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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

> Storage is the most likely component to fail.

Got any sources for that? I find that hard to believe.

> MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here.

This is indeed annoying, but with USB4/Thunderbolt support becoming more common in monitors, I believe this is going to be less of an issue going forward.

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The only reason I was able to use my 2012 MacBook Pro 15 as my daily driver for 11 years, is because I was able to replace 2 failed non-soldered SSDs.

Those were old SSDs with I presume much lower capacity than modern drives

The first one was 512GB. The ones after that 1TB.

No write intensive usage. Just normal office use with occasionally compiling code.

SSDs and batteries are the only components (as far as I remember) that have a "guaranteed" cycle lifetime. Or in another words, a "very likely after this point" failure threshold.

I completely agree on batteries (and I believe this is in fact why most devices are being replaced was what I was getting at!), but where is that point practically for SSDs?

With typical usage, it should hopefully be out many more years than the laptop gets security updates.

> With typical usage, it should hopefully be out many more years than the laptop gets security updates.

Well, that's a good question, isn't it? Especially when you're selling memory-limited hardware and shoving the swap in your SSD

(And using it past the availability of security updates should be the user's prerogative, not Apple - you can run Linux on the ARM laptops)

Data point of one. Last 20 years storage has not failed on me across close to a dozen laptops I’ve owned across various brands.

So even I get puzzled whenever I see “storage is the most likely component to fail”. Maybe I just got lucky?

I think it's more about ssd's with limited cycles+ the fact that with smaller RAM, swap can nuke those ssd's pretty fast if you go beyond ram capacity

If you're replacing your laptop every 1.5 years then you're probably not likely to encounter any part failing.

And if a man mates with nine women he'll be holding one baby this time next month? With both electronic devices and gestating females concurrency is common.

No, you don't understand. SSDs begin to encounter problems over time after some number of read/write cycles. This is entirely expected and when one sector has issues it gets remapped to one of some spares that are built into the drive. Once those are exhausted it's a matter of time before you have an unusable SSD and, if it's soldered to the motherboard, an unusable laptop.

A sister comment to mine referred to this too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38066645

But where did they say they only used each device for 1.5 years? That seemed like your assumption based on the quoted dozen laptops across twenty years; I certainly have a number of devices concurrently, with the oldest now being 14 years (still working though only on a power supply as the battery is badly degraded). That said I also strongly prefer a replaceable drive, but more because I don't want to buy the capacity at today's price that I'll only truly need in a few years time, if ever.

It’s a pretty fair assumption, I think. It’d be a really unusual if they kept buying laptops and somehow continued using all or some of them at the same rate.

That’s a fair point, if I recall correctly I had three laptops for about 5 years each. And about 7 over 5 years period as I switched jobs and laptops frequently.

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