The state of solid state hard drives?
Discussion
.I would argue an SSD is an excellent choice nowadays. My self built machine has an SSD to boot from and some applications on and then I have a spinning drive that is used to keep an image of the SSD on and warehouse files. I think they're excellent, more reliable than a spinning disk (provided you don't do lots of writing to them) and make a machine so responsive.
Basically
Pros-
Speed
Reliability
silence/power consumption
Cons-
Price
Ability to be used in devices where writing to them is key
Price
In a nutshell I would say run two drives. A, SSD to boot from and a spinning drive to stick other files on.
Basically
Pros-
Speed
Reliability
silence/power consumption
Cons-
Price
Ability to be used in devices where writing to them is key
Price
In a nutshell I would say run two drives. A, SSD to boot from and a spinning drive to stick other files on.
Total no-brainer. SSDs are cheap, capacious and reliable these days.
All of the five main PCs in my house run SSDs with the longest-served coming up for four years old now. Never had a failure, which is more than I can say for the so-called 'server-class' magnetic drives that run in my NAS.
All of the five main PCs in my house run SSDs with the longest-served coming up for four years old now. Never had a failure, which is more than I can say for the so-called 'server-class' magnetic drives that run in my NAS.
Generally fine. Ultimately with enough writes the flash memory will start failing. As with spinning hard drives, you may get the odd one that fails early.
Techreport tested several to failure, by continuously writing data for months on end. 100TB of writes is far more than most desktop drives will ever write - they made it through that a few times over. Some were still OK after 2PB of writes.
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-enduran...
Techreport tested several to failure, by continuously writing data for months on end. 100TB of writes is far more than most desktop drives will ever write - they made it through that a few times over. Some were still OK after 2PB of writes.
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-enduran...
Agreed - I run two
One to boot from and low resource stuff, the other specifically for games.
PC is nearly two years since I built it and running strong.
It's such a breath of fresh air to be able to turn it on and within 30 seconds be working. Not like the old days when you'd go and make a cup of tea before you could even log in.
One to boot from and low resource stuff, the other specifically for games.
PC is nearly two years since I built it and running strong.
It's such a breath of fresh air to be able to turn it on and within 30 seconds be working. Not like the old days when you'd go and make a cup of tea before you could even log in.
deckster said:
Total no-brainer. SSDs are cheap, capacious and reliable these days.
All of the five main PCs in my house run SSDs with the longest-served coming up for four years old now. Never had a failure, which is more than I can say for the so-called 'server-class' magnetic drives that run in my NAS.
At least you usually get a bit of warning via strange clicking noises or a bunch of SMART alerts before spinning rust completely fails though. All of the five main PCs in my house run SSDs with the longest-served coming up for four years old now. Never had a failure, which is more than I can say for the so-called 'server-class' magnetic drives that run in my NAS.
Not a bean from the last few SSDs I've seen fail. Working one moment, then dead the next.
Oh and the Sammy drives I have currently keep needing to be rewritten with DiskFresh to maintain performance.
In general though, really good, I would choose them for anything except cheap bulk storage.
Edited by budgie smuggler on Tuesday 28th July 15:06
I switched to a SSD C: drive and HDD D: drive a while ago, I have Acronis TrueImage do a compressed image backup of the SSD to the hard disk every Friday night, in case the SSD fails. The system boots up and responds very quickly with the SSD. It is a Crucial MX100 512GB.
If you have a recent Intel motherboard which supports this then you can try a sort of halfway-house solution using Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technology). You add an SSD to your system which then is configured to act as a cache for frequently used data on the designated HDD.
I did this for a while with a Plextor 64GB SSD (64GB was the maximum amount you could cache with at the time) and once you'd booted the machine a few times and run your most used apps a few times it was much faster than with an HDD as stock. I was amazed how much slower the machine booted and ran when I disabled the RST cache to swap over to the new Crucial SSD.
