SSDs boot a lot faster than HDs. But they probably won’t last as long, and generally there is far less on-board storage. If you are happy giving your data to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or one of the lesser ‘cloud’ competitors, then SSD is probably superior. If you want to keep your data close to home, get a HD and an external HD for backup.
The ideal setup would be a blended system - SSD for boot and programs, HD for data storage.
Get your self a pencil and some paper...
SSD’s are definitely the way to go. Backups are important. So is off site storage of backups.
It’s true SSD’s have a finite life. But so do hard drives and every other piece of computer equipment. The chances are very good the SSD will outlast the laptop.
I have a closet full of hard drives I have taken out of systems upgraded to a SSD.
Buy good, solid SSD’s from a reputable manufacturer. I recommend Samsung.
Surveillance systems at least used to use heavier-duty hard drives, ten year warranty.
They made a big deal out of SSD limits to reads and writes when they first came out, but upon using them you quickly realize you will toss the laptop before having to change drives. Go with SSD. Most people won't keep their laptop over 3-5 years and then it's usually not run 24/7/365.
SSDs have come a long way, baby!
and the only ones to buy are the Samsung EVO 860 with 5 year warranty:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0781Z7Y3S/ref=twister_B07P5VF5TL?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
or
Samsung EVO 850 Pro series with 10 year warranty (for big bucks and probably overkill):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LF10KTO/ref=twister_B01MUGQA4A?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
the reason for samsung is that the interal SSD OS that juggles sector usage to keep any given sector from going dead from over-usage is the most important factor in SSD technology, and the samsung SSD internal OS is the most reliable in the biz ... the reason the SSD internal OS is so important is if an SSD internal OS crashes, all data is instantly lost forever ...
at any rate, i’ve installed hundreds of the EVO 860s and will never use a mechanical drive ever again, because:
1. Samsung SSDs are now more reliable than mechanical HDs.
2. SSDs are essentially drop proof.
3. SSDs Consume way less power and produce way less heat mechanical HDs.
4. and best of all, SSDs are WAY, WAY faster than mechanical HDs.
1
Yes, I’m under the impression that your original write up is exactly backwards...
SSD is bigger and more reliable. Not so susceptible to being bumped and corrupted. Longer lasting, fewer moving parts.
HDD is faster, but less reliable and shorter life because of moving parts. Most people put their boot files and OS on the HDD for faster start, but they save all data to the SSD.
Do I have it backwards?
Ive seen reports where usable data has been extracted from magnetic media that was over written up to seven times by new data, or deeply magnetically erased.
Data also can be disturbed on magnetic drives by external magnetic means SSDs store data by flipping digital switches, from zero to one. It is much easier to erase a SSD so data that should NOT be recovered cannot be recovered by surreptitious means. There are no ghost images of an on state left to find when a location has been switched to off, especially remnants of long past switching. While it is still true that most erasure is done merely by marking locations as available, real erasure, where every memory location is either zeroed or randomized, truly works on an SSD, so you know the data/images/whatever that was in those files is gone forever.
With a HDD, the only assured method of guaranteeing data destruction is destroying the platters, along with the magnetic media on which the data is stored, beyond all possible recovery. Holes are not sufficient, breaking in half, nope! Destroyed, dissolved, burned, melted, fried, torched! That’ll do it. Nothing less.
MTBF — MTBF (mean time between failures) is a measure of how reliable a hardware product or component is over its expected lifetime. For most components, the measure is typically in thousands or even tens of thousands of hours between failures. For example, a hard disk drive may have a mean time between failures of 300,000 hours, while an SSD might have 1.5 million hours.This doesn’t mean that your SSD will last that many hours, what it means is, given a sample set of that model of SSD, errors will occur at a certain rate. A 1.2 million hour MTBF means that if the drive is used at an average of 8 hours a day, a sample size of 1,000 SSDs would be expected to have one failure every 150 days, or about twice a year.
More detail at the source:How reliable are SSDs? BackBlaze.com.
From another source, How Long Do SSDs Really last? — OnTrack.com, even more actual experimental data from 2018 that shoul allay your fears:
Usually, manufacturers give an estimate with the so-called terabyte(s) written (TBW)– especially when it comes to enterprise SSDs, but also for consumer versions. Because of the fact that by using Wear-Leveling the data will be distributed evenly over all cells, this figure is supposed to tell how much data can be really written in total on all cells inside the storage chips and over the whole life span.A typical TBW figure for a 250 GB SSD lies between 60 and 150 terabytes written. That means: To get over a guaranteed TBW of 70, a user would have to write 190(!) GB daily over a period of one year (In other words, to fill two thirds of the SSD with new data every day). In a consumer environment this is highly unlikely.
