SSD drives

[Poita (Peter)]

Originally Posted by LightningNZ

They are also quite expensive, but if you need reliability, sure they're tops. If you're purchasing for enterprise-level I/O buffering then the Intel S3700 is simply the best you can buy right now.

Even so, if an SSD dies within warranty, it should only ever be an inconvenience. If you lose data off one then you aren't backing up properly.

-Cam

If you lose an entire night's planetary catpures it feels more than inconvenient. They can die in the middle of using them.

But I have found standard platter Hard Drives to be less reliable than SSDs of late.
The intel SSDs are only a few dollars more and well worth it.

[Garbz (Chris)]

Originally Posted by Poita

If you lose an entire night's planetary catpures it feels more than inconvenient. They can die in the middle of using them.

So can any drive. They can just spontaneously die for no reason. But what is more likely, a laptop which is outside and potentially susceptible to bumps, drops, etc causing the sudden death of an intricate electromechanical device? Or some chips with no moving parts giving up for no reason in the middle of their life?

[Tandum (Robin)]

I have ssd drives is several yellow cab data base machines across town.
Twas the only way to get the crap software to respond properly.
2 years + and no failures.

Yes backups are there if they fail.

[Poita (Peter)]

Originally Posted by Garbz

So can any drive. They can just spontaneously die for no reason. But what is more likely, a laptop which is outside and potentially susceptible to bumps, drops, etc causing the sudden death of an intricate electromechanical device? Or some chips with no moving parts giving up for no reason in the middle of their life?

Oh I'd vote for the SSD to survive. Was just pointing out that backups aren't always possible.

I am a total SSD convert, but I spend the extra to get intel or crucial drives these days.

[jamiep (Jamie)]

SSD drives are great - but when they drop their bundle they do so in style ... an old mechanical drive if a control board failed etc you could find a like model and swap components to get the data off - SSD's you're much more dependent on backups. Having said that if you put a pair in and mirror, more often than not you'll have a backup in the event of a failure.

They're soooooooo much faster it's becoming a must have IMO.

I'm also pretty confident the latest platter drives are a case of engineered to cost/fail - if you pick one up they're a fraction of the weight of previous drives (plastic bodies etc, cheap cost of manufacture = decreased lifetime).

If you purchase high reliability and high speed server drives (mechanical) they're like bricks in comparison, so the cuts are coming from somewhere!

[icytailmark (Mark)]

i just purchased a samsung 840 pro 256gb. They are getting great reviews. im gunna stick my OS on there and a few apps. I will store most of my data on a 1tb regular sata drive. Thanks for everyones feedback.

[acropolite (Phil)]

There's been quite a bit of dialog on SSD performance, but no mention of the associated hardware requirements to achieve that performance.

To get the advertised transfer rates on the Samsung 840Pro for example, you need a very good SATA 3 controller. Quite a few of the controllers on recent motherboads, despite being SATA 3, have abysmal performance, the Marvel 9128 SATA 3 chipset on my Gigabyte I7 board is slower than the SATA 2 interfaces on the motherboard.

I've investigated aftermarket cards, but the only PCI slot suitable on the motherboard is used by my video card, the performance demands for add on PCI sata 3 cards are very high. I'll be looking at replacing a perfectly good i7 (socket 1156) and motherboard to get the full performance from the 840Pro, as soon as the latest socket change happens (due over the next few weeks apparently)
In the meantime, I'll install the 840 on a SATA port and take a slight hit on performance, not as bad as the benchmark figures would suggest from what I've read.

[dpastern (Dave Pastern)]

As others have said, o/s and applications on the SSD, data on an ordinary drive.

The beauty with SSDs is that they tend to only fail on the writing side of things, so if the drive stuffs up, you can always read it and get the data off, unlike with an ordinary drive (barring physical damage to the SSD of course!!!).

I bought a Samsung 840 pro 256GB drive for my new PC - the drive itself is fast, but Samsung's software is horrible and their support non existent, which reminds me that I must get back in touch with them and blast them for such crappy support. OCZ has excellent support and I should have sacrificed a few percent in speed for the better support. Oh well, you live and learn.

If you want speed on your data, you could consider a SCSI card and drives, but they're expensive, not easy to find, and storage rates haven't really increased for them like with ordinary drives. Perhaps a WD raptor (10k spin rate drive) might be OK too as a compromise?

I typically go raid 1 as data integrity is more important to me than outright speed.

I have to say I'm not enamoured of most of the new technologies - having just went through nightmare with my new PC (issues still not resolved), especially with AHCI and EFI.

Dave

[LightningNZ (Cam)]

Even the fastest Raptors can't hold a candle to even the slowest of today's SSDs. Seriously, just get one, download your image stack, combine your image data and then back it up. It's also pretty unlikely these days that you'll get an SSD that'll die within warranty.

