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Current state of SSD's
Current state of SSD's
My niece thinks she needs a new laptop. Hers' is all of 4 years old and she imagines its running slowly. (Or it is but could be fiixed.) She wasts a solid state drive. Last I heard, you could only write to them so many times before they started forgetting what they knew. Are they still unreliable in this or some other way? |
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#2
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Current state of SSD's
There was an interesting discussion recently
at Slashdot. I'd just been thinking that maybe SSDs are now mature enough to be a sensible investment. But there seemed to be a lot of people who've had them die suddenly. |
#3
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Current state of SSD's
On Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 7:48:25 PM UTC-5, Mayayana wrote:
There was an interesting discussion recently at Slashdot. I'd just been thinking that maybe SSDs are now mature enough to be a sensible investment. But there seemed to be a lot of people who've had them die suddenly. I will stick with the older IDE drives. I have one that is 15 years old and still going strong. Andy |
#4
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Current state of SSD's
Mayayana wrote:
There was an interesting discussion recently at Slashdot. I'd just been thinking that maybe SSDs are now mature enough to be a sensible investment. But there seemed to be a lot of people who've had them die suddenly. If you happen to come across some articles on that, please post some links when you get a chance. It would be interesting to know more about that. |
#5
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Current state of SSD's
micky wrote:
Current state of SSD's My niece thinks she needs a new laptop. Hers' is all of 4 years old and she imagines its running slowly. (Or it is but could be fiixed.) She wasts a solid state drive. Last I heard, you could only write to them so many times before they started forgetting what they knew. Are they still unreliable in this or some other way? There are three kinds of flash chips in SSDs. SLC - single level cell, the best, used in low capacity enterprise drives, or as a cache in an SSHD drive. Hardly any consumer drives would use these. MLC - stores two bits worth of data per the same storage cell. This is the current workhorse of the consumer market for SSDs. These are OK. TLC - stores three bits worth of data per storage cell. These have exhibited degradation when data is left "cold" on a section of drive for periods of more than three months. I cannot recommend a drive using these chips, to any one. Even if firmware is shipped, to automatically refresh "cold" data, this is a poor way to run flash memories (a wasteful operating mode). If we were to see "slow readout syndrome" start to show up on MLC drives too, then I would not be able to recommend them either. For the time being, MLC still seems safe. Check the customer reviews to see if anyone has experienced less than satisfactory performance. At least one web site, has been testing SSD drives to exhaustion. And some of them have exceeded their expected life by a wide margin. Too bad there wasn't a way to predict which ones would behave like that. As any testing that has taken a few years to complete, the drives today would use entirely different chips. And we wouldn't be able to buy exactly the same SSD drives any more. At least one company was caught changing chip types, without changing the SSD drive model number. So the SSD companies know they'd receive some pretty bad PR feedback, if they do this again. At the very least, a product using MLC today, with model number 12345678, should also contain MLC chips tomorrow. Chips with the same geometry (like 20nm gate dimensions say). If they changed from MLC to TLC, without changing the model number to signify such a production change, then expect them to get blasted by the feedback. The SMART statistics on SSDs offer a different set of metrics than on hard drives. You will need a more modern up-to-date utility to read SSD SMART. In particular, monitor the "remaining drive life", a percentage figure. You see, some manufacturers have designed bizarre behavior into the SSD drives, at the end of their service life. At least one company, turns off both writes *and reads* when the percentage life hits zero. They claim this prevents people from getting unreliable data, but for people who do not do backups, their only copy of a file could be on that drive. So check the end-of-life policy, or do backups daily if you're too lazy to do the leg work. Both hard drives and SSD drives, are at the mercy of firmware bugs. Even hard drives have been bricked by inappropriate behavior with respect to controlling data structures. So in fact, "instant death syndrome" can happen with both SSDs and HDDs. One difference is, the HDD is more sensitive to handling, so if dropped, that's an area which the SSD can outperform the hard drive. It takes a drop a little bit better than a running hard drive would, as nothing is spinning, and there is no microscopic flying height to worry about. Paul |
#6
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Current state of SSD's