If you have a recent Intel motherboard which supports this then you can try a sort of halfway-house solution using Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technology). You add an SSD to your system which then is configured to act as a cache for frequently used data on the designated HDD.
I did this for a while with a Plextor 64GB SSD (64GB was the maximum amount you could cache with at the time) and once you'd booted the machine a few times and run your most used apps a few times it was much faster than with an HDD as stock. I was amazed how much slower the machine booted and ran when I disabled the RST cache to swap over to the new Crucial SSD.
Modern SSDs are generally very reliable and you'd have to absolutely hammer them with writes to wear them out in less than 3-4 years. I do think the perceived 'unreliability' of SSDs is greatly overstated here on threads like this. In any case if downtime associated with individual disk failure poses a substantial risk then buy a pair and mirror them just as you would with conventional disks.
Smaller capacity enterprise eMLC SATA SSDs are also becoming affordable to the point where you can install them in desktops/laptops if you want increased assurance of reliability - look at Intel DCS3610/3710 for example, the latter are warranted for 10 whole drive writes per day over 5 years and start from £250. Try doing that with a spinning disk.
I use several client-provided workstations with Windows 7 on spinning disk and they are utterly terrible to use. If they didn't use full disk encryption I'd swap them out for my own SSDs just to make them useable.
Smaller capacity enterprise eMLC SATA SSDs are also becoming affordable to the point where you can install them in desktops/laptops if you want increased assurance of reliability - look at Intel DCS3610/3710 for example, the latter are warranted for 10 whole drive writes per day over 5 years and start from £250. Try doing that with a spinning disk.
I use several client-provided workstations with Windows 7 on spinning disk and they are utterly terrible to use. If they didn't use full disk encryption I'd swap them out for my own SSDs just to make them useable.
Thanks for all the replies so far; I should have added in my original post that I'm not exactly tech savvy when it comes to computers 
.
I've not looked at all the specific alternatives mentioned so far but I see that you can specify a hybrid drive,
would that be the best of both worlds?
.I've not looked at all the specific alternatives mentioned so far but I see that you can specify a hybrid drive,
would that be the best of both worlds?
SSDs can have some quirks, it's well worth at least doing a cursory Google search to see if one you're looking at has some kind of known pecularity with older firmware or whatever.
Had a friend buy a Crucial SSD a few years back which had a quite esoteric fault in that after it had passed 5000 hours total runtime it would bluescreen randomly for no reason. That's the sort of problem that you'd never expect to really happen, and if you weren't savvy enough to do your research could spend a lot of time and potentially money trying to get to the bottom of. Turned out to be a firmware bug which was subsequently fixed by Crucial.
That being said the technology has matured considerably in recent years and I would recommend Crucial SSDs, and SSDs in general, with the caveat of keeping an eye on firmware updates. An SSD is perhaps the most significant real world practical boost you can give a computer in my experience.
Had a friend buy a Crucial SSD a few years back which had a quite esoteric fault in that after it had passed 5000 hours total runtime it would bluescreen randomly for no reason. That's the sort of problem that you'd never expect to really happen, and if you weren't savvy enough to do your research could spend a lot of time and potentially money trying to get to the bottom of. Turned out to be a firmware bug which was subsequently fixed by Crucial.
That being said the technology has matured considerably in recent years and I would recommend Crucial SSDs, and SSDs in general, with the caveat of keeping an eye on firmware updates. An SSD is perhaps the most significant real world practical boost you can give a computer in my experience.
Just to add weight to the SSD argument.
I have been using SSDs for three and a half years. Two are in a lightly used self built HTPC. (Both drives 3.5 years old) and one in a laptop (2 years old)
They have transformed the performance of my PCs and like others in this thread I would not spec a PC with a conventional drive now. I have had no reliability problems but I do regular backups to a conventional portable drive. (which I always did anyway because I have had three conventional drives fail in my time using PCs (since the early 1990s!))
