Replies

I thought I saw somewhere that they have a limited predetermined life span.

In a laptop, this is a no-brainer, SSD all the way. The pre-determined life span of an SSD is quite long with regular usage. Unless you are reWRITING the entire hard drive every day (e.g. you were using the SSD in the laptop to use full backups of large files that change 100% every day), the lifespan is considerably greater than a regular hard drive, which has its own MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). Most regular users perform 90% READS, not WRITES, on their large storage media. In a worst case scenario, the SSD might degrade slightly in performance, but will still run rings around a mechanical hard drive.

If the laptop ever leaves the desk and actually gets moved around (travel, moved between work and home, etc.) that is one more reason to go SSD, as a hard drive is more likely to suffer damage in transit because of the moving parts.

The only other time to consider a mechanical hard drive is if you have huge storage requirements (e.g. 2TB or greater). That is not the case for mainstream laptop users.