Should I get my laptop a Solid State Hard Drive?

Well, your browser is hungry because you have FIFTY FIVE TABS OPEN!

There cannot possibly be a legitimate need for that that couldn’t be handled in a better way!

Unless, of course, your watching porn, in which you’ll invariably finish around tab 4, and stare in shame and disgust at habits just moments before you were ravenous about.

Not speaking from personal experience, of course.

Every 3 years?! Your computer replacement budget is far more robust than mine.
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Yeah, and you must be buying awful computers. I buy a new computer every 6-8 years, and I keep the old ones as ancillary /backup machines and to run antiquated software as need be. I’ve had a handful of HD failures over the years but that’s what backups are for. Never had a computer get to the point that it was chock-full of wearing-out parts the way old cars get sometimes; honestly the only reason I’ve retired them is obsolescence, lack of ability to do things I needed to be able to do.

I call ~100 MB a tab memory hungry.

I keep telling this to my wife. She always has dozens upon dozens of browser tabs open, then complains when her machine slows to a crawl.

TSR? Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time. ::stares wistfully into distance::
(it means “Terminate and Stay Resident”, kids. A utility application that ran alongside your primary application, in the days before true multitasking. Ask your granddad about it, but brace yourselves for tales of CONFIG.SYS.)

I have replaced my platter based hard drives with SSDs in my two main notebooks. Boot times are much faster, however, differences in real world operating speed is negligible vs platter drives once programs are loaded into memory. So yes there is a speed boost, but it’s on the front end and if you rarely re-boot your PC you are not going to notice much of real world difference in overall responsiveness unless you are moving lots of files around constantly.

The main utility of the SSD (to you) will be shock resistance if you are rough on them.

On a 3 year old+ notebook i would not spend more than what it takes to get a 128 gig drive. You can off load data files onto a big thumbdrive or external drive.
Backup everything, SSD drives may be solid state but they still fail occasionally just like platter based drives.

How occasionally…? If I’m plunking down $500, I want it to last for at least 5 years…O.o

Industry failure quotes for HDDs under warranty are about 5% and for SSDs under warranty at about 1.5%. There are many SSD users that claim this 1.5% number is complete BS nonsense and that failure rates are almost identical to HDDs at around 5%. In SSD some brands have much higher failure rates than others. Speed difference between SSD drives are negligible. The Samsung Pro line is well regarded for being reliable. OCZ brand is noted for being unreliable.

One slightly advantage of HDD failure modes is that the drive will often give you a warning via noise if it’s getting wonky and you can sometimes pull your data off in times or after the fact, with SSDs there is no warning and once it’s dead the data is generally non-recoverable.

I did and I probably won’t do it again unless they have come down in price and gone up in capacity a lot. Mine is 128GB and I am just running out of space. And I don’t reboot often enough (every couple weeks) to make it worth my while. My sysop suggests putting my data files on an external HD and leave the programs on the SSD. But I need more wires coming out of my computer like a hole in the head.

Obviously opinions differ and I guess it depends on how you work. But give me a computer with at least a TB drive and a load of memory. Oh, and I don’t have many audio files or any video files.

I would have to put all my iTunes stuff onto a desktop computer, then there would be little in terms of disk space left.

I shut off my laptop in between classes, and basically any time I move in between classes. I used to just put it into sleep, but then one day my laptop turned itself on inside my neoprene sleeve (later found out there a chip on the hinge that made it think it was open). This melted the mainboard, and I’ve been paranoid ever since. So yes. I shut down and turn on maybe…4-5 times a day?