And then they'll drop more after that. And then more after that. That's technology... How is this relevant? You have a 50% subsidy on it...

I'd say get an SSD now.

The price has already come down a lot since I got mine about a year ago (man, where did the time go?). Which is to say the price is actually about the same or a little less, but the capacity has increased a lot (doubled), and the speeds have too. But really getting an "ultra-fast" SSD isn't worth it I don't think - you'll pay an extra premium, it'll be beaten by new technology within a few months, and merely a 'very fast' SSD will still be hundreds of times better than a HD anyway.

If you get an SSD, it would be better to get one with SLC rather than MLC flash memory if possible, since it has more write cycles (from what I've heard). It also happens to be faster.

Never mind what I said earlier, I checked my notes and the vendor told me that nowadays, people lose about 40% of their stuff from disk failures. That's why it's a good thing to get an SSD, even if it doesn't have as much space. The best thing is to constantly back up. When I'm done, it's a good practice to transfer things I won't need to my external hard drive.

Does an SSD have a low failure rate? Also, does the SSD completely replace the HD? So if you wanted to replace and HD with like 200 gbs worth of stuff, you'd have to get a 200 gb SSD?

I believe this is a good comparison: SSD vs HDD

SSDs can fail, so you should back things up. I used to have a simple laptop + external HDD setup, where my laptop runs SSDs and stores whats necessary and my HDD stores everything else. Then my external hard drive failed, so I got a NAS (server-thing) with two hard drives in RAID1 (the data is written to both, so if one hard drive dies, the other still has the data). A cheaper but less convenient solution for you is to have two external hard drives, or an external hard drive and a desktop to back things up to. You can also use web services to store some things; Skydrive is one of Microsoft's free web services and it offers 25GB of storage, for example, which will likely be enough for all of your photos, your music, or both. Unfortunately, though, Microsoft hasn't made it possible to just stream stuff off Skydrive, nor, as far as I know, expand that 25GB.

From my (limited) experience, SSD's have lower failure rates; I've heard that SSDs can greatly slow down or break as well, but I just haven't seen it. Specifically, though, I believe that SSDs are much more resistant to collisions than regular hard drives, due to there not being moving parts (no spinning disk, as in a conventional drive), which means that in a laptop that you plan to carry around, there is, at the very least, that advantage. I've had several drive failures in devices with spinning drives (external hard drive, Zune 120, etc) that I carried around a lot, but no flash-based storage failures. With TRIM, most of the slowdown can be avoided, and other workarounds can be found. For example, TRIM doesn't (or, last I checked, didn't) work with SSDs in RAID configurations, but I've read that either Sony or Samsung developed their own cleaning mechanism to keep the SSDs running in the Vaio Z line of laptops - and, though it hasn't been an extremely long time or anything, I've seen no performance degredation.

Just a quick grab-bag reply to earlier posts about SSDs.

SLC memory has higher write cycles and also greater performance, but will cost much much more money. SLC drives are aimed at big enterprise, where cost isn't an issue (eg, 1 complete system might cost $100,000, and they need 20 of them, and they throw them out after 18 months and buy new ones) but up-time and system reliability is. For consumers, MLC is perfectly fine.

In laptops, hard drive failure is quite common, because unlike a desktop, laptops get put through much more physical abuse. So SSDs in laptops make a lot of sense. Laptop HDs are also typically slower than desktop counterparts, due to power constraints, size constraints (not so much any more) and because slower HDs are easier to protect from physical shocks. So SSDs make doubly-more sense for laptops because laptop HDs are slower than desktop ones to begin with.

Too much fuss has been made about SSD lifetimes. Yes, they have a finite lifetime when they will wear out, whereas HDs nominally don't. But HD's actually suffer from physical failure much more readily - some studies I've seen done by Google show that hard drive failure rate in their servers reach 50% at 5 years of age. The link that Apos posted is very good, and mentions this about SSD life time: "Or about 40 years of non-stop writing due to write cycle limits".

SSDs are still prone to DoA like any other hardware, and recently some of the cutting-edge models using Sandforce controllers have been a bit flaky. But I don't recommend getting the cutting-edge anyway because of the price premium. If you're worried about quality, Intel SSDs will generally be the most reliable as they'll have had the most validation and verification testing done on them simply because Intel has the cash to throw at those things whereas smaller companies do not.

There are some tweaks that can be done to reduce writes in just about any OS. I seem to recall there being some topics about it (especially for Windows, but other OS's might be covered) on OCZ's forum for their SSDs. There is information about disabling automatic updates of the "last access" time to reduce unnecessary writes and various other tweaks to help extend the life of your SSD. Might be something to look into if you get one, regardless of brand or type.

It's a laptop, he likely won't know what brand is providing the SSDs. And in the name of profits, they won't be Intel SSDs. It shouldn't matter.

I wouldn't buy a laptop that came with SSDs unless I knew exactly what they were. If that wasn't an option, I'd just buy it with an HD and put an SSD in myself, and put the HD in a portal enclosure or sell it.

When manufacturers take into account that the drive is an ssd, they can take advantage of its smaller size. Also, it's an unnecessary hassle for the paranoid to do that; its much more convenient to get a prebuilt than opening it up, risking something breaking, etc. It's not in the manufacturers interest to sell you a gimped product, the built-in should be fine.

So long as it isn't a mac, laptop HDDs are simple to take out.

Most SSDs are the standard 2.5" form-factor of HDs. This is especially the case when you are buying an SSD version or upgrade of a laptop that usually comes with an HD - it's a simple drop-in replacement.

Modern laptops are not scary to take apart at all. Mac's might be another story, however.

And yet when Apple first rolled out SSDs in their macbook air, they used Samsung SSDs which were severely inferior to 3rd party SSDs, including those from Intel. Apple went with Samsung because they scored a sweet deal with them as a supplier, not because they were doing it in the best interests of the customer. I've no idea what they put in their macs now, but clearly if a premium-price company like Apple was willing to put crap in their laptops, your blind assumption that manufacturer's work in the best interests of the customer is flawed.

I've you going to spend several hundred extra on a purely optional upgrade, I think it's reasonable to make sure that you're not throwing your money away. If this means you can't buy a specific laptop because the manufacturer won't tell you what's in it, so be it.

Geh. Whatever, I'm not going to argue about this. If he wants to open and fiddle with his laptop, more power to him.