On 27/05/2015 6:32 PM, micky wrote:
Current state of SSD's My niece thinks she needs a new laptop. Hers' is all of 4 years old and she imagines its running slowly. (Or it is but could be fiixed.) She wasts a solid state drive. Last I heard, you could only write to them so many times before they started forgetting what they knew. Are they still unreliable in this or some other way? I'd say they're safe and reliable. I got two of them, one in my desktop and one in my laptop. In actual fact, the larger these SSD get, the more reliable they get. The reason is that there is a lot of redundancy built into them, and the larger the memory pool the larger the redundancy pool. I would suggest not getting any SSD that's less than 120GB at least. Yousuf Khan |
#7
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Current state of SSD's
Bill in Co wrote:
Mayayana wrote: There was an interesting discussion recently at Slashdot. I'd just been thinking that maybe SSDs are now mature enough to be a sensible investment. But there seemed to be a lot of people who've had them die suddenly. If you happen to come across some articles on that, please post some links when you get a chance. It would be interesting to know more about that. SSD brickage due to firmware issues, was an issue in the past. But even HDD have had firmware issues of a similar type, with similar results (sudden death syndrome). The only difference seems to be, we cut the HDD guys more slack when they foul up. As long as you check the Newegg customer reviews for the SSD you want to buy, there are enough reviews to get a clear picture of product quality, hen you have some idea whether it's going to brick on you within the first month of usage. Paul |
#8
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Current state of SSD's
On Wed, 27 May 2015 18:08:53 -0700 (PDT), Andy wrote:
I will stick with the older IDE drives. I have one that is 15 years old and still going strong. 17 years for me. |
#9
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Current state of SSD's
On 27/05/2015 23:32, micky wrote:
Current state of SSD's My niece thinks she needs a new laptop. Hers' is all of 4 years old and she imagines its running slowly. (Or it is but could be fiixed.) She wasts a solid state drive. Last I heard, you could only write to them so many times before they started forgetting what they knew. Are they still unreliable in this or some other way? If its running slow now, maybe it just needs all the crap cleaned off. I have done too many laptops which are running like a snail at first, but be time I have cleaned them out they are more or less just like new again. Anyways an SSD can only run at the speed of what SATA speed the laptop is now . That is if it's SATA 2 now then it will always be sata 2. |
#10
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Current state of SSD's
From: "Andy"
On Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 7:48:25 PM UTC-5, Mayayana wrote: There was an interesting discussion recently at Slashdot. I'd just been thinking that maybe SSDs are now mature enough to be a sensible investment. But there seemed to be a lot of people who've had them die suddenly. I will stick with the older IDE drives. I have one that is 15 years old and still going strong. IDE (aka; PATA) is just an interface similar to SATA and SCSI. What you really mean is a "Spindle Drive" referring to physically rotating magentic platters. We separate secondary storage technology now as Solid State Drives and Spindle Drives or media that uses a combination called Hybrid Drives. -- Dave Multi-AV Scanning Tool - http://multi-av.thespykiller.co.uk http://www.pctipp.ch/downloads/dl/35905.asp |
#11
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Current state of SSD's
| If you happen to come across some articles on that, please post some links | when you get a chance. It would be interesting to know more about that. | This was the discussion: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...e-powered-down The topic was actually about false rumors of SSD failure, but the posters brought up other issues. I got the impression that Intel and Samsung made the best SSDs. But then Samsung had some kind of bad batch recently. I've had a hard time finding consistent information. The specs also seem to vary more than hard disk specs do. And they really haven't been around long enough to support claims of long life. My own hesitation is twofold: 1) Given the relatively high cost, I really don't care about booting my computer in 5 seconds vs 30 seconds. 2) If there's any risk of seemingly arbitrary, instant failure that's a deal-breaker for me, since I don't really need the speed. I've never actually had a hard disk fail. When they do there's generally some warning. I help friends with their computers and have a couple I'm currently trying to give away. In most cases those are XP PCs with hard disks more than 10 years old. |
#12
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Current state of SSD's
| We separate secondary storage technology now as Solid State Drives and
