Finite, yes, but sufficiently large that unless you’re running some kind of server application that needs lots of hot storage, it’s longer than the expected lifetime of the computer it’s in.
If you’re worried about data loss, focusing on which storage medium has slightly lower failure rates is not the best solution. The best solution is to use a professional data backup service that will store redundant copies on their many hard drives. Several orders of magnitude lower failure rates that way.
That’s fair. I’m doing a poor job of risk assessment and mitigation. I may choose to improve but not today. Thanks.
This would be a pretty good motto for humanity in general 
Procrastination is not just a river in Egypt.
Surely many people reuse their existing hard drives when moving to a new computer, though? I know I have. It makes data migration a snap.
Hard drive wear tends to be measured in years, while SSD wear is measured in writes. So it really depends on how much and how often you write to your SSD to determine how long it will last. If you tend to leave a lot of free space and don’t write much data, that SSD will last a long time.
Still, I do think it makes sense to backup your SSD to your HDD. Partly because the HDD will most likely be bigger. But mostly because it’s your boot drive, meaning you need it back ASAP. The vast majority of your data can wait a bit, so I use cloud storage for that.
Surely some incredibly small percentage of people do but most people want their new computer to have new parts, don’t want to void their warranty by cracking it open when they first get it, don’t want to drag along whatever outdated versions of software they have installed on their old computer, etc. I’ll bet fewer than 10% of people install their old hard drive into their new laptop and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that number was less than 1%.
For normal use patterns, SSDs will outlast hard drives. If you are writing lots of new data regularly, SSDs may not be the best choice, but if you’re just using a computer the way that most people use a computer, SSDs are great. They’re faster, more reliable, use less energy, and last longer. The only downside is cost/byte, but, again, at the size that most people use, that’s a good tradeoff.
If you’re planning to move storage devices from computer to computer for ease of data migration (a thing I have done), you better have a backup plan in place! Because whatever type of drive you have, it will fail eventually. The question is when, not if. My oldest hard drive is about 12 years old. It would be crazy if I didn’t have a backup of its data.
Keep in mind also that a spinning hard drive in a laptop is almost certainly going to be 5400 RPM instead of the more typical 7200 RPM you find in full-size desktop hard drives. That makes an already pretty slow technology even slower. I’d avoid the mixed SSD/HD environment if at all possible. It makes backing up and archiving and finding things easier.
Gonna agree w T&C above. Your comment is 1990s thinking.
When I get a new PC / laptop / supertablet, the old one goes in the trash. The cloud loads my stuff onto the new one and I’m off to the races. Transferring old hardware into a new box is borderline insane. And frequently physically impossible.
And I say this as a guy who earned a living for decades writing software for servers.
Eh, I suppose I take more of a middle ground. I reuse HW all the time. Since SSD performance has been increasing at a rapid rate, upgrading the boot drive is a key part. However:
My stuff gets backed up to the cloud, but it’s still a complete pain in the ass setting up a new system just the way I like it. Easily a few man-days, and more if you include time spent in the future with lesser-used programs. Oh, and downloading all my games again will take forever even at gigabit and blow through my data cap.
I’ve been stringing along my current OS install for over a decade. It’s gone from Win7 to Win10 and all the subversions, made its way between probably four complete sets of hardware, but it’s still basically the same thing.
I definitely wouldn’t reuse an old spinny disk, though.
To each his own and there certainly is no One Right Way.
The last computer I owned that you could install prior hardware into was bought in 2003. And gleefully scrapped in 2010.
The last time I thought about installing prior hardware in a computer was a 56K modem in 1999. But the new computer came with one anyway so it didn’t matter.
Any system with a form factor that disallows upgrading is gonna have a bad day with a 250 watt GPU. As will the top of my legs.
Cloud migration makes sense for devices like phones and tablets which never have very much storage. But it seems odd for a PC with an actual hard drive, since you don’t really need said hard drive unless you have at least 1 TB of data (and more likely more like 2TB, since 1TB SSDs are pretty cheap these days.) ISPs tend to cap residential data to around 1 TB per month, and surely you’d want some of that to actually use your Internet.
I could see them pulling what Google has done recently, and having a quick migration by cable built in. (I seem to remember Windows has a data migration wizard.) You could link up the ethernet ports, or possibly even USB 3 and/or USB C. But most migration guides I’ve seen (including on here) have you take your internal drive and put it in a USB caddy. Easy migration from there, and then you have an external drive to use for backup. Thus you have a reason to keep using it, while not caring so much if it dies as long as you know it has died.
I’m not saying that most people reuse a hard drive. There are a lot of people who don’t bother with keeping their old data at all. Others keep only a small portion, the stuff they consider important, rather than their entire digital life. But, for those who use the storage, it seems odd to just throw away a perfectly working drive to me.
But it also seems odd to me to throw away computers. I don’t even think I’m technically allowed to do so except once a year, when the city has a drive to get rid of your e-waste and large appliances. But, even with that, I’m probably going to give away, donate, or even possibly sell stuff before I’d just toss out working equipment. Heck, that’s how I kept upgrading my own computer for a long while–people needed someone to take their stuff off their hands.
BTW, if you do feel like throwing away a computer in the future that still works. I’d love it if you’d let me know. Dad is currently having to use a very old laptop as his desktop, one with Intel HD graphics (not even HD 2000) and a dual core. It’s only marginally better than the new computer his brother bought him in 2011. A memory upgrade and an SSD (from my old, dead computer) can only do so much.
I almost always transfer my drives into a new PC. I think my oldest drive is around a decade old at this point but it doesn’t get used very much. I’m acutely aware that it could die at any moment (though no issues yet) but I’m also not the sort who is dreadfully attached to photos and stuff which is what’s on there. If it died, I’d say “That sucks” then go redownload whatever was memorable enough for me to miss.
This also means that I have a number of drives that just get added along. The system I have now contains five SSDs (one M.2 NVMe, four SATA) and the above mentioned HDD for a combined 5.25TB
Didn’t pipe in earlier because I’d just be +1’ing the advice: Buy an SSD when you have the option unless you just need a lot of cheap storage for rarely accessed files (bunches of photos, videos, old documents, etc)
Once I cobbled together a storage server (to test something, not for storage of important irreplaceable files) and attached a bunch of old disk drives to it. Whenever one of them died, you could just swap it out for a not-dead drive. Basically, it worked fine. You have to configure it with at least some RAID, though (let’s say 5 or 6).