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Comment by hosay123 | Hacker News Reader

My first, only, and last-until-hell-freezes-over SSD went crazy last week, after a series of bizarre kernel panics that now appear to relate entirely to the SSD (machine is fine after a reinstall). Following a final reboot the Macbook's firmware displayed a "missing startup folder" icon. On flying home I discover that several GB from the start of the drive has gone missing entirely (check out http://i.imgur.com/riK4CBt.gif -- grey is good, black is zero blocks). Never again relying on a disk technology that doesn't respond to a hammer when it's dying.

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One data point is a poor basis for decision making.

Right. So I could drop $2-3k on gaining experience from a meaningful sample size, all the while risking more lost business days, or I could just believe all those anecdotes it took me close to half a decade to convince myself to ignore. I've got bigger problems than seek latency, will retry in a couple more years.

Maybe you could try making backups next time?

Would certainly be smarter than banking on the reliability of a single HDD.

Unfortunately you can't back up billable hours, and carrying an entirely separate laptop or disk on the expectation that your main one will fail seems a bit too weird, especially when robust alternatives exist

As an hourly contractor as well, I back up everything to the cloud and have at least two laptops in a 'ready' state. Trusting hardware to work is... brave.

If you have a laptop with a optical disk drive, you can remove the drive and replace it with a second hard drive for backups alone. You can even make it a 1.5TB HDD and use something like Time Machine for multiple version backups that backup all the time. That way you don't have to carry anything.

Most of your billable hours would be saved that way. I also have an external HDD connected to my laptop dock that does automatic backups whenever I connect the laptop to it, and I have crashplan for 'offsite' backups. I don't use my second HDD in my laptop as a backup hard drive although.

meh. That's what backups are for? Have you ever restored from time machine? In the 5 years I've lost 3 or 4 mechanical drives in my MBP's and only lost the amount of time it took to buy a new HD and restore.

I'm much happier with the day-to-day SSD speeds and I figure if the drive lasts a year or so I'm still on par with my usual HD burn out rate.

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