someone told me that if a solid state drive fails, all data is gone FOREVER. in which case, a solid back up plan is necessary when using solid state drives.

Good backups are necessary for any type of drive.

I can't justify the added bucks for a SSD, although when I think what I paid to UPGRADE to a 212 meg HD about 20 years ago.

Many of the reports I have read don't really put them that much faster than a good 7200 SATA. Several comparisons have shown how after time the wear leveling software / alogrythm will begin to slow down the drive.

And can you really notice the speed difference.
Like defragging, with the older drives you could notice the difference, with todays high speed drives can you 'really' notice a difference.

I don't really worry about the wear issue, I don't see most home users every coming close.

But the prices are high compared to regular HDs when comparing size.

Although I got a 500 gig hd (7200 Sata) with this laptop, with the recovery partition, tons of stuff stored here just to store it here and I still have 350+ gig free.
They keep coming out with bigger and bigger drives, I think we are aproaching the point of too much storage.
Much like CPUs, do people realize that Windows, Mac AND Linux don't make good use of multiple CPUs. Particularly past 2 or 3 AND very little software multi-threads to take advantage of multi cores.

__________________
KLK, MCSE

1990 500SL

I was always taught to respect my elders.
I don't have to respect too many people anymore.

SSD's are an order of magnitude faster than rotating disks for non-sequential access, and that's what matters most. If you install one, you will see.

Two years ago, they were not very impressive. But SSDs are evolving fast. In six months, mine is still usable, but much slower than the newest offerings. Slower by a factor of 5 for non-sequential writes. But it's still five times faster than your Velociraptor.

I have a 64G disk as my boot drive now. My data resides on other disks, which I insert when the need arises. One 1T 7200rpm disk contains my home directories for Fedora, which is there with the 64G SSD. Others come and go as needed.

A good 7200 RPM SATA disk is pretty fast, but mine will only take about 117MB/sec in a sequential write. The SSD does over 200, and it's not even the latest technology.

Prices are high, but it's not bad if you only need one in a system. I could have saved more money by going AMD instead of Core i7. Or by not having external bays for my disks. Or by not having a liquid cooler on the CPU. Or by not buying the best acoustically-insulated case that I could find. You make your choices, and you get the performance that you pay for.

With a platter, data recovery may be possible on a failed drive. But since this costs several thousand dollars, it is really not an option for most people. Backups are cheaper.

Any disk will eventually fail, so all data must be redundant.