| Spindle Drives or media that uses a combination called Hybrid Drives. | Who's "we"? I call them disk drives. There's no confusion between "disk drive" and "SSD", so there's no need to come up with new names. "Spindle drive" sounds to me like a marketing idea cooked up to sell SSDs. It evokes associations with 19th century machinery and wobbly toy tops. |
#13
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Current state of SSD's
From: "Mayayana"
| We separate secondary storage technology now as Solid State Drives and | Spindle Drives or media that uses a combination called Hybrid Drives. | Who's "we"? I call them disk drives. There's no confusion between "disk drive" and "SSD", so there's no need to come up with new names. "Spindle drive" sounds to me like a marketing idea cooked up to sell SSDs. It evokes associations with 19th century machinery and wobbly toy tops. Thank you for expressing your inexperienced, novice, perception. -- Dave Multi-AV Scanning Tool - http://multi-av.thespykiller.co.uk http://www.pctipp.ch/downloads/dl/35905.asp |
#14
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Current state of SSD's
Mayayana wrote:
| If you happen to come across some articles on that, please post some links | when you get a chance. It would be interesting to know more about that. | This was the discussion: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...e-powered-down The topic was actually about false rumors of SSD failure, but the posters brought up other issues. I got the impression that Intel and Samsung made the best SSDs. But then Samsung had some kind of bad batch recently. I've had a hard time finding consistent information. The specs also seem to vary more than hard disk specs do. And they really haven't been around long enough to support claims of long life. My own hesitation is twofold: 1) Given the relatively high cost, I really don't care about booting my computer in 5 seconds vs 30 seconds. 2) If there's any risk of seemingly arbitrary, instant failure that's a deal-breaker for me, since I don't really need the speed. I've never actually had a hard disk fail. When they do there's generally some warning. I help friends with their computers and have a couple I'm currently trying to give away. In most cases those are XP PCs with hard disks more than 10 years old. It turned out the false alarm on data life, was for drives that had already hit the "0% life left" limit. Then, the drives were stored at elevated temperature, and then the data lasted for a week. On some drives, the drive ceases to communicate when the SMART statistic says "0% life remaining", so you cannot even read the data and discover it is corrupted. I didn't catch that detail, when reading the original bad looking documentation. If your drive has life left, it should not perform that poorly. And nobody should be running an SSD with valuable data, all the way down to 0%, just to find out what happens (without having a backup). Moral of that story, is research the prospective drive design, to see what the end-of-life policy is (read-only or brick, are the two policies). If you own a single SSD, then the improvement is the zero seek time parameter. If you own multiple SSD, then the enhanced transfer rate is a boon. But only one poster in the newsgroup, runs an all-SSD operation. The rest of us are too poor for that sort of thing. So the chances of you doing SSD-to-SSD transfers all day long, are pretty limited. Sure, you can go out right now, buy two of them and make a liar out of me, but practical people normally only buy one, and don't do fancy stuff with it. So they're doing SSD to HDD or HDD to SSD transfers, with the HDD limiting the transfer. So seek time is the improvement. When your AV decides to scan the entire Windows folder, that will go a lot faster due to reduced seek time. And if you do Windows Search, without generating an index first, the SSD makes it possible to do such searches in real time. Your Windows OS is a bottleneck to the improvements. While the SSD can have as high as 100,000 IO per second, the OS refuses to deliver them that fast. A much much lower performance number is the result. For example, Windows has interrupt mitigation, which may cap the response from a subsystem. But I have a feeling some other file system code, chops even more performance off the thing. Not sure what that is. I've done tests with RAMDisks here, and spotted these issues. Desktop Windows gets in the way of high I/O, no matter what your best intentions might have been. So if you're disappointed with your new purchase, that's why. Paul |
#15
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Current state of SSD's
| It turned out the false alarm on data life, was
| for drives that had already hit the "0% life left" | limit. Then, the drives were stored at elevated | temperature, and then the data lasted for a week. | On some drives, the drive ceases to communicate | when the SMART statistic says "0% life remaining", | so you cannot even read the data and discover it is | corrupted. I didn't catch that detail, when | reading the original bad looking documentation. | | If your drive has life left, it should not | perform that poorly. Yes. I did mention that it was about a false alarm. What I thought was interesting, though, was the discussion it sparked. Though there seem to be a lot of strong opinions on both sides of the issue. |
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