As prices have dropped it really is a no brainer. I have not looked at prebuilt systems recently, but manufacturers always used to have an unjustified premium on SSDs - hence my original home built option PS home build is not that difficult to achieve either. If you can complete a technical Lego kit then home building is a cinch (speccing it might be more difficult to ensure compatibility - but plenty of experts here can help!)
Mike
I have been using SSDs for three and a half years. Two are in a lightly used self built HTPC. (Both drives 3.5 years old) and one in a laptop (2 years old)
They have transformed the performance of my PCs and like others in this thread I would not spec a PC with a conventional drive now. I have had no reliability problems but I do regular backups to a conventional portable drive. (which I always did anyway because I have had three conventional drives fail in my time using PCs (since the early 1990s!))
As prices have dropped it really is a no brainer. I have not looked at prebuilt systems recently, but manufacturers always used to have an unjustified premium on SSDs - hence my original home built option PS home build is not that difficult to achieve either. If you can complete a technical Lego kit then home building is a cinch (speccing it might be more difficult to ensure compatibility - but plenty of experts here can help!)
Mike
If you can afford then get one - does make a huge difference if you're moving from regular spinning disks.
Don't get caught up in the specs, they are orders of magnitude faster than spinning disks (in terms of IOPs), so you won't notice the difference.
The crucial M5xx range is the only consumer SSD I know of that includes power loss protection. This means if you lose power to your machine then you shouldn't end up with any corrupt data.
Don't get caught up in the specs, they are orders of magnitude faster than spinning disks (in terms of IOPs), so you won't notice the difference.
The crucial M5xx range is the only consumer SSD I know of that includes power loss protection. This means if you lose power to your machine then you shouldn't end up with any corrupt data.
cornet said:
The crucial M5xx range is the only consumer SSD I know of that includes power loss protection. This means if you lose power to your machine then you shouldn't end up with any corrupt data.
That's good advice for me as I live in a small village that seems to get more than its fair share of power cuts ...... but unfortunately the Crucial M5xx range are no longer available .I use Samsung pro in my work pc. Its on 10+ hours a day and does not miss a beat. I do back it up quite often now just in case as its several years old. I started a thread on here a while ago about SSD reliability and downloaded a little tool that tells you if there are any issues - my laptop is in work but will post on Monday the name of it.
I've have three SSDs in a gaming / office machine, all Samsung EVOs 256Gb units, a pair of 840's that I fitted when I built the machine about 18 months ago and a more recent 850 EVO (cheaper than the recently EOL 840's).
No problems at all, the performance is - honestly - staggering. Boot up is very fast, load times for games very fast, the system itself feels zippy and responsive too (Windows 8.1).
My only regret is not getting bigger drives, 500Gb is obviously more space per SATA port but is also the point at which the risk cache size increases for a little extra performance. That's probably somewhat academic though as any SSD nowadays will be fast.
Samsung EVO drives recommended
No problems at all, the performance is - honestly - staggering. Boot up is very fast, load times for games very fast, the system itself feels zippy and responsive too (Windows 8.1).
My only regret is not getting bigger drives, 500Gb is obviously more space per SATA port but is also the point at which the risk cache size increases for a little extra performance. That's probably somewhat academic though as any SSD nowadays will be fast.
Samsung EVO drives recommended
red_slr said:
I use Samsung pro in my work pc. Its on 10+ hours a day and does not miss a beat. I do back it up quite often now just in case as its several years old. I started a thread on here a while ago about SSD reliability and downloaded a little tool that tells you if there are any issues - my laptop is in work but will post on Monday the name of it.
That would be appreciated. Cheers.Been using SSD's for the last 3 years or so for both home and work.
Never had one fail so far.
Verses spinning drives, they are the biggest leap forward we have seen for some time!
Only downside is capacity. If you really need several TB of storage, use an SSD as your boot drive and a spinning disk for big stuff.
Never had one fail so far.
Verses spinning drives, they are the biggest leap forward we have seen for some time!
Only downside is capacity. If you really need several TB of storage, use an SSD as your boot drive and a spinning disk for big stuff.
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