Reliability of SSD drives
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Reliability of SSD drives
08-07-2011 8:09 PM
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http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
Re: Reliability of SSD drives
08-07-2011 8:35 PM
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Re: Reliability of SSD drives
09-07-2011 7:53 AM
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However, I will still be installing an SSD into my Ubuntu laptop when the price falls just a little further.
The speed advantage and improved battery time (on a laptop) are really worth the potential inconvenience of short SSD lifespan.
The trick is to synchronise your important data to a networked backup hard drive, so that WHEN the SSD dies, then you don't lose your data.
I personally wouldn't run Windows on an SSD, as that OS is constantly and unnecessarily rewrites many of it's configuration files, and uses a flawed swap file methodology, which therefore wears out flash memory devices MUCH quicker than other OSs.
Re: Reliability of SSD drives
09-07-2011 5:05 PM
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Chances are that if it's working, you can recover the last few minutes of your disk writes and if it fails that you have to rely on on your disk journalling and your boot times will be extended to 30+ seconds.
"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."
Re: Reliability of SSD drives
10-07-2011 1:23 PM
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One of the benefits of SSDs is the relatively low cost of solid state memory, of course another is that it retains its memory when the power goes.
Re: Reliability of SSD drives
10-07-2011 7:18 PM
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Most of your data is fairly static.
So a cheap HD e.g. £50 per TeraByte plus a couple of GB on SSD ought to be ample...
"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."
Re: Reliability of SSD drives
10-07-2011 7:32 PM
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Because when fitted to a laptop an SSD has lower power consumption than the greenest HDD, and therefore gives a significant boost to battery run times.
In addition the disk seek time for every file access drops to nearly zero, and therefore the whole machine feels more responsive, without having to upgrade the CPU or RAM.
Re: Reliability of SSD drives
12-07-2011 11:48 PM
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Backing up is just as necessary whatever type of drive you use.
At any given moment in the universe many things happen. Coincidence is a matter of how close these events are in space, time and relationship.
Opinions expressed in forum posts are those of the poster, others may have different views.
Re: Reliability of SSD drives
13-07-2011 6:24 AM
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Re: Reliability of SSD drives
13-07-2011 6:45 AM
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It seems a lot of failures I have read about recently have been caused by firmware errors and not physical errors. However, a badly configured OS can reduce the life of an SSD by quite a lot, in some cases to months rather than years - M$ operating systems are one of the worst offenders - they should not be run with a swap file so just add more memory and turn off virtual memory.
Re: Reliability of SSD drives
13-07-2011 7:52 AM
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Quote from: Peter ... a badly configured OS can reduce the life of an SSD by quite a lot, in some cases to months rather than years ...
Erm, so we are saying that SSDs are great so long as you don't actually use them!?! Anything that requires a lot of reading and writing, such as the Windows swap file, wears out the drive.
Re: Reliability of SSD drives
13-07-2011 9:29 AM
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@ReedRichard: The present commonly used SSD technologies "wear out" after a lot of write operations. The manufacturers of SSDs use clever algorithms to reduce and hide that effect from most users. If part of the SSD memory dies the built in controller maps around the dead part. For normal usage the lifetime of an SSD is the same as a retail hard disk. However if you run a processor which is a bit short on main memory the operating system will "page out" unused parts of programs resident in the memory to the hard disk. Each of those paging operations involves one or more write operations. Hence excessive paging can in theory bite into the life of an SSD, but manufacturing techniques are improving all the time. SSD technology is taking an increasing role in the as a fast storage layer in "data storage farms" of major data centres. There's a whole IT engineering discipline developing on this issue.
In summary SSDs are expensive, fast, have low power consumption and are shock resistant. They can fail. If you can afford them they can significantly improve the battery life and speed of a laptop computer.
Re: Reliability of SSD drives
13-07-2011 9:30 AM
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We also use SSDs fairly extensively in our primary storage here at work, but they're in a RAID60 set, and in 20 months we've not had a single failure (although we're talking enterprise grade SSDs, rather than residential grade SSDs)
I certainly wouldn't recommend using SSD to store anything mission-critical for the /long/ term
B.
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