> Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did.

> And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me.

I'm pretty sure you're cherry-picking the data you're willing to look at. It's definitely not true that any datacenter ever avoids SSDs due to worries about drive failure rates. These days, high-end consumer or enterprise SSDs are warrantied to survive more writes than it is physically possible to send to a hard drive during the same 5-year span. Flash memory write endurance stopped being a serious concern by the time consumer SSDs reached capacities that made them sufficient for use as the sole storage device in a mainstream laptop.

Controller/firmware bugs are the only source of SSD failure that you have a non-negligible chance of encountering in the wild, but the rate of such failures is very small, especially if you stick to the major reputable SSD brands. And that's in the consumer market where the vendors aren't specifically validating each SSD model with your specific servers before you put anything into production.