Laptop / Desktop deals from Dell

refurb

I've never bought anything with a screen refurb, but I've bought quite a few refurb desktops over the years with no problems. Definitely a good deal if the specs suit your needs.

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And?

These were 2 year leased laptops. I have had a company laptop from them for about 4 years now and have had ZERO issues.

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2+4=6yrs on hdd

you better image that to a new hdd or ssd ASAP
life expectency for hdd is about 5yrs

good luck

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life expectency for hdd is about 5yrs

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I have a 120 GB HDD from the very first desktop I built back in 2004 that runs perfectly.

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I can understand an SSD with the limited read/writes it has

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Really, SSDs last a lot longer than some people perceive. The limited read/writes amount to decades of daily normal use.

As for hard drive life expectancy, there is no reliable data published on the subject regarding a consumer environment. None. I'm sure most people have read about BackBlaze's studies, the ones that show brand failure rates. A couple of years ago they stated that failure rates increased significantly after 3 years, but nearly 80% of their drives have lived longer than four years. They extrapolated their data to estimate that their hard drives have an median lifespan of "over 6 years."

Let us not forget, however, that BackBlaze is a cloud storage company, and their data comes from the thousands of consumer drives that they have deployed in an enterprise environment, undergoing the kind of constant use that enterprise drives are built for (or at least warranted for). Backblaze specifically deployed the cheaper consumer drives in their data center because they've apparently determined that the failure rate for these drives under these conditions is low enough to be a cost-effective solution. However, it does render their data less than useful when applying it to consumer use.

Google did a study as well, as did Carnegie Mellon University. Neither of these studies have data beyond 5 years either.

Honestly, I really hope nobody here has taken any advice from retired trucker. I don't believe he's posted anything accurate in any tech board thread so far.

Hard drives can and will fail. Everyone should have a backup solution for anything they do not want to lose, and it should start on day one. There is no special cut-off time when you should retire a hard drive because it's getting old unless it's showing actual signs of degradation or failure, because you should have a backup ready to go when it fails anyway.

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The limited read/writes amount to decades of daily normal use

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Ageed, but I use mine a lot more than Most. Just recently had a Crucial SSD crash on my machine. Had it for about 2 years