It is said solid state hard drive is more durable because it doesn't have any moving parts. In other words, why, spinning drive with moving parts is less durable? Assume that they never drop from height or get damaged, does a moving part of any device fail more easily? What is the reason behind?

One reason is that the moving parts of a device accelerate thus creating internal tensions. 

45 minutes ago, kenny1999 said:

It is said solid state hard drive is more durable because it doesn't have any moving parts. In other words, why, spinning drive with moving parts is less durable? Assume that they never drop from height or get damaged, does a moving part of any device fail more easily? What is the reason behind?

 

40 minutes ago, Genady said:

One reason is that the moving parts of a device accelerate thus creating internal tensions. 

 

Mechanical wear by friction and by impact against the end stops is by far the biggest culprit, because such processes are much faster than long term deterioration.

Components are normally (or should be) made of materials that can resist the acceleration/deceleration stresses they encounter in normal operation.

 

On the other hand,charge migration  with the extremely small feature size, and multi-level cells, of modern SSDs, necessitating cell redundancies, and various error correction algorithms for on-the-fly swapping of failed cells, makes the premise that SSDs are more durable than spinning magnetic drives questionable.

Current consumer SSDs use quad level cells to store 16 bits of information per cell, and are extremely prone to charge migration.
Enterprise SSDs, used in data centers, are usually restricted to 2 level cells, and are much more expensive.
 

Edited December 12, 20223 yr by MigL

That's what I understand, although my knowledge is pretty basic. If I want to store stuff long-term for reference purposes, I put it on a spinning hard disk. What I'm not sure of though, is how long a hard disk will keep it's boot info safe. I have had hard disks lose it and need reformatting, if left unused for a long period. Maybe there is flash memory used at start-up that can leak away.

Fortunately, you can usually recover data after formatting, if it's precious. But backing up is a better bet.

If I want info to be constantly available, and continually updated, then an SSD is ideal. 

And of course, for laptops and phones, that get bumped and dropped, SSD is miles better. 

48 minutes ago, mistermack said:

That's what I understand, although my knowledge is pretty basic. If I want to store stuff long-term for reference purposes, I put it on a spinning hard disk. What I'm not sure of though, is how long a hard disk will keep it's boot info safe. I have had hard disks lose it and need reformatting, if left unused for a long period. Maybe there is flash memory used at start-up that can leak away.

Fortunately, you can usually recover data after formatting, if it's precious. But backing up is a better bet.

If I want info to be constantly available, and continually updated, then an SSD is ideal. 

And of course, for laptops and phones, that get bumped and dropped, SSD is miles better. 

Put  archival copies on devices that won't get accessed much.

2 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Put  archival copies on devices that won't get accessed much.

That's what I do, at the moment. I archive onto a large capacity magnetic disk, which I then remove and store. The theory being that the disk will last longer, if it's not constantly powered up and spinning. But I have had hard disks lose their formatting, if not used for a long period. Maybe by coincidence, the were Hitachi disks. Maybe they have a weakness.

You can get your data back (or most of it) by formatting the disk again, and running Recuva, or some other data retrieval software, but it's long winded, and you don't always get everything.

What would be great, would be a formatting utility that doesn't wipe the existing file system, but just restores the boot system files, so that you can access what was on the disk straight away. Maybe there is something like that out there. I haven't come across it though.

When the HDD has to stop, the header has to land somewhere, this is header-landing-zone. https://www.google.com/search?q=hard+drives+landing+zone

When there is an accidental shutdown of the computer without properly shutting down the computer (e.g., a power failure), or when you have a hard drive in your laptop and are moving it, the head will hit some random spot on the platter and may cause damage. Modern HDDs are less prone to damage than older designs (>= 20-30 years old), which could not survive any single move without some damage.

A laptop with an SSD, you can move it any way you want without worrying about damaging the platters.