Laptop here. I have over 100G just in pictures then add in all the other stuff and SSD's just are not yet big enough.

There are 1TB SSDs available.

As soon as you decide to finally make the switch, you'll be kicking yourself for not doing it years earlier.

Mostly mixed systems.
SSD by choice.

PS: Happy birthday Jeremy

not at a price I can afford

I need the three things SSD still sucks at: Reliability (esp in the longevity aspect), lots of space, and inexpensive.

And SSDs are only cheap if you're looking at a comparison of the technology against itself. Saying they're cheap is like saying Microsoft makes a good OS because Win 7 is better than Vista. Windows still sucks because Vista is a low bar to set. It's a bar that was set by the lone jumper rather than the competition. If you have to exclude the competition in order to make a particular metric look good...

It's much the same with Reliability and space. Comparisons are frequently made against previous iterations of the technology rather than against other technologies. I'm glad you added a few inches to your 3 foot high jump, but your competition is jumping 8 to 10 feet.

If we look at speed only, well HDDs suck on cache misses. Otherwise the performance is much the same. We've been at it long enough that minimizing cache misses is a refined art. Add more memory, read less (e.g. compression), be smarter about discards (use a decent OS). But yeah, cache misses still happen often enough that the speed of the device is often important. More important than my preferred three metrics? You get one or the other. It's a lot to trade off for speed. At least from my perspective.

I'm sorry, but have you ever actually USED an SSD? Judging by your comments (especially on speed), you haven't, or you wouldn't be saying that the performance with a HDD is anywhere NEAR comparable. Sequential read and write speed with an HDD is about 30% of what you get with a decent SSD, seek time is over an order of magnitude slower (closer to two orders of magnitude...that's 100x). Put a platter drive in the best computer on the market, and it will slow to a crawl. Put an SSD in any crappy computer that somebody has been using for years, and they'll think it's a brand new machine.

There's a reason that after over a decade of building computers personally and professionally, I refuse to put the OS on a platter drive in any machine I build anymore. Whenever I build a machine with the OS on an SSD for somebody who has never used one, the first reaction, every single time, is "how is this thing so fast!?". They're used to $1500 computers with HDDs, and can't believe that this little $900 machine with less RAM, slower RAM, and a slower processor is over twice as fast at daily tasks.

These days platter drives are for archiving media and data, where all you need is cheap storage and seek and I/O times don't matter, and they do great in that role, but that's it. It makes absolutely no sense to piece together anything but the bottom of the barrel processor and RAM and then pair it with a HDD, unless the machine is doing nothing but number-crunching. That i7 processor will be no faster than an i5 or i3 for normal tasks if you're sticking the OS on a HDD, it bottlenecks the entire system.

Reliability on SSDs is perfectly fine. I have somewhere around 130,000 hours on SSDs in computers under my control with zero failures. The oldest ones are over 3 years old, back when SSD technology wasn't even as good as it is today, and they are still running 24/7 without issue. I like that you're complaining about SSDs having poor longevity as if it's a fact, when SSDs haven't even been on the market long enough to see if it's going to be a problem (and early indications, at least from what I've seen, say that it's not).


So to revisit your three requirements:
Reliability - not a problem, and even if it was, you should be keeping backups anyway. Hard drives fail, it happens, keep a backup and it doesn't matter.

Space/Inexpensive - that's actually one problem, not two. You can go cheap, or you can go big, same with HDDs. Yes SSDs are more expensive than HDDs for the same capacity, and they always will be, but at some point you have to realize that you're actually going to have a faster computer and better user experience if you spend $50 less on the processor, $50 less on the RAM, and put that $100 into a ~120GB SSD drive for the OS. Keep your massive platter drive for data storage, no need to choose one or the other unless this is a laptop with only one drive bay. My home server has a 6TB RAID on 4 platter drives, with the OS on a 3 year old 40GB SSD, works phenomenally well. And if this IS a laptop, you should seriously reconsider using an HDD from a reliability perspective. HDD longevity in laptops is absolutely horrible due to heat, motion and vibration, I rarely see them last more than a year or two.

