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Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think he's crazy.

I don't care how fast a computer is if I have to reinstall it from scratch every few months.

Sure, all my working files are safely on Dropbox (documents) or GitHub (code), but that doesn't help when I have to reinstall my operating system and software every three months!

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HDDs still fail as well remember. However, that aside, if you offered me the price of my SSDs and a next day warranty replacement on my computer with a great backup solution to give up tabbed browsing or keyboard shortcuts I wouldn't take it. The efficiency from those things is just too painful to give up once you have tasted it. SSDs are like that. They can be seen as the carbon fibre sportscar with no airbags, but it's more than just a revving status symbol and the joy of movement, it's speeding up the device with which I think: for work and hobbies. Brin calls Google the third half of your brain, implying improvement and extension, the computer as a whole is much more than that for people who value the life of the mind. The investment then becomes fairly easy to justify I think.

You don't have to install from scratch with a decent backup.

(A complete Time Machine restore of my laptop over Firewire takes 2-3 hours. I sleep better at night, knowing this.)

Yes. Use SuperDuper to clone occasionally to a laptop-sized HD and you can probably get the restore time down to "how long will it take me to open up the machine and slide in this backup HD".

Such a backup might not be especially fresh, but once it's up you can sync over files from a fresher, automated backup.

Do you know a good one for Windows?

Acronis TrueImage (http://www.acronis.com/trueimage). Both backups and restores are amazingly fast -- in my case, 8 to 10 minutes for just under 60GB.

You sound like a desktop user, but a server environment, if done properly, is kind of the opposite.

Anything important is part of a pool.

Rebuilding, with cobbler + puppet, should take 10 minutes depending on your hardware and network, plus app files.

This is all trivial when weighed against the speed and to a lesser extent, power savings you get with SSDs.

Servers are, indeed, a different kettle of fish. But he seems to be talking about desktops (and laptops).

1. You can backup entire partition

2. Restoring of Windows machine with lot of software very annoying and takes a lot of time (clicking dumb "I agree", and reboot the computer now, entering serials etc...) but with ubuntu or os x it's less annoying experience. Good package manager calculate dependencies for software. The only exception is when you need to install some proprietary software (less frequently than on windows) or you need edge version.

I have a shell script that installs all the packages I need on a fresh Ubuntu install, but

1. I only tend to update it after running it and finding that something I was expecting to be installed wasn't (really I should switch to using puppet/cdist/similar for this)

2. I have to set up Firefox manually (downloading extensions etc)

Put your Firefox profile in a Dropbox directory?

If you're scripting it anyway, you could go one step further and just download all the XPIs to your extension directory, where Firefox will automatically pick them up. I also believe Firefox Sync will be able to sync extensions in the future.

True, a partition restore would be faster.

Agreed. I fancy though that he's imagining, or rather betting, the reliability of SSDs will improve. I bet that if his new purchase also fails after 12 months (or less) he'll be pretty pissed.

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