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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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