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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

My five-year-old Macbook with a new SSD is very noticeably faster than my brand new Macbook Pro with an HDD. I don't know why people still use HDDs.

Don't answer, it was rhetorical.

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I'll answer anyway since it's an interesting question.

Space is still cheaper on hdd's, and data volatility concerns. Is the latter still an issue with SSDs, or have they reached the point now where you can store your music collection on them and not worry about losing it in two or three years?

It's probably just space, as volatility isn't a very good excuse. Sure, it's worse with SSDs, but you need to always have backups.

If your backup strategy doesn't account for your main disk failing at any given time you've already lost.

You should always worry about losing it, traditional spinning disk or not. That said, my SSD is doing just fine, but I still have a full backup of it.

With Time Machine, there's no reason for anyone on OSX not to have backups, it's so incredibly easy to do, and you set it up once and forget about it until you need it.

My original macbook has an SSD in the optical drive slot with all applications and the OS. In the HDD bay is a large hard drive containing all user data.

Fun oddity after switching to SSD: If the laptop gets REALLY hot from long term summer usage, in the past I would just slap a cooling pad under it to get the fans to stay quiet. Now, the cooling pad somehow causes the SSD to freeze, so I have the cooling pad sitting only under the left half of the machine, and all is well.

Yes, SSDs have a read/write limit, but the average time it takes to hit it is longer than the mean time to failure of HDDs.

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