A 500 GB SSD is the same price like a spinning disk and will still give you a performance boost.
So if you dont have any disks laying around it is no question what to get.

I would never fit a traditional hard drive in anything as the primary drive these days, at least as long as the system can handle a SATA SSD (or even better nvme).

The price differential is just not worth it.

Ssds seem to be cheaper. Its not about price. Both are paltry.

Has anyone ever gotten 6+ years feom an ssd? This unit does not take an m.2. My backup little asus does, and only takes an m.2. For some reason I suspect mechanical drives may be more reliable over time.

Seconded.

While I'm willing to continue with spinning disks as primary drives in old systems, as long as they live, I see no reason to go with anything that's not an SSD, if I am to buy one now.

ccronk wrote on 2024-03-07, 09:06:

Has anyone ever gotten 6+ years feom an ssd? This unit does not take an m.2. My backup little asus does, and only takes an m.2. For some reason I suspect mechanical drives may be more reliable over time.

If it's the same reason you suspect old office versions are better for learning, just forget it and get an SSD.
I'm sure that almost everyone in this forum has SSDs from 2018 still working fine.

ccronk wrote on 2024-03-07, 09:06:

Ssds seem to be cheaper. Its not about price. Both are paltry.

Has anyone ever gotten 6+ years feom an ssd? This unit does not take an m.2. My backup little asus does, and only takes an m.2. For some reason I suspect mechanical drives may be more reliable over time.

m.2 is just a physical/electrical interface - it doesn't specify which storage interfaces are supported; for that you need to check the keyways of the M.2 header and the support from your motherboard chipset. But in broad terms, a SATA M.2 is functionally identical to a 2.5" SATA SSD. The only concern about adding a 2.5" SATA SSD is if you have a machine that is really old that only did SATA 1.5 or 3Gbit/sec, rather than 6Gbit/sec which has been standard for many, many years now.

An NVMe M.2, on the other hand, talks directly via PCIe, rather than via SATA, and as a result is much faster - 1 lane of PCIe 2.0 is as fast as SATA 6G, for example.

If you have a SATA 6G port and a M.2 SATA port, then they are functionally the same.

konc wrote on 2024-03-07, 10:59:

ccronk wrote on 2024-03-07, 09:06:

Has anyone ever gotten 6+ years feom an ssd? This unit does not take an m.2. My backup little asus does, and only takes an m.2. For some reason I suspect mechanical drives may be more reliable over time.

If it's the same reason you suspect old office versions are better for learning, just forget it and get an SSD.
I'm sure that almost everyone in this forum has SSDs from 2018 still working fine.

Microshaft Off-kilter has absolutely nothing to do with this topic. Mechanical hard drives are pretty triexld and true. While I have installed nvmes in newer boxes, that was in the last year. No way of ascertaining their reliability. Thus I asked.

ccronk wrote on 2024-03-07, 05:06:

Spinning rust or ssd?

I have a 6+ year d Lenovo lt. It's not used that often. But everything dies. I get the impression the h/d is getting ever so slightly wonky. I could stick it out and see what happens. A 500gb disk is so cheap. I'm tempted to get another mechanical drive. What are the pros and cons. Reliability is the most important thing. But this thing isn' t used for anything critical. If you don't have a sufficient backup strategy you just don't get it. But extra speed would be real nice.

No spinning sh*t
I recommend to use a 120/128 GB SSD for a surfing / streaming machine, 240/256 GB if you want to use it for more.

A female neighbour wanted to get rid of her i3 because it was so terribly slow.
I've replaced her 1 TB HDD with a 240 GB SSD and now she's happy... until support end of Windows 10.

Get the SSD. You have no excuse now that they are so cheap.

Geez not looking for an excuse. I want reliability. There's only a 2$ difference in price.

I like hard drives fine in desktops, but SSDs are more suitable for a laptop.
With an SSD you don't have to worry about movement or vibration. They also use a little less power, which also means a little less heat to dissipate.

The last desktop mechanical h/d I bought was a 7200rpm Seagate 3.5". Real speedy. Fastest drive I've ever worked with (I think). I have putzzed around with small Adata SSDs. I can't draw a comparison in my mind for some reason. The newest MSI nvmes I installed haven't been used whatsoever, no os even installed yet. Built those bad boys and they're just sitting there, lonely.

ccronk wrote on 2024-03-07, 09:06:

Ssds seem to be cheaper. Its not about price. Both are paltry.

Has anyone ever gotten 6+ years feom an ssd? This unit does not take an m.2. My backup little asus does, and only takes an m.2. For some reason I suspect mechanical drives may be more reliable over time.

I still have my first, 60gb SSD. It hasn't been used much in the last 10 years, but last I checked it still worked.

I don't think SSD vs HDD is a meaningful comparison, as numerous factors come into play. Two different drives within one of these categories can have very different reliability, so it's hard to generalize SSDs and HDDs as a whole.

When SSDs first became popular, there was a lot of concern over their reliability. People would often recommend using an SSD for your OS and an HDD for your data drive. However, that no longer seems to be the case. I don't know if that's because we now how data supporting the reliability of SSDs or if this based on anecdotes. Unfortunately, we often rely on anecdotes when it comes to the quality of different computers or parts. I think we all have strong opinions about certain brands that are just based on our own experiences with them. However, our own experiences will be based on a small sample of these products and may not represent other people's experiences.

That being said, there is some data out there. I know that many people trust Backblaze's advice. They have saved me money because I was looking at some Seagate SAS drives for a server I'm putting together. I didn't buy them because Backblaze had data showing that these drives have a very high failure rate. Backblaze has a page on SSDs vs HDDs that you might want to look at:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-reliable-are-ssds/

I work for a moderately sized UK university. We buy thousands upon thousands of laptops and desktops every year, unless someone wants dozens of terabytes of storage these all come with sata or nvme ssds, and have done for years.

If we have any reliability problems with SSDs it is so small to be statistically insignificant.

Just buy the SSD.

I would use a NVME drive (or if not available a SATA SSD) for main OS and a large spinning disk for downloads, movies, and misc. files.

It only takes 1 drive.

If sssds are so amazing, why bother with mechanical drives at all? In a sense you are at a disadvantage - you can drop the thing and lose everything. This unit never stores anything critical, so that isn't an issue. And I am very careful with my transportable puters. I see people do such stupid ****.

This was maybe the last of the traditional Lenovos. Resembles the old Thinkpads in overall look and feel. A very nice keyboard. Decent enough screen. Dooky AMD processor/gpu. But for what it is it was a bargain. Been running well for 6.5 years. But as I said doesn't get used that much. And I used it on the internet for the very first time scant weeks ago (w/a Fedora live usb). It's possible I'll get another 3.5 years out of it. The h/d isn't shot by any means. I just thought I may be approaching the point where to avoid a crash I should just replace it.

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.

I regularly use a pimped out T440p (fastest 4th gen i7 I could fit, maxed out ram, several SSDs) when I need to do onsite work.

As long as you don't need speedy graphics, it does absolutely everything I want it to.

Mechanical hard drives are for capacity / cost. Try speccing a workstation with 100TB of SSD storage vs mechanical hard drives and you will soon see the difference.

You need quite a few spindles of mechanical drives to approach the throughput of a modern NVMe drive. That's where you put your active data these days.