[Discuss] Notebook Recommendations?

[Kent Borg]

On May 2, 2016 10:27:06 AM EDT, Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
>Don't be. Flash-based consumer SSDs are no less reliable or replaceable
>than mechanical drives within their normal usage lifetimes.

As reliable? Maybe, but the flash product the industry has most commonly put in consumer hands, SD cards, die left and right. (A quite new Samsung SD card instantly died on me just a few months ago.) Mechanical drives, being mechanical, frequently give warnings before completely dying. Flash? <poof!> And it's gone. Finally, I have personally watched the underlying technology go from an admitted life span of 100,000s of writes (was it more, 15+ years ago?) down to I forget how few we are at now. Yes, I know about wear-leveling. Finally, the higher levels of the software stack were built with disks in mind, flash doesn't necessarily swap in seamlessly. (See wear leveling.) I'm going flash, but warily. 

Many are soldered. Removable is important to me when dealing with consumables. My Lenovo X230 had a few years left in it, until this unfortunate event. A bit of modularity helps in that.

Thanks,

-kb, the Kent whose side of his head and left leg periodically remind him they are still tender, but whose left hand merely looks a bit mangled.

-- 
Sent from my Turing Machine.