[toomuchtodo]

I need citations that mechanical drives will fail from shock or magnetic fields? I'm not going to waste my time googling references for that.

> Most of planet earth relies primarily on magnetic storage including people outside the data center.

Right. And I'm arguing SSDs are sturdier in that regard when not safe in a chassis somewhere. SSDs can withstand higher shock forces, have no glass platters or mechanical arms that can contact each other, and are not affected by magnetic fields.

[Tiksi]

It takes quite a bit of shock force [1] and a pretty insane magnetic field [2] to damage rust.

Also you could buy 2 6tb hdds [3] for the price of that single ssd and mirror them for another level of redundancy, so in my book they come out way ahead of ssds and cloud storage for backup/archival purposes.

1: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a-sturdy-companion,758-2...

2: http://superuser.com/questions/568336/what-is-the-tolerable-...

3: https://smile.amazon.com/Marshal-7200RPM-Internal-MAL36000NS...