What should we do with outdated, but highly-popular questions?

Question

Example: We have a question about SSDs, which is now two years old.

Are SSDs worth the money?

I've been hearing a lot of hype about the SSDs recently. I'm planning to buy a new machine as soon as Windows 7 gets released. My question is are SSDs worth the money on a new Windows 7 Laptop?

Now, here's this one:

Solid-State Drives pros and cons?

_{There's already a thread here about the pros and cons of SSDs that has a lot of votes, so it tends to show up towards the top when you search for SSD info on here. Unfortunately, a lot of the info about pricing, reliability and performance is badly out of date.}

Same question, two years later: now that SSDs are cheaper, faster and presumably more reliable, what are the pros and cons?

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I am somewhat tempted to close it as too localized or NARQ (for obvious reasons) but still we could get some useful information from it as a CW.

My main argument is: I'd rather have current and up-to-date information than a too popular two-year old question with its answers.

Answer 1

This is the sort of case where we should be taking advantage of things like community FAQs and community wiki posts. If we had one single post like this with only one or two canonical answers that were collaboratively edited and maintained as information changes, it would be a much better resource than having a new question every however many months.

In this particular case, the info from the old post is very old. I don't see much value in keeping it - if we were to delete all the existing answers on it to modernize and align with a canonical answer style post, then we might as well start fresh and close that post.

Now, the question itself of "are SSDs worth the money" is completely subjective, and I would close it as "not constructive". However, a post along the lines of "how do SSDs work, what is the current SSD technology, and what are the pros and cons of using them" would be a lot more useful. I think in this particular case, we should close the old one, and make the new one really good, and make it clear that users should contribute to it as a collaborative piece of work to evolve over time.

For some starter material for this particular question, I suggest folks take a look at the SSD articles on the Super User Blog. We have some very nice, detailed posts about SSDs, including a really well researched explanation of what SSDs are and how they work by Kronos. These are things that can be quoted in our answer to this new question, and can also be referenced as a useful outside link.

Answer 2

Obviously, every question about the prices and specs of computer technology is going to be "localized" to a certain degree, as these things are going to be changing rapidly over time. But that's true for a lot of valid questions you could ask on Super User. The entire field of IT is changing rapidly all the time, after all, and the criterion of "This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors" hardly applies to a question about the pros and cons of SSDs, which a ton of people are asking themselves right now.

I also don't think it's "Not a real question" - sure, it does invite discussion to a certain degree, but it can still be answered with objective facts.

The real question we should be asking, I think, is not "too localized?" or "NARQ?" but rather "Should we be editing the old thread to reflect the new facts, or create a new one with current information and close the old one (possibly with a link to the new version)?"