Going back to my first post on the thread, and trying to ignore the less-than useful followup by some, allow me to explain a little more. You can easily check this out for yourself. ....

SSD life is rated in numbers of writes to the memory chips in it. It doesn't mechanically fail like a spinning hard drive does, but it starts to fail in reliability. Operations that cause a lot of moving/deleting/adding of data add to the "writes" total.

That's why defragmenting of an SSD should absolutely not be done, because an SSD does not benefit from it the way a spinning drive does and defragging by design involves a tremendous amount of rewriting data to new locations.

It's also why an SSD is best used for the operating system and application installations, which don't get "changed" much in operation, while keeping data that is manipulated a lot on conventional hard drives. Sure, if you are just filing-away photos or anything else on an SSD for storage only without repeated modification, you're not doing much "writing" after the initial process. But adding/deleting/editing/modifying files creates lots of "writes".

And yes, an SSD can fail, suddenly or gradually, just as a hard drive can. So that is not a distinguishing trait between the two. Benefit of an SSD is if you have the system and programs installed on an SSD you benefit from faster booting and operation of the "system (Windows, Mac, Linux)". And you don't need a huge SSD to hold the OS and applications. Hard drive capacity is cheaper than SSD capacity for data STORAGE.

I have multiple Windows and Linux computers with 120 and 250 GB SSDs, which only contain the OS and many programs, and they don't begin to fill the SSDs. All of my many years of accumulated data is on a network-attached-storage (NAS) hard drive, which is backed-up regularly to additional hard drives.

External drive is a good idea, but NOT an SSD solid-state drive. An SSD should only be used as a system drive...operating system and applications. Must be a rotating-platter hard drive. Size-wise, there aren't "small" ones readily available anymore, so 1 TB (Terabyte)-on-up is what you'll see. Also consider strongly backing-up your storage drive regularly to insure against drive-failure loss of all your data. So, buy TWO external drives.
You can even buy external hard drive enclosures and fill them with whatever brand of drive you want. There are only three manufacturers anymore, and one is just as good as another...Seagate (includes Maxtor and Samsung), Western Digital (includes HGST), Toshiba.

Modern SSDs have a max number of write cycles far in excess of any personal use - it’s just a non-issue with modern drives. Additionally, image files are typically written and read a few times even when editing. Note that many modern laptops use only SSDs for OS, Aps and data. Another advantage, in addition to speed, for an external drive is ruggedness. While they do fail (but not often), they are largely immune to to shock, vibration and moisture. Perhaps not a big deal (unless you knock it off your desk) for a stationary drive, but a very useful attribute if you need portability.

Finally, as to reliability, we do not have as much data on large arrays of SSDs as we do HDs simply because of cost - large data centers are concerned with $/TB and employ redundancy to mitigate HD failures, but non-mechanical drives are inherently more reliable than mechanical devices. How many CPU or memory failures have you experienced compared to HD failures? Not even in the same league. HDs have had a great run, from the 10MB drives of the early 80s to the 8TB drives of today at a fraction of the original price, but they are being rapidly replaced with SSDs, which are the future of storage.

TriX, have you seen anything authoritative just recently that rebutts what Wikipedia has to say about using SSDs for long term storage as I posted on page 2 of this thread and that everyone ignored. Makes me wonder how many people have me on "Ignore." Here's my previous post from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#SSD_reliability_and_failure_modes, third paragraph from the top:

About using SSDs for long-term storage, from Wikipedia:

"As of 2017, most SSDs use 3D TLC NAND-based flash memory, which is a type of non-volatile memory that retains data when power is lost. For applications requiring fast access but not necessarily data persistence after power loss, SSDs may be constructed from random-access memory (RAM). Such devices may employ batteries as integrated power sources to retain data for a certain amount of time after external power is lost.[4]

However, all SSDs still store data in electrical charges, which slowly leak over time if left without power. This causes worn out drives (that have exceeded their endurance rating) to start losing data typically after one (if stored at 30 °C) to two (at 25 °C) years in storage; for new drives it takes longer. [7] Therefore, SSDs are not suited for archival purposes."