Someone told me that USB drives are basically batteries, and have a shelf life of maybe, 10 years. Same with SSD? This source is a professional photographer, and he says that's why recordable CDs and DVDs are better for important storage. Just passing on what I heard.

I know things have changed when it comes to storage, but back in the late 90s I worked for EMC the company that manufactured Coca Cola sized machine hard drive storage units. These large devices were mostly used by banks, stock exchanges and other large businesses that need umpteen terabytes of hard drive storage space. Part of my job with a team while building the units involved testing the hard drives some of the devices held 270 separate hard drives. We’d test them in heated chambers of 110 degrees F, in refrigerated chambers at 40 degrees and also at room temperature. On any given day many hard drives would fail, but that was the point to fail any weak links. Management wanted to be sure once the product was delivered that any further failure rate would be very low.

I haven’t the vaguest idea what they are installing in the units today but I’m sure they must be SSDs.

The time is here already. There are next gen SSD "drives" already selling, as this M.2 SSD pictured here. They are blazing fast, like reading directly from RAM memory. You can already get them up to 2TB in size. Also newest high performance laptops are fitted with M.2. So yes, spinning disks are close to extinction. I have none on any of my PCs anymore.

The lifetime of solid state storage revolves around the rate of degradation of the storage structure and that depends on usage; there is a limit to how many times you can turn a bit on or off. This number is increasing all the time and for normal users and computers is sufficiently large as to be ignored.

"Enterprise" standard solid state discs now routinely have 5 year warranty and they get hit at a far higher rate that anything we will throw at them.

You are still going to get failures, **** happens, but I am not aware that modern SSDs are any more prone to failure than mechanical hard discs.

I'd advise your photographer friend that use of CDs or DVDs for long term storage is not any more secure, they degrade over time even when sat on a shelf. This can be mitigate by controlling temperate and humidity - bit I'd feel just as happy with a decent brand USB or SSD device.

Member pjd posted a link at PSR Tutorial Forum with some more Genos info.

http://sandsoftwaresound.net/genos-news-from-germany/

Quote from info regarding "HD / SSD":

"Internal file storage

Genos has no internal hard drive and no SSD drive. Hard drives are vulnerable to fairure due to their mechanics. The moving parts in a hard drive also affect the lifetime of a hard drive. There is a solid-state user memory (= Flash ROM) with 58 GB of memory.

[People are having a hard time getting their minds around this one. Wot? No hard drive, no SSD? What is it? Yamaha have cleverly used the flash memory attached to one of the tone generators as explained in my post. Yes, it’s flash, but it will be a heck of lot faster than USB flash. Trust me.]"
End quote.