Storage necessary and without having extra drives. No trying to balance a dock or external drive on my lap and then when I go places I don't have the cloud or my local network. Extra bays add weight and thickness. And yes I prefer the 4:3 screens over wide screen.

I still use HDD.

I do a lot of writing to disk and what I read about SSD's lifespan on writing to disk just won't do it for me. However, SSDs are excellent for reading of them.

I guess I've just never been one to keep a lot of data on laptops, I don't see the need. My home server has 6TB of storage, and it definitely gets used (currently around 56% usage, will probably need to expand it in about two years), but the laptop never has more than 30-40 GB of data stored on it.

When I'm home I just stream from the server, and when I'm going away I just transfer over what I need, which is not much. The SSD in my laptop is a 256, and it holds two OSs, all of the necessary programs on each (which actually take up a LOT of room, especially on the Windows side), and is still only maybe half full.

I guess I just can't comprehend why somebody would need that much storage on a laptop...I view laptops as portable machines that let you get work done on the road, and for that they don't need a lot of storage, but they do need speed, reliability, and power efficiency - all of which you get with an SSD. If you're doing big number crunching, server duty, TBs of storage...a laptop is just not the right solution in the first place, regardless of what type of storage it uses.

Iḿ only on SSD ćos someone wrote windows 8 all over the HDD supplied. After admitting defeat in the UEFI struggle, I felt I had better retain the HDD intact in case I needed to make a warranty claim. So I bought an SSD. It turned out to be a good idea, as the keyboard chip has died.

Pretty much agree with all the points here.

The only time I use a significant amount of Laptop storage is on holidays, when I load up with films, and 250Gb is enough (but a mechanical drive) I only use SSDs for workstation boot disks. It would be nice to put a big SSD in the holiday laptop but I can't justify it for a few weeks a year.

Laptop is my primary machine remember. I've been 'mobile' for 15-20 years, last desktop system I had was a 486. So my primary machine is my primary copy of my data, over 120G just in pictures, another 10G in music, another 50G in my documents and 100G in Archived documents. Sure I could store the archived off on a separate drive but then I have to track and manage media, its a whole lot simpler to just backup one drive and know that I have multiple backups of that one drive.
Many people may not have that much data, but I switched to paperless in 1999, got our first digital camera then and first scanner so everything has been paperless since then. Older papers/documents are moved into archive but pictures are not.
I have my whole inventory of wooddorking tools, projects, back accounts, kids college fund, etc.
Remember I mentioned not being able to access network or cloud, my family is on a farm in WV, so far we can get a 1x Verizon data connection but that's it. My parents dial up connects at 24.6k, they can't even view pictures on Facebook without making a meal while waiting for one to download. Family reunions and such are when everyone passes around the pictures/laptops.
If I needed to do some big powerful number crunching I can offload that to the secondary 'server' machine. I moved virtualbox over there after upgrading it earlier this year.

And sure I could sort and archive more but thats not a significant amount of saved space and a waste of time. What I do now is just have a couple folders of unimportant stuff excluded from backups so my backed up /home is just under 512G. Folders where I downloaded and compiled software because there were no packages available are one example that are excluded from backups.

Hard drive, SSD? Big, small? No 2 lives the same, no best answer.

1. WHERE'S THE SPEED?
Have 2 SSDS, 1 WD Velociraptor replacing hard drives in 3 workstations.
The Velociraptor dropped boot time to less than half in an old WinXP workstation, and that's with a SATA drive going through a PATA UDMA133 adapter (gasp). What's going on?

The raw transfer speeds quoted, the widely-advertised interface improvements from SATA I to SATA II to SATA III (6 Gb/s) reflect transfer from head buffer to drive bus, not sustained streaming speeds off the platter. A Velociraptor "crippled" by a slow bus was not so crippled after all. What seems to have mattered when the Velociraptor cut boot time to less than half is platter spin delay (10,000 rpm, not 5K or 7K) and head cylinder seek time (2.5" drive, not 3.5" - don't know if the controller also does sophisticated "elevator seeks" after command queuing).

Any confirmation of spin and seek? Yeah. The files/apps/pgms that sped up tremendously are those that search and validate and synchronize large (true) databases or long flat files and have been on the workstation for a decade. Despite "compaction" in the application and "defragment" in the operating system, these databases may have scattered internal pointers even if they were not badly scattered across the drive platter.

Conclusion: SSDs are the sin qua non of speed, but hard drives and what we ask them to do leave lots of room for improvement while you're waiting for Santa Claus or the lottery.

2. MY OTHER DRIVE IS A BTRFS ARRAY
The newest SSD boot drive workstation here has a btrfs (B-tree file system) for the /home data area (terabytes of music, photos, email and other history, etc). It is my experience that RAID technology has failed with multi-terabyte drives. The granularity of RAID striping (platter sectors, not the btrfs's 1GB "chunks") is too fine. The non-stop day and a half it takes to regenerate a failed drive is likely to push one of the other drives into failure. Two drives down, bye bye all data, thanks for the redundancy. Unless you spend $800ish for a dedicated PCIe RAID controller card with independent compute power and memory for each drive channel, it takes too long to calculate the checksums and route the data for so many little sectors.

So the alternative to an SSD is not simply "a hard drive".

I am 70. What should I build to carry me to my 80th birthday? With a btrfs -- once they get the bugs out, I hope this wasn't a horrible mistake -- you can just throw more drives into the array, the drives don't have to be the same. I specified redundancy of both metadata and my data, so I can presumably pull a drive out (that failed or just got too small). The more drives, the more striping, the faster the transfer. We'll see. Of course everything is redundant. I can't deal with regenerating my data and workstation in panic mode anymore.

