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Your plan is a good one, as it helps ensure you get what you need now and for the foreseeable future, plus helps manage costs.
Other than the HD, I always plan for components to last a minimum of 5 years. Since I got 8 out of the last CPU/MB/RAM, I'm quite pleased.
I replace my primary HD every ~2 years. This forces me to reload Windows from scratch, which removes problems produced by continual updates, and ensures my HD is solid. Nothing worse than a failed HD, regardless of how good the backup schedule is. I use the old HD for online and offline backups, and have a Sabrent external unit that let's me hot swap HD (SATA HD and SSD).
That plan will break down with the new HD, which is an M2. It's system files only, so I'll probably run it longer than previous boot disks.
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Meantime between failure for solid state is something like 15-20 years, if I recall correctly.
For HDDs it's about 10, again if I recall correctly.
Of course, I suppose that depends on how much writing you do, but the writes will fail first, meaning your data should be recoverable.
My point is, it might be worth changing your plan accordingly now that you're on solid state.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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Thanks for the feedback! Your point is an important one.
Folks talk about SSD failure, and before this I never delved deeply into it. One study that I found repeated references to stated that HDD have a 300,000 hour mean time before critical failure, while SSD have 1,500,000 hours.
This translates to 171 years and 34 years, respectively.
I have serious doubts regarding these figures, as they are theoretical and calculated. Given my practical experience, I don't trust HDD after 7 years, and have erred on the side of caution. But it does appear that SSD last a lot longer than HDD.
Another point mentioned in a blog -- look at the manufacturer's warranty period. In the case of my Samsung M2, that's 5 years, while for SanDisk SSD it's 3 years.
Again, thanks for the feedback, you've got me thinking about this. Unless I have a failure, I have 2.5 years before I need to make a decision, and that decision may be to wait.
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I've been building/upgrading my own systems since the early 90's and I've never had a HDD fail because the drive itself completely died. I'm not saying it can't happen but that's what backups are for. For the most part, I've replaced the drives because I needed more space or more speed long before the drives themselves failed. The oldest drive I have in any of the family's systems today is from 2015. Back then, I was replacing 500GB (or less) spinning HDDs which are basically worthless now. Today, the only place I have spinning HDDs are 4TB drives in a NAS.
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matblue25 wrote: I've been building/upgrading my own systems since the early 90's and I've never had a HDD fail because the drive itself completely died. Nor have I. But I have lost files because of bad sectors, and was thankful I had good backups.
Always validate backups. In the early 90's I worked for an office that had a great backup schedule. Nightly incremental backups, full on Friday nights, full monthly backups that were kept for a year. They had been doing this for years!
It worked fantastic until we had to restore 1 file from a backup. Turns out we couldn't read any of the backups. Daily swapping of cartridges for years was a completely pointless effort.
That office replaced the backup system 9 months after we reported the problem .......
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100% agree. Online, offline and offsite backups and check them regularly that I can recover files.
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