I recently read a blog post by the so-famous Jeff Atwood that has been disturbing me, but let me back up a bit.

I was recently considering dropping a solid state drive in my system, to run beside my regular 'spinny' hard drive. After getting my Sandy Bridge system up and running with properly working SATA ports, I've been thinking 'What next?' Maybe an SSD, then in a GPU generation or two, up the video card. And whenever ZFS gets integrated into the Linux kernel, buy multiple multi-terabyte hard drives and drop them into my server.

Anyways, to my point. I'm not likely to buy an SSD for the issue presented in the first half of Atwood's post. If you've been remotely connected to the computer hardware scene of late, SSDs are in. They are extremely fast, but they aren't cheap or spacious. And apparently fail a lot, like 15 to 500 days to 'OMG I can't get to my files datafail.'

If I need to replace the thing every year or so, I don't think so. As unreliable as storage devices are, expecting at least 3 years of operational service life out of them shouldn't be too much to ask. While I am aware of a certain 'infant mortality' effect of spinnies (pdf), it is usually not encountered, and if it is, is often covered under warranty.