ccronk wrote on 2024-03-10, 02:47:
It only takes 1 drive.
If sssds are so amazing, why bother with mechanical drives at all?
I wouldn't. The only valid use case for mechanical hard disks in 2024 is "cheaper large bulk storage in datasets that don't need any kind of random access performance and don't need to be moved; but need faster access than tape". So, the only hard disk I own is a 6TB drive with my media collection on it. The only hard disks at work are in a couple of NAS used to store local backups in addition to our BackBlaze archive. And if I needed to build a new NAS now, I would probably buy SSDs anyway. They're less stressful.
Desktop boot drive: SATA SSD. Desktop game and scratch drive: SATA SSD. Laptop: SATA SSD. Server boot drives: SATA SSD. VM disk store: SATA SSD. Raspberry Pi: NVMe SSD (only thing I have new enough).
I have about 30 SSD's from 2012 working just fine in machines at work. They're our new SAN media, having already had a long life at a parter organisation (current lifespan remaining averages at about 98% on each one). They're replacing 2012 HDDs that have all died from old age, which already needed NVMe SLOGs to have minimum tolerable performance. The mSATA SSD in my primary VMHost at home is from 2013. Lifespan of data on an unpowered SSD is about 10 years last I checked, so if it's something sat in a box - LTO is still the way to go. For anything in active use, SSD.
Summary of the general rules of SSD's, via Backblaze (someone linked it above, but TL;DR): Between brand new SSDs and brand new enterprise-grade HDD's in a server, the failure rate in the first year of an SSD is *slightly* higher. Over the long term, it's far far far lower, right up until the SSD write life. If you picked up an Intel D3-S4520 960GB disk, you can secure erase it once a day, every day, for 14 years before you hit that. It's a £180 drive though, so a more reasonable option, the Lexar NS100 1TB you can erase every day for about 18 months - that's £65. Since no-one does that kind of write lifecycle in a laptop - it's not likely to be an issue. I use a 250GB drive that's about 4 years old, and an estimation based on it's limited SMART readout is that I've used 14/128TBW. And a HDD will have a longer life in a server than a laptop even under ideal conditions.
HDDs are painfully slow as OS drives, less reliable, horribly vulnerable to premature failure from shock or vibration and really aren't much cheaper. £14.99 for an HDD on Amazon from <list of suspicious seller names>, £26.54 for an NS100 256GB (I recommend this model for a budget SSD - higher ideal lifespan than most) sold by Amazon.
There literally isn't any reason to buy a HDD for a laptop.
P.S, I wish you many happy more years with your Thinkpad. My personal daily is a 2011 machine. Currently aiming to EoL it sometime between 2029 and 2032.