I'm talking about, and it is even written clear as daylight, about a machine that is moved, while it is running, from classroom to classroom, every 40-60 minuts or so. How often does someone on an international flight move the laptop around? I have seen laptops used to tune cars, my previous one is my old 13 year old Acer Extensa (only had 2 HDDs in its life time), workshops use them to check PCMs and other control modules (climate control, brake control, etc etc etc.) and can be moved around a workshop ina nd out of grubby cars all while running with no difficulties from year to year. Like I said I agreed with everything else you said but that one little bit. In my experience, and it seems at least one other persons, HDDs last longer than you said in many if not most cases.

You didn't say every 40-60 minutes, I got the impression that it was an occasional thing, not a regular occurrence (I had assumed you were a teacher who was only moving the laptop between classrooms occasionally, not every period).

Either way, I'm glad yours has been reliable. I am the IT department at my company, so I deal with many laptops from multiple brands, multiple brand/size/speed hard drives, multiple users. I have found that the HDDs in these machines fail on a regular basis. I'll either RMA the drive or buy a new one to swap in, reload the OS and all software, and sure enough 1-2 years later it fails again. As soon as I started switching the machines over to SSDs, all failures stopped dead in their tracks, there hasn't been a single one since. Sure the occasional HDD-based laptop at my company lasts longer than the 1-2 year norm, and it has a lot to do with how the machine is (ab)used by the user (my boss is notoriously hard on laptops), but the above has been my general experience over the last ~8 years. My boss alone went through probably 4 failed laptop HDDs in the first 5 of those 8 years, and has been on a single SSD for the last 3 years without issue.

You can take from that experience whatever you like. Personally, I try to avoid using HDDs at all in laptops, and if I must use one, I walk on eggshells around it.

Note that this is only the laptops that have this problem, the HDDs used in the desktops/servers typically last 5+ years running 24/7 without issue.

What about the TAILS / Liberte CD/DVD only users? There's got to be at least 1 person here that uses only one of those mediums.... So we need a "neither" choice.

I'm a casual, I'm not in the same room one lesson to the next unless I am in a Primary School but even then I can 3 or 4 different classes/classrooms in 1 day and my laptop is my teaching resource.

To me this is an issue of someone not taking care of company equipment. It is similar to when I was a mechanic, the boss would have a company car, a new one each year, and by the end of that time the car would need alot of work to bring it back up to the standard it should be at.

Maybe your colleagues should learn to treat them the same way you do!

My main machine is a laptop (Dell M6600) I use an SSD for the OS and a HDD for data. However /boot is on the HDD because when I had it on the SSD the machine would regularly fail to boot (it would boot but only after multiply attempts). Moving the /boot partition to the HDD solved the problem and it now boots reliably.

Thought I'd mention it just incase anyone else might have a similar problem.

Paul Thompson

HDD only for capacity reasons as my primary Linux desktop is an ex-lease laptop with docking station and LCD screen for the office.
I haven't found a tablet that has the network diag tools available in a Linux desktop distro.

SSDs are still pricey here in NZ but have improved tremendously.

My next Major OS update will probably include an SSD

I have both.

Hi

altho I voted (correctly) as HDD, some first users based on that other thread may well install first to a USB device which may be flash drive
lets not forget boot with cd and persistence on flash USB sticks?

Mine is a Hadron Density Drive, it uses quantum gravity and tachyon suspensors so it will actually read the disk blocks just before they are actually required and can store a vin diesel film on five square planck lengths of surface.
Unfortunately on a power cut it will cause a wormhole in space-time and suck your budgie into it.

I tried an OCZ Petrol 64 GB. It started to fail a few weeks after I had installed it. It became so unreliable that I reinstalled the OS onto the HDD but I left the SDD in the computer with Linux Mint installed. When I went back to boot from the drive the BIOS did not even recognise it.

I have since pulled it out of the machine and on testing it is completely dead. I am actually looking at it while I write this response.

I would have to be convinced of the reliability of these devices. I like the idea of the STD in principle but it would take me a lot of convincing.

Robert…

I placed my mark against HDD because my primary Desktop has 3 HDDs in Raid 5 configuration but my next build will be SSD; the price is close to the right price!
It's a pity the poll didn't ask what you would like as well as what you have.

Desktop has HDD, primary
Netbook has SSD

I Initially installed an SSD in my "always on box" (small ITX machine running Debian + firewall, mail, squid, samba etc)
it was an OCZ 120Gb . Installed and worked fine. Next day came back , filesystem a total mess, fsck(8) fails . Spent a YEAR (on and off) trying to get this going, finally realised it was doing some housekeeping when it was left on and idle for several hours which resulted in randomised disk blocks. Meanwhile I'd bought a replacement computer (assuming it was the on board driver hardware) same behaviour ... ended up with a sandisk which just worked, sent the OCZ drive (now over a year old) back , they sent their new version. No longer trust these in critical machines so I used it in a laptop.
So now my "always on" is a Dreamplug + SD card, and I use HDD in my day to day machines. SSD only in laptop where the data loss is not critical. The failure mode of 100% working to 100% broken is just no good.

I use HDD in 4 notebooks and 3 desktops, for now SSD way too expensive

System was pre-configured for Win8. 2TB HDD sda, and 16GB SSD sdb - RAID 1. Pig dog from hell.

Now SSD is sda (Debian), data storage on the HDD and whoa it is fast. Thank you, more please.