I don't have any SSDs. I suppose HDD spining disk is used for most of my primary stuff. But I really like booting linux on SDHC cards or USB sticks. They're sometimes a lot slower, but that shows off a few of the faults in common applications. Like web browsers preventing the loading of "new" content while the old content saves to disk? Why? If I ever go "back" there, save out the rest that you didn't have time for, otherwise get out of my way.

Most of what I do could probably use a really huge ramdisk for in my opinion. If that was an option. If only I could have 128GB of RAM and be able to allocate 100GB of that as a pseudo disk / temp storage. For $100 or less of course. Not this decade I suppose.

Still old school. HDD

still hdd as i never had a problem with one and dont like flash media.. dont trust its livespan.. also i dont care about sound the system makes.. it can be loud if its cool

I am using a SATA II hard drive for now. SSD is still expensive for a decent size of usage.

I currently have HDDs only but I'm in the process of building a new desktop that will have an SDD for the OSs and a series of HDDs in RAID1 for /home (data)

I can't say I'm an expert like many of you and I agree with everythig you said until this bit. My current Samsung laptop has a 1TB HDD and it runs beautifully after nearly 4 years. This machine runs for up to 5 days without shutting down, other times it gets moved around from classroom to classroom while still turned on and it has never given me an ounce of trouble. Having said that my next upgrade for this laptop will probably be a 1TB SDD.

HDD, HDD !!! my pocket still in legacy mode.. hope it will boost up and i will change to SSD..

Sounds like your buying consumer grade laptops, I always buy business models. I recently had a hdd fail, it was a 60G from 2002. I had one other failure 6-7 years ago when my son was just old enough to crawl, it was on the table and he found that it made a great rattle. I've run 1-2 laptops of my own 24x7 for the last decade or more with only those two failures. I've put a laptop hdd in an car computer and drove on PA highways (PA lays down concrete then cuts expansion gaps with a big saw blade so the highway buckles at those gaps so you get a constant bump bump, bump bump, bump bump as you go over them and if your suspension is too soft you can actually get a nice oscillation going on) and gravel roads in WV without a failure.

I've had multiple USB flash drives fail within that decade, there are only a few makers of the actual flash memory so chances are the same is going into SSD's.

With the current cost I could buy one SSD or three laptop drives and have my data backed up twice. My laptop drive powers down a lot so sustained transfer rate is pointless unless I'm actually running a backup with will be overnight anyway.

Its getting frustration too with the SSD push, I can't find a decent laptop/tablet. They are all coming with ssd's and I have to hunt to find out if they are hdd form factor or not and 9 out of 10 are not so I can't get enough storage to make anything useable. Everyone thinks you can afford and have access to the "cloud' all the time.

SSD for the OS and HDDs for data

I am talking about using laptops how they were intended though...on the plane, in the car on the way to/from meetings, hotel lobbies, on job sites, constantly in/out of bags (often while still running), etc. Obviously if you stick it on a desk and don't touch it again it'll last just fine, but at that point you might as well just buy a desktop, or stick a small SSD in the laptop and use an external drive for bulk storage.

Nope, I'm talking about business/enterprise model laptops.

Except that the memory is not the same, and USB/SD flash drives are missing many of the reliability improvements you get with SSDs. More read/write cycles before failing, wear leveling, built-in redundancy, built in super cap to enable the controller to flush the cache if the system loses power mid-write, etc. It is incredibly naive to think that USB flash drives and SSDs have anywhere close to the same reliability just because they both use solid state storage. That's like saying a record and a CD will sound the same because they both use a spinning disk.

And have a MUCH slower computer. Or you could cut back a bit on the processor and graphics driver, use the money you saved to run an SSD without costing anything extra, and have a faster overall computer that's more reliable with better battery life.

Funny, I have the same reaction, but not for the same reason as you. I hate the SSDs used in most off the shelf laptops, they're crappy, incredibly slow, and the laptop manufacturers charge a ridiculous amount of money for them. I usually hunt for a laptop that's available with a HDD, and then swap it out for a good SSD myself while I'm upgrading the RAM. And if you do that, you can stick the stock HDD you pulled out into an external enclosure and use it for free bulk storage.

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