this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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That's good, really good news, to see that HDDs are still being manufactured and being thought of. Because I'm having a serious problem trying to find a new 2.5" HDD for my old laptop here in Brazil. I can quickly find SSDs across the Brazilian online marketplaces, and they're not much expensive, but I'm intending on purchasing a mechanical one because SSDs won't hold data for much longer compared to HDDs, but there are so few HDD for sale, and those I could find aren't brand-new.
Realistically this is not a good reason to select SSD over HDD. If your data is important it's being backed up (and if it's not backed up it's not important. Yada yada 3.2.1 backups and all. I'll happily give real backup advise if you need it)
In my anecdotal experience across both my family's various computers and computers I've seen bite the dust at work, I've not observed any longevity difference between HDDs and SSDs (in fact I've only seen 2 fail and those were front desk PCs that were effectively always on 24/7 with heavy use during all lobby hours, and that was after multiple years of that usecase) and I've never observed bit rot in the real world on anything other than crappy flashdrives and SD cards (literally the lowest quality flash you can get)
Honestly best way to look at it is to select based on your usecase. Always have your boot device be an SSD, and if you don't need more storage on that computer than you feel like buying an SSD to match, don't even worry about a HDD for that device. HDDs have one usecase only these days: bulk storage for comparatively low cost per GB
I replaced my laptop's DVD drive with a HDD caddy adapter, so it supports two drives instead of just one. Then, I installed a 120G SSD alongside with a 500G HDD, with the HDD being connected through the caddy adapter. The entire Linux installation on this laptop was done in 2019 and, since then, I never reinstalled nor replaced the drives.
But sometimes I hear what seems to be a "coil whine" (a short high pitched sound) coming from where the SSD is, so I guess that its end is near. I have another SSD (240G) I bought a few years ago, waiting to be installed but I'm waiting to get another HDD (1TB or 2TB) in order to make another installation, because the HDD was reused from another laptop I had (therefore, it's really old by now, although I had no I/O errors nor "coil whinings" yet).
Back when I installed the current Linux, I mistakenly placed
/varand/home(and consequently,/home/me/.cacheand/home/me/.config, both folders of which have high write rates because I use KDE Plasma) on the SSD. As the years passed by, I realized it was a mistake but I never had the courage to relocate things, so I did some "creative solutions" ("gambiarra") such as creating a symlinked folder for.cacheand.config, pointing them to another folder within the HDD.As for backup, while I have three old spare HDDs holding the same old data (so it's a redundant backup), there are so many (hundreds of GBs) new things I both produced and downloaded that I'd need lots of room to better organize all the files, finding out what is not needed anymore and renewing my backups. That's why I was looking for either 1TB or 2TB HDDs, as brand-new as possible (also, I'm intending to tinker more with things such as data science after a fresh new installation of Linux). It's not a thing that I'm really in a hurry to do, though.
Edit: and those old spare HDDs are 3.5" so they wouldn't fit the laptop.
I doubt the high pitched whine that you're hearing is the SSD failing. The sheer amount of writes to fully wear out an SSD is...honestly difficult to achieve in the real world. I've got decade old budget SSDs in some of my computers that are still going strong!