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Comment by simpleTruth | Hacker News Reader

The general assumption with SSD is you have both a SSD and a traditional HDD. As long as you only have program and temp files on a SSD it's loss can have fairly minimal impact. Especially, if you schedule a full disk backup of your SSD weekly. Worst, case you lose a few OS/browser patches ship back the SSD for a replacement drive and move on.

PS: If you want to get fancy you can set up a bootable partition on your HDD and then backup the SSD to that partition.

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Is that really the general assumption, or is it the assumption amongst people who know enough about hardware to build their own systems? Plenty of system integrators (Dell, Apple, etc) sell configurations that are SSD-only. If the failure rates are really this high, it's a point of concern to say the least.

I keep regular Time Machine backups, Backblaze off-site backups, and much of my "current" work is done in Dropbox, so it's synched quickly, but a hard drive loss still means downtime and the loss of whatever I was working on. Of all the computing users I know in every day life, I am the most backed up amongst them. SSDs are rapidly going mainstream, and the impact of hardware failure for the "mainstream" user isn't something that should be marginalized.

What makes you say that's the general assumption? As far as I know the vast majority of machines shipping with SSDs are shipping with ONLY an SSD, not two drives. Are you saying Apple's (for example) assumption is you're going to cary around an external HDD with your MacBook to store your files on?

The general assumption (or rather disclaimer) is: make backups.

An earlier failure may even be an advantage here because that way you have less time to accumulate important data before learning your lesson...

A lot of people go with removing the cd drive and adding the ssd there. That's what I did and aside from a sata saturation firmware bug it went great. So fast.

If you're not using the SSD for some of your data files, you're losing out on a lot of the performance. I keep all my code working directories on the SSD as well. Compiles of even large projects just scream from an SSD.

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