Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2026

explore alternative technolo gies to meet their DR objec tives. In some cases, media such as disk, tape, or even refurbished SSDs may again find new roles in their envi ronment. In other cases, orga nizations may want to utilize software they already own to meet these needs. Disk and Tape not Dead Yet Many organizations started using only SSDs for primary storage and only hard disk drives (HDDs) for secondary storage for both performance and cost reasons. SSDs per formed significantly better than HDDs while HDDs offered similar performance benefits over tape. While SSDs cost more than HDDs and HDDs cost more than tape, their per formance benefits outweighed their respective costs. While the performance delta between SSDs, HDDs,

and tape remains the same, the cost delta has widened signifi cantly. Technology providers now report SSDs once again cost as much as 20 times more than HDDs. The price gap between HDDs and tape has also similarly widened. As a result, organizations may find they may need to expand their use of disk and perhaps even tape. This adop tion does not mean they neces sarily need to abandon using SSDs in production or HDDs in secondary storage. Rather, they can deploy hybrid storage solutions which use both SSDs and HDDs in their production servers and storage systems. These solu tions keep the most active data on SSDs and tier older or less active data to HDDs. Similarly, for external sec ondary storage, organizations can possibly use HDD-based

systems as backup targets and for fast backups and restores. These HDD storage systems may then offer the option to tier older backups to cloud storage or tape. This configu ration permits organizations to meet their more aggressive backup and recovery require ments. They can then tier backups to lower cost media to meet their compliance or reten tion requirements. Life Left in Old SSDs Those organizations that still want or need SSDs but cannot afford them may still have a path forward. One technology provider recently shared, many SSDs on the sec ondary market still have lots of life left in them. Unlike HDDs, SSDs have no moving parts. So, one cannot necessarily measure the life of an SSD by its age. Rather, one determines the

lifespan of an SSD by its usage or wear life. SSDs only experi ence “wear” when applications write to them, not when appli cations read from them. As a result, SSDs which were infre quently written to when ini tially deployed may still have significant life left in them. Before using SSDs avail able on the secondary market, organizations should verify at least two technical steps have occurred. n First, verify the reseller of the secondary market SSDs wiped the SSDs to remove all data. n Second, verify how much wear life remains on each refurbished SSD as remaining wear life will vary. Software exists that resellers

can use to determine and document the remaining wear life of each SSD.

28 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SUMMER 2026