I'm perhaps not the best person to ask, but I can share a few things.

Good SSDs can last a really long time, the common killer is write cycles(they can only be written to so many times). Different applications have different behavior when it comes to writes. With a bitcoin node, IIRC the blockchain itself is going to be write-once, meaning once the data is written its not likely to change. Indexes and such may be updated as frequently as a new block is written to the chain however. I don't think that's a lot of write cycles except the original block download. When we are talking concerns for write cycles, we are normally talking about something getting rewritten over and over again, like for example rows in a database that are constantly changing. Swap/virtual memory from the operating system could be another example. There might be some database/indexes for the blockchain, but I doubt they are going to be the amount of writes to cause me concern.

SSDs should generally run cooler than HDD, and provide better performance in general. Also use less power.

Hard drives have a shelf life based on several different things. How long its been spinning. Start count. Stop count. Heat. Perhaps 3-4 years is a good life time for a hard drive. A higher storage hard drive may be slightly more likely to fail due to the required accuracy of the head, as well as (if the storage is consumed) more movement of the heads and such. Also, watch out for SMR drives which I don't recommend.

I would never rely on just one drive, SSDor HDD. Always get two and do a RAID, I recommend ZFS or BTRFS to prevent bit rot. Bits flip more often than people realize. Raid is not a backup, raid can keep you running when eventually one drive does die. All drives eventually die.

Backups: no matter the storage solution, I recommend offline backups of critical data taken regulary. I'm not certain its necessary to backup the blockchain (thousands of nodes are doing that for you already) unless you need it back FAST.


Long story short, I think good quality SSDs are perhaps the way to go for just a bitcoin node where you are concerned about heat, noise, and power consumption. I might have a different answer for databases, or file servers, depending on what's getting stored and how its being written, and how much space you need.

I run two bitcoin nodes, both are on HDD, because I don't care about speed, power, noise, heat, and I've got a good raid setup as well as good backups. I save the SSDs for gaming and higher perf applications instead.