5-6 years would be a very long time for a physical disk to last in a laptop.
Yup, that was my thought too. And in any event, surely SSD technology has come a long way in that time.
IMHO, SSD is much better for a laptop. They get bumped and moved around while running. This can cause a spinning disk problems.
And, for my self for a laptop SSD is the only way to go. At least a few years ago, spinning disk had a problem with altitude because of the thinner density air. It uses the air as a cushion between the reader head and the disk.
If I recall, a spinning disk is made to work at the cabin pressure of an airplane. The cabin is pressurized to about 7,000 feet. Spinning disk works fine for me on a desktop, but not for a laptop. I live at 11,200 feet.
An odd little factoid that will affect very few people, but there it is. I’m sticking with SSD.
I concur that an SSD makes a lot of sense in a laptop because of the sensitivity of conventional hard drives to being bumped – it’s nice to have a laptop that’s basically all solid state, except for the CD/DVD drive if it even has one. I’ve known more than one HDD that has gone bad, but never an SSD. And my recollection of a longevity test on Intel SSDs is consistent with what was mentioned upthread – despite the theoretical limited write cycles, in practice they last for the life of the machine.
Their use in desktops is less obvious, but they’re good for performance gains on the OS and paging drive. When I wanted to install Windows 7 as an additional OS on one of my desktops, instead of fritzing around with dual-boot configurations and eating up disk space, I just popped in an inexpensive SSD and installed all the Win 7 specific stuff on that. It takes up almost no space and generates almost no heat, yet it supports an entire computing environment, and I can dual boot to it through the BIOS. And man, it’s fast. I should have timed how long it took to install Windows 7. It was mere minutes.
Not always. Windows-10 takes less disk space than Windows-7 or 8.
SSD is IMHO a no-brainer for a laptop, and very very hard to argue against as the prime disk for any machine.
What is an important change, one that is finally seeping into the main consciousness, is that your laptop, and even preferably your desktop, should be thought of as a cache for your data. Your actual real prime data should be somewhere where you are totally happy it is secure from all bad things. Which include: disk failures, fire, theft, ransomware, and your laptop being run over by a bus.
The right answer is to get your data storage organised so that if at any time your laptop ceases to exist, all you have to do is buy a new one, and then point it at your data repository, at which point it loads itself with the minimum amount of stuff you need to proceed working or playing.
The performance difference between an SSD and spinning rust is silly. Replacing an HD with an SSD in an old computer yields such a huge performance lift that it is probably a major reason for the slowdown in sales of new computers. The question should really be, “is there any reason not to use an SSD?”.
The “price point” issue regarding SSDs is interesting.
I remember my first replacement HD for my PC was over $300 and had a whopping 120 megabytes. And I was happy to have it. The old disk was 20MB and sloooow.
But the idea of shelling out $300 for a 1TB SSD seems ridiculous to me now.
It probably depends on how you use your laptop, though. My current laptop almost never even leaves my desk, and on the maybe three occasions when it did, I put it in standby, closed it up, and set it up on a different desk before starting it back up. I actually wanted a desktop, except that when I bought it, the laptop was actually cheaper. So for me, the jostling isn’t really a consideration. And when I got this computer, I went for the biggest hard drive I could, just because it’s such a nuisance to swap out a hard drive in a laptop. Now, if I were getting a tower, in that case I probably would get an SSD, because in a tower you have the luxury of space for multiple drives, and so I could get an SSD just big enough for my OS plus a comfortably-roomy disc for my data.
And I still don’t trust this move to cloud-everything. There was a reason why we matured past the mainframe-and-dumb-terminal model. Why are we going back to it?
I try not to buy a spinning HD anymore. My home laptops are all SSD. My home desktop is SSD startup with HD data.
My office PC is SSD with a mirrored SSD network drive to share with co-workers.
My SQL server is SSD startup disk with 4 500GB SSD RAID 0+1. Expensive but oh so fast and redundant.
My co-workers and I are impatient people and don’t like to wait on spinning disks.
Added Nostalgia: Back in my ancient corporate life I got the boss to buy me some external storage for my 64K IBM PC. When I ordered the Tallgrass hard drive it cost $4500 for 20MB. But prices were plummeting rapidly so I got a price break and only had to pay $2300 for the 20MB unit.
Because many, many people now create, edit, and consume their data on devices with “disk” sizes in the tens of gigabytes or less–many more people than even own laptops. This is particularly true in parts of the world where the computing revolution more or less skipped the “personal computer” era and went straight to the “mobile device” one.
I agree, although it’s somewhat more like the traditional client/server model than the mainframe-and-dumb-terminal model. I particularly dislike the terminology, because it implies that “the cloud” is some terrific new paradigm, whereas the basic idea has been around since at least the early 70s when Xerox PARC invented the Ethernet and ushered in practical client/server computing. There’s no such physical thing as a “cloud”, except the thing in the sky that rain comes out of. What there is, is one or more servers to which you have relinquished storage and/or computing functionality, and you are consequently dependent both on the servers and the intervening wide-area network, and implicitly on the adequate performance thereof, to be able to do useful things. It’s traditional old client/server except you’ve got a (potentially slow or flaky) WAN instead of a high-bandwidth LAN between you and the server.
The key word is “consume”. Mobile devices are almost exclusively for data presentation and not full-blown computing. Going back to the paradigm I mentioned above, for the most part they are not so much client/server as “thin client” – i.e.- they have advanced presentation technology (browsers, media players, etc.) but they’re rarely used for programming, content creation, or other traditional computing functions. Whereas if you have a “real” computer, you can load it with large amounts of storage for practically free.
The ideal solution is to run your applications and O/S from an SSD and put all you storage on a spinning hard drive. I saw Newegg recently had 10tb spinning hard drives for under $300 about a week ago, so set a price alert with Newegg for the kind of drive you want
Even then, an SSD gives you a substantial performance improvement, especially boot up & software startup time. Though of course, if it’s a typical laptop with one 2.5 inch bay and no mSATA or M2 slot, you may have to choose between a large HDD and a smaller SSD. (There are hybrid drives but it’s not always available as an option).
Cloud computing is very different from server/client. With modern cloud systems, the data you are working on is stored or cached locally. The software is running locally too. The data is merely being synchronized with the server in the background. It’s the best of both worlds (standalone system vs dumb terminal). And it’s becoming popular because internet connection is now ubiquitous.
…in the US. That is very much not true in much of the world, and even in the US photos and video creation (which are both space-consuming) is largely a mobile activity.
The old view of personal computing, the one that Microsoft believed in for so long that it pretty much doomed the company, was that everyone had their own personal computer. One person, one computer. Steve Jobs had this attitude in the very early days of the Mac as well. Be he got smart quickly. The other Steve didn’t. Which is why MS have lost control of the market and have no useful presence in personal devices (like smartphones or tablets.) In the enterprise market they did understand and SMB is still very much the usual way data is accessed.
The moment you use more than one computer, or share a computer, things change from this model. For many of us we never worked in the 1-1 model. I grew up in the world of workstations and NFS. I now use half a dozen computers, many on a daily basis. It is ridiculous to treat each as a separate data repository. Work computers are separate from personal, but that is it. My email is up-to-date and usable on every device. My calendar, contacts, messaging, photos, and music collection similarly so. Software projects tend to be managed in Github, and the entire environment is close to being recoverable even if my house burns down. (I don’t have a synchronised off site backup of my music collection yet.)
Any personal computer needs to be treated as a disposable cache. Not doing so opens you up to a world of pain eventually.