Samsung states that their Samsung SSD 850 PRO SATA, with a capacity of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 or 1 TB, is “built to handle 150 terabytes written (TBW), which equates to a 40 GB daily read/write workload over a ten-year period.” Samsung even promises that the product is “withstanding up to 600 terabytes written (TBW).”
A normal office user writes approximately between 10 and 35 GB on a normal day. Even if one raises this amount up to 40 GB, it means that they could write (and only write) more than almost 5 years until they reach the 70 TBW limit.
SSD lifespan even longer than promised
The good news: These manufacturer figures are even lower than the real TBWs detected in a long-term test conducted by Germany´s most respected IT and Computer magazine c´t and the Heise publishing company. In the magazine´s test, they bought two SSDs each of the 12 most popular products available in 2016 and tested those for one year until the end of June 2017. The SSDs that were tested were OCZ TR150, Crucial BX 200, Samsung 750 Evo, Samsung 850 Pro, SanDisk Extreme Pro, and SanDisk Ultra II.
The experts from the magazine wrote bits of data on the SSDs using a special tool programmed by one of their experts to both analyze the performance as well as to constantly fill the disks with data.
The outcome of the tests conducted were astonishing: All of the drives tested were able to write more data than what was promised by the producer. Even cheaper drives were able to write more data than promised: The Crucial BX 200 drives were able to write 187 TB and 280 TB – that is more than 2.5 times the figure promised.
One of the Samsung SSD 850 PRO drives achieved a figure of 9.1 petabytes of data written! That’s 60 times the TBW figure Samsung promises on their data sheets. The other Samsung product – the Samsung SSD 750 Evo – was able to write 1.2 petabytes of data, which equals (in theory) to more than 80 years of constant writing. However, the pro models showed why their price is higher: None of them did write less than 2.2 Petabyte of data.
The test clearly proves that the fear of a limited life span is highly exaggerated in most aspects. But there are other threats.
SSDs have only gotten better in the two years since this study was completed. We replaced the HHDs in my office with SSDs except in the RAID arrays and rejuvenated every computer in the place!
Bartles and Jaymes?
Unless there is some reason to, like price being a barrier, I cannot think of a single reason to go with a physical hard drive and not SSD.
Yes SSD has a “limited” lifespan, but so do physical hard drives. Eventually they wear out too.
You will get shorter battery life and slower performance out of physical drives.. so unless you really have a penny pinching need there is zero reason to try to justify saving a few bucks on the purchase price... any savings will be lost many times over in the performance slowdown.. doesn’t take much time to easily make up a few hundred bucks in developer time.
Tech Ping
They also make Solid-State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) Models (raid 0)
or
Portable 1TB SSD, Bus-Powered, Multi-Interface Storage Solution, Mac / PC / USB 3.0 & 2.0 / FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 Backwards Compatible)
should you wish to boot off external drive, leaving your PC intact.
Thinking that I will be room temperature before this gives out.
Thinking of swapping out my Apple Time machine hard drive for an ssd as well.
Unless you are keeping them forever, the SSD drives will outlive the laptops. I run them in my home tower PCs as well. The speed boost is very substantial. I do you mechanical hard drives for large scale storage of data files, but the Os is always on an SSD. The performance difference is outstanding.
Go with SSD and use a usb drive or external for back up of sensitive files.
I’m planning to go SSD soon, already have over 150,000 pictures on an external 1.5 TB drive. I use smaller, up to 228 gb usb drives for carry around stuff, songs for band etc.
The SSD will last long enough you’ll probably replace the laptop sooner...
[[ I am investigating whether to purchase new solid state hard]]
Yes, absolutely- immediate speed upgrade-
MTBF on SSDs is absurdly long and getting longer every year. Meanwhile, M.2 disks are becoming more fashionable and boast astronomically better performance than even SSDs.
Bottom line: old school spinning disk should be relegated to 3rd or 4th tier data center operations like near-state backups or bulk storage (>100 TB). For consumer electronics, M.2 is the current standard bearer, and SSD is a comparable second for performance.