I waited for the PC to be invented and bought one. (What else did you think LSI -- large-scale integration of chips -- would lead to?) Not every 70 year old has practically his whole life on hard drives, but most of you will. So yes, give us all speed, life is not infinitely long, no one can't wait forever. But after drive speed comes some path to reliability and freedom from panic.

You could still run your own WiFi network to connect your systems together.

As for your data requirements, I would use a totally different solution which would most certainly NOT include having my primary copy of all my valuable data on my Laptop.

I have significantly more data than you and mine is on a server, I only copy to Laptop what I NEED when I go off-site. Specifically I DO NOT carry personal data unless essential. But I have spent the last 40 years in the Security world (various aspects of it), so I have a totally different view on data security to yours.

I'd have to carry two systems the 250 mile drive to the farm to make wifi work :)

I just choose to keep the primary machine I use (laptop) as the primary and it rysnc's to the online backup drive on the server each night which is swapped with the offline in the safe every week or two so that when we do travel I have a full copy on both primary and backup drive rather than waiting a couple hours to copy data down to the laptop if it were to bea secondary.

I'm in IT Risk and Security myself, I looked it like this:

1. Full data on laptop and backup server with few day old backup in safe (three full copies of data). Laptop is stolen the actor most likely won't know how to use Linux let alone break the encryption so they are getting at most the hardware and even if they did understand Linux still would have to break the encryption.

or

2. Laptop has only data I need, primary is on the server at home with few day old backup in safe (two full copies of data, partial data on laptop). House broken into and server stolen I'm down to the one full backup in the safe.

I weighed the risks of each and decided that I'd rather have the three full copies with laptop being out of sight for short period of time (1 hour) for some of the trips when we do stop somewhere. A lot of the trips we will stop and eat at a park along the way, vehicle containing laptop within sight. Compare that to typical suburban neighborhood where crime may be low but break ins do happen to houses with empty driveways since that is a good sign that no one is home and the city police liaison said they do not give any priority to alarms due to the number of false alarms and I have called in myself which did nothing buy annoy the dispatcher who would not dispatch police unless I could see and describe the thief to them.

I didn't intend to derail the thread this far, I was simply saying there is a need to have storage on a laptop which prevents me from utilizing SSD at the current price point because I could either not hold all my data or not have multiple backups.

For me, I tend to do experimental things. Like using ffmpeg to extract frames of a video as images. Running those images through the gimp for effects or general pretty-ness. Sometimes using those images as textures in a povray animation. And combining the images back into a video. Almost all scripted so all of this could happen while I sleep. Or on other machines if I'm done fiddling. I can easily chew up 100GB of space in work files for a 10 minute video.

It's not so much the drive speed that I need as there is enough bottleneck in CPU processing to not fully use the drives available bandwidth for most tasks. And most of my drive usage is temp files, which can break in a new HDD drive enough to a point that I trust it. If I did that same kind of I/O on an SSD it would break it in to a point that I don't trust it, aka number of writes. I don't want to spend a drives lifetime thinking twice about compiling from source or trying out new distros or new filesystems. It's just kind of odd that I trust an HDD more, the more that I use it. And if I had an SSD, I would trust it less, the more that I use it. Even though that may have nothing to do with the technology itself.

Why?

We seem to have a fundamental difference of lifestyle here, I do not NEED to have ALL my data INSTANTLY available EVERYWHERE every moment of the day, you do.

Perhaps this is a good place to end the hijack.

Because that's where they family reunions are that people want to look at the old pictures. I mentioned before that I'd have to spend a few hours copying the data I think I need over to the laptop so its faster to just have a complete copy there all the time and I feel the risk of loss is less. Besides what good is having data if I can't access it?

Is it possible to add Hybrid SSD to the question ?
 

Hi ,
I've a SSD on a Lamp server
It's working well but I also know that it's possible to have crash and to lost data.
Fact is that after a new installation laptop has a tendency to be like frozen for more than 10/20 minutes , SSD "working" (it arrives randomly during the 10 reboot after a new installation, not after .. why ?)
I saw some articles of people using 1 SSD + 1 HDD to have speed and security
So for a laptop, I'd be very interested for a feedback on an Hybrid SSD/HDD disk installed on a laptop and to know details of Linux installation on it .
Best solution for my needs would be an Hybride drive rysncs to an online backup drive
Is it a dream or an existing solution ?
Have a nice day !

Latitude E6500 Core 2 Duo 2.80 (T9600)/4Gb/120Gb SSD , Ubuntu 12.04

I was thinking about that. There are 12mm, 9mm, 7mm, etc thick 2.5" laptop drives. If your laptop will accept a 12mm, you could possibly accept a 9mm hdd with SSD on top if you can find an adapter to split the SATA plug into two. The major issue I think would be the extra heat. Your E6500 though you could have two drives:

http://www.dell.com/us/dfb/p/latitude-e6500/pd

I'm just guessing here but I would not stack any two storage mediums on top of one another in a slot made for one. Especially in laptops these thing are crammed together with the least amount of heat dissipation possible for them to live as long as a warranty and are not made for customisation at all. A hybrid drive is different, of course, being designed for the situation.
I can understand wanting all your data with you at once but, for me at least, I've got my music collection on my media player in FLAC and my photo's on my tiny USB stick and, if I were inclined, my movies on my portable HDD so I don't tend to think about the storage inside my portable devices.