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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Nah, in many businesses, everything is on a schedule. For desktop computers, a common cycle is 4 years. For servers, maybe a little longer, but not by much. After that date arrives, it’s liquidate everything and rebuild.

Having things consistently work is much cheaper than down days caused by your ancient equipment. Apple’s SSDs will make it to 5 years no problem - and more likely, 10-15 years.

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At my last N jobs, companies built high end server farms and carefully specced all the hardware. Then they looked at SSD specs and said “these are all fine”.

Fast forward 2 years: The $50-$250K machines have a 100% drive failure rate, and some poor bastard has to fly from data center to data center to swap the $60 drive for a $120 one, then re-rack and re-image each machine.

Anyway, soldering a decent SSD to the motherboard board would actually improve reliability at all those places.

What does soldering it to the board have to do with reliability?

If they were soldered onto those systems you talk about, all those would have had to be replaced instead of just having the drive swapped out and re-imaged.

I think the implication was that a soldered SSD doesn't give the customer as much chance to pick the wrong SSD. But it's still possible for the customer to have a different use case in mind than the OEM did when the OEM is picking what SSD to include.

It wouldn't solve other mismatched expectations. For example, the vendor might ship those SSDs only to store firmware-initiated crash dumps. They don't expect them to be used to meet production storage requirements. Maybe to occasionally boot a maintenance system, but that's it. To them, this is kind of obvious because everybody has a SAN anyway. But of course, this is not actually true in practice because customers vary a bit.

What company was specc'ing out a 6 figure machine just to put in a consumer class SSD?

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