Consider this: the hard drive is the least reliable component of almost any modern PC/laptop. Add to this that it likely contains the most valuable non-commodity asset: your data.
Anyone not backing up their system is really asking for trouble... which will happen. Given the ease of use of modern backup systems, and their cost (free only costing a modest amount of your time), everyone should be doing it. OSX and Win7 make you feel guilty for not doing it (though OSX's version is better, both deliver on basic backups).
All this said, the difference between an SSD and an HD is about zero when it comes to real reliability. Both will fail at odd times, and you should have a backup, preferably bootable, to get you back to good. An external drive with a system-imaged startup disk (free for all major desktop OSs) is quite cheap to maintain.
> Consider this: the hard drive is the least reliable component of almost any modern PC/laptop.
Is it really? Completely anecdotally I've never lost a HDD, but keep going through power supplies… it'd be nice to see some data on component failure rates. I assume some exists, but I haven't really felt strongly enough about it to go look.
I've worked in IT for several years. My own fail rate is one or two drives per year in a 50 computer environment. So in a 150 computer environment its 3 to 6 a year. That's desktops/laptops.
In servers its a completely different game. Thanks to A/C and steady loads its much, much better. There is a chance of getting a run of bad disks and suddenly having multiple failures a year, but only on that specific model. Generally, I'd say that rate is closer to .25-.5 fails for every 50 drives per year, if that. So over 4 years I can expect one or two drive fails on 50 disks.
Regardless, drives fail all the time on desktops and laptops. The reliability is a huge, huge problem. Supposedly, SSDs were going to fix this, but their teething problems are probably making them worse than spinning disks.
It stands to reason that people would think that hard drives are the least reliable component. A bad hdd tends to be very obvious, and for anyone with bad backup hygiene also memorable. Something like a flaky ram stick just makes the machine crash a little more often.
That said, on my desktop I run a raid-1 setup. When a drive fails, I immediately replace the whole pair. Just lost the third one in 6 years this Saturday. And there isn't even any infant mortality distorting the stats.
Completely anecdotally, I've had a few hard drives fail (some spontaneous, some due to physical abuse that solid state hardware would tolerate) and never seen a power supply go. I suspect that power supplies are something where cheap ones will fail a lot and good, expensive ones will outlive the person buying it. Hard drives, on the other hand, have a decent risk of failure no matter how much money you spend.
They have improved, but I do not think we are there yet. For example, I do not know of any system that regularly verifies backups. Time Machine, for example, could lose a directory of photos from five years ago without noticing it. If, then, your main disk fails, The photos are, for all practical purposes, gone forever.
I disagree. In my collection of always-on 30 machines in my basement, over the last three years I have had probably 10 power supplies die, and only two hard drives. The hard drives that died--two 500 gig drives--died in the same month after just two years. I don't keep spare hard drives, but i do keep spare power supplies.
I'm finding it hard to believe that the difference is about zero. I think it depends _a lot_ on the usage pattern, and while your statement might be true for the majority of users, some people _are_ experiencing reliability issues with SSDs: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid...
This is only reasonable to expect when one technology has a write cycle limit and the other does not. A hard drive will give better reliability in write intensive applications, while an SSD will beat a hard drive in mobile/portable applications.
Of course, for most people buying an SSD, the increased performance easily outweighs any reliability "cost".
Anyone not backing up their system is really asking for trouble... which will happen. Given the ease of use of modern backup systems, and their cost (free only costing a modest amount of your time), everyone should be doing it. OSX and Win7 make you feel guilty for not doing it (though OSX's version is better, both deliver on basic backups).
All this said, the difference between an SSD and an HD is about zero when it comes to real reliability. Both will fail at odd times, and you should have a backup, preferably bootable, to get you back to good. An external drive with a system-imaged startup disk (free for all major desktop OSs) is quite cheap to maintain.