws/ProductDetails.ice?ProductID=X628AAT

Which are tiny and cheaper (250+VAT) and more rugged. Only USB 3.1gen2 which isn't ideal. And more annoyingly no compatibility with our ev workflow. I also don't like the fact that they have rounder surfaces so I couldn't stack them on a shelf but that might just be me and I could always knock up some kind of specific storage solution for them if we got more than 10.

Questions:

1. When's a good time to buy into SSD from a price perspective? Anyone got a good arc showing price drop over time?
   
2. Is it worth going wild and considering SD instead? Though presume read/write times are considerably slower except on super fast (expensive) versions? I think there's a 300mb sandisk but it caps out at 128GB which at £300 cost prohibitive for the terrabytes we'd need. Ok this question is answered.
   
3. Is SSD worth it full stop? Are they really that reliable in comparison to rugged spinning drives? If we bought say a dozen of those small rugged ssds and a couple didn't get used for say 6 months-1 year as we had the others in rotation, would it still have a better chance of working fine compared to a spinning disc that's been sitting gathering dust on a shelf? i.e. is it an urban myth that rotating drives need to be kept spinning regularly to keep them functional?