droolcules

SSD are not 'built for speed'. They are both more reliable and faster due to solid state design. The speed is a by product of using solid state technolgoy, but the first uses for large solid state drive that I remember where for earth quake proofing mission critical systems at the enormous cost of early SSD technology, people still did it. Now days SSD is BOTH faster and more reliable than HDD storage. A few years ago in earlier generations there were significantly limits on total writes which limited the lifespan of SSD devices. This is no longer a significant limitation to solid state drives and the end result is a higher number of hours before mean tiem failure. The same methodology used to test mechanical hard drives is used to test solid state drives and solid states now reliable out last mechnical hard drives.Solid state drives also continue to improve more rapidly than mechanical hdds. These days the only reason to go HDD over SSD is because of the much larger capacity on the HDD. I'd recommend everyone switch over to solid state drives for the OS and main apps. It's affordable enough and the performance boost is huge. It's easily the best money you can spend to see a performance increase in your system. Even if you were worried about SSD long term reliability you would still install the OS and main apps on teh SSD and simply used your HDD to store pictures and financial data. Of course we live in the age of cloud storage and I think thats the direction most people will want to go for backing up reasonble amounts of sensitive data, just don't skimp on your passwords. There is no reason not to get the massive performance boost that SSD can give your system at today's pices and capacities, other than you don't feel like you need a far more resonsive PC and faster load/zoning/boot times or any type of manipulating of large files as well as any type of file copy process. If you do any of that then SSD is going to give you a pretty huge boost during those operations. I've worked in IT for over 15 years and have a CS degree. The modern data shows that SSDs are more reliable. Data from 5 or 10 years ago may show the opposite. I use a Samsung 880 Pro and it works great. It's also far more resistant to corrupting if your computer crashes or power goes off without a UPS/shutdown. It's also of course much more resistant to damage from shock via dropping or damange from vibration. It's tiny and generates very little heat, unlike my array of 15 TB of mechnical drives I use for my server storage. I wish I could afford 15 TB of solid state performance to eliminate my conerns of mechanical drive failures. In normal user, gaming and home server usage, SSDs are superior and show lower failure rates. When you do push an SSD to it's limits you can cause it to fail prematurely, pretty much like any electronic device. The difference is your moving tremendiously more data on an SSD over the same given period of time in a stress test and that's just not how a normal user or even server often works. Only in very specific uses would you run into this problem with SSD and that would be likely on large computer clusters doing massive multi threaded data manipulations. Still, you would accomplish these tasks in a fraction of the time with SSD, you just might push the drives beyond their current design limits and over time that would wear them down. In any type of normal PC usage, even file sharing or 2nd life caching you should not come any where near the write limits of an SSD within any unreasonably short amount of time. I expect my SSD will easily last 8+ years and I consider myself a demanding user. I would not put my trust in any existing mechnical hdd to last that long with as high a level of certainty. It's still electronics though and even among mechnical hard drives electronics are not anywhere near rock solid, but you should be ably to rely on an SSD as much as an HDD. For backups you simply need multiple locations/drives to store data or it's not really much of a backup. Here is a long standing and reliable site for informatoin and benchmarks on storage technology. . http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd