On Thu, 9 Aug 2018, Bill wrote:

mike wrote:

How's the reliability?
I'm still reading that they fail catastrophically without warning.

I've heard that the reliability of SSDs far exceeds that of the mechanical
hard drives (for, in fact, an obvious reason--no moving parts). The "trim"
software for my Intel SSD even provides an indication of the drive's
reliability (I'm not sure how well that works). I do regular backups too.

But I've never had a hard drive problem. That goes back to 1993, when I
go tmy first hard drive.

I've moved on to different hard drives, but that's because of a different
computer or wanting more space. But none have failed, not even the ones
that had been used when I got them.


I'm sure that when I get around to turning on that computer from 2003,
which was used at the time, the hard drive will be fine. Though I
splurged on a new hard drive, a 160g, about 2006. But it stayed on most
of the time till I moved to a different computer in 2012.

Hard drives became reliable at some point, and so cheap.

And I'm yet to be convinced that an SSD is appreciably faster than a
mechanical hard drive. Though it helps that I leave the computer on, so
any "slowness" of booting is an iregular thing.

Michael