You don't need the very latest SATA to get a massive performance boost either. You won't notice the difference between 300 MB/s and 600 MB/s, you will notice the difference between 80 MB/s and 300 MB/s...

One last benefit that I haven't noticed mentioned yet is that other running processes will not soak up your disks ability to deal with multiple requests. Even a cheap, totally loaded up SSD will offer 100x the number of IOs per second that even a Raptor can offer. I know that's not a big deal for desktop users, but I noticed that even just AV + Spybot would take up a significant number of IOs that my old 7200 rpm drives could offer.

[deadsimple (Ash)]

I would not listen to the doom and gloom posts and come to the conclusion that all SSDs are unreliable. Those users were unfortunate to buy from manufacturers such as OCZ, Corsair, etc. They have been known for a couple of years to have poor quality control and have pushed out series after series of unreliable drives, yet many people still bought them due to the lower price (at the time) and then complained about data loss. Others were unfortunate to not know about the unreliability before purchase, as store sales staff will push anything to get rid of stock.

As others have said, Samsung's series are excellent, as are most of the Intels and the ones from Crucial. I don't even need to list the models as those companies have consistently pushed out reliable solid-state drives and have good quality control overall.

I personally have several Crucial C300s & C400s, and my current system has a Samsung 830. However, despite the very low failure rates from these manufacturers, I still run regular backups as any electronics hardware can fail unexpectedly.

If you're after some backup software, I'd wholeheartedly recommend Macrium Reflect:

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

The free version is very capable, and unlike junk like Acronis or most of the other backup software you see on the market with all the bells and whistles, it's actually very reliable and won't unexpectedly fail on you when you're trying to restore your data despite giving you a thumbs up during the backup itself.

[Garbz (Chris)]

Interesting conclusion you drew about reliability. Corsair are well known for their excellent quality control in the memory world, and OCZ are far from cheap and nasty. Samsung on the other hand are pushing out drives using the cheapest possible high density MLC modules which have known lower failure rates.

I would conclude is that users were burnt by the issues early Sandforce controllers had which were used by multiple vendors. All these issues were resolved via firmware updates, but then how many people do you know who have actually checked to see if their SSD has the latest firmware?

The failure rates across all manufacturers for SSD is lower than HDD with no one being able to conclusively like to any problem so far other than a particular series of Sandforce controllers which isn't used in any current drive. Yet the fear factor is still there for some reason...

[deadsimple (Ash)]

Originally Posted by Garbz

Corsair are well known for their excellent quality control in the memory world, and OCZ are far from cheap and nasty.

If you had said that say 3-4 years ago, I would have agreed with you. Unfortunately since then, the statistics consistently disagree.

Memory return rates:

2010: http://www.behardware.com/articles/7...rns-rates.html
2011a: http://www.behardware.com/articles/8...rns-rates.html
2011b: http://www.behardware.com/articles/8...s-rates-5.html
2012a: http://www.behardware.com/articles/8...s-rates-6.html
2012b: http://www.behardware.com/articles/8...s-rates-7.html
2013: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/893-4/memoires.html

Corsair and OCZ topping the list for highest rate of returns since 2010.

SSD return rates:

2011a: http://www.behardware.com/articles/8...rns-rates.html
2011b: http://www.behardware.com/articles/8...s-rates-5.html
2012a: http://www.behardware.com/articles/8...s-rates-6.html
2012b: http://www.behardware.com/articles/8...s-rates-7.html
2013: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/893-7/ssd.html

Again OCZ and Corsair topping almost all the lists for returns rates, even to this day when the obvious Sandforce problems are long past. Also, user reviews on Amazon.com and Newegg.com have a strong correlation with the above statistics.

I would conclude is that users were burnt by the issues early Sandforce controllers had which were used by multiple vendors. All these issues were resolved via firmware updates, but then how many people do you know who have actually checked to see if their SSD has the latest firmware?

Here's the thing. It still comes down to quality control and the manufacturer's technical ability. While OCZ and Corsair were blaming Sandforce for months and waiting for fixes to trickle down to them while still producing and shipping new drives based on the faulty Sandforce tech, Intel jumped in when Sandforce stability was still bad and silently fixed the major bugs on their own without raising a sweat before the first unit was shipped, since it was a standard part of their quality control processes.

It's a shame that OCZ/Corsair did not scale back and put more resources towards solving the critical bugs, and yes this has scared people in the long-term. Then again, many people haven't done a backup in years and are always surprised when their drives die, as though there was no way around losing the data.

[Tandum (Robin)]

I thought ocz was in recievership?