SSD price justification

[SimMike2]

Everyone complains about the price of SSD drives, especially per GB compared to regular drives. And most agree they are a really nice upgrade to your computer, but a little too pricey.

In one respect they might save you money. You can upgrade your two year old system with a good SSD drive.It will probably give you enough boost in speed that your old system feels new again. So this means you don't need to spend money on a new motherboard, CPU and RAM. Just the SSD drive. In my opinion getting an SSD drive is similar to the major CPU change I described above, in terms of responsiveness of your computer. For people like this, you save money by getting a cheaper, one piece upgrade, as opposed to an expensive and complicated CPU change.

To sum up, an SSD, while appearing to be overly expensive at first, can actually save you money by breathing new life into your old computer. So you can delay your next major computer upgrade for maybe two more years, at least.

 

[Blain]

You can upgrade your two year old system with a good SSD drive.It will probably give you enough boost in speed that your old system feels new again. So this means you don't need to spend money on a new motherboard, CPU and RAM. Just the SSD drive.

If you're running a 2 year old system...
upgrading to a higher density HD (WD 1TB Black with a 64MB cache)
and reloading your OS, will give you a nice snappy system with tons of capacity for about $100.

 

[HendrixFan]

If you're running a 2 year old system...
upgrading to a higher density HD (WD 1TB Black with a 64MB cache)
and reloading your OS, will give you a nice snappy system with tons of capacity for about $100.

I would bet that a $100 SSD drive would feel like a bigger upgrade. For that price you can install the OS and quite a few apps.

 

[Emulex]

i have done:
p4-2.8 (no HT) - X25-V
p4-3.06 HT - X18-M

both have had stupendous gains where CPU is constantly pegging out (XP) and the disk light is never on - i'd say a typical business class desktop p5300/2gb(ram aint cheap right now), 7200.12 250gb, xp pro is SLOWER doing office tasks.

ie: 12 browser tabs (flash/java enabled), outlook with 4gb cache/local pst, a few custom apps, word, adobe reader.

Massive gains found are obviously boot, indexer 4.0 search (outlook!), office 2007 load times, having much larger cache in IE/firefox since search through thousands of files is near zero compared to hard drive seek time/fragmentation. Backup times and Daily AV scan times are 1/4 - which allows you to sequence (AV scan then backup) and cram more systems into non-overlapping backup windows. 50 machines per night FULL BARE METAL backup no incrementals is a reality.

Also there is the time to provision a new machine, update it, customize it - easily a half to full day dependent on apps for the job role - versus throwing the SSD in the #2 sata port and running a ghost/acronis then swapping out and tweaking (1hr max).

Time crunch - i'd rather spend $100 on x25-v and have massive gains even the mightiest core I series with a standard hard drive.

Heck i'd take an older poo-box celeron dual-core(core2) w/ 2gb x25-V over a P5400 3gb desktop with 7200.12 all day long.

If i need more disk space - storage server works - gigabit link to a dedicated storage server can produce quick a bit of i/o without the hassle of non-raid/non-ecc machines.

 

[Valis]

How long can you run windows on these SSDs? Swap files/Temp/Documents and Settings. 2 years? I have HDDs from the mid 90s that still works fine. Speed is nice, but the memory types in flash disks are pure s**t.

Maybe when something like MRAM is used for SSDs I'll buy one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_Random_Access_Memory

 

[Mark R]

How long can you run windows on these SSDs? Swap files/Temp/Documents and Settings. 2 years? I have HDDs from the mid 90s that still works fine. Speed is nice, but the memory types in flash disks are pure s**t.

Flash does wear out - with all the temp files, disk swap etc. They may only last 20-30 years, before they wear out, if used for regular office work. Heavy enthusiast use may drop that down to 5-10 years, on a small capacity drive.

Things are a bit different if you are using SSDs in a multi-user server - e.g. E-mail

 

[Modelworks]

How long can you run windows on these SSDs? Swap files/Temp/Documents and Settings. 2 years? I have HDDs from the mid 90s that still works fine. Speed is nice, but the memory types in flash disks are pure s**t.

Nobody really knows how long SSD will last under heavy usage over the years. All we have to go on right now is simulations. Simulations are great for getting a general idea on things but the real answer will not be known till they are used more and a few years have passed.

 

[Voo]

How long can you run windows on these SSDs? Swap files/Temp/Documents and Settings. 2 years? I have HDDs from the mid 90s that still works fine. Speed is nice, but the memory types in flash disks are pure s**t.

Maybe when something like MRAM is used for SSDs I'll buy one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_Random_Access_Memory

Intel and other manufacterers stress tested their drives to get a idea about how many write cycles they get. And those numbers put it in the 5-10years range for desktop usage, so we're talking about unforseeable failures now? Well I'd say that HDDs aren't that much better in that regard..

 

[frostedflakes]

How long can you run windows on these SSDs? Swap files/Temp/Documents and Settings. 2 years? I have HDDs from the mid 90s that still works fine. Speed is nice, but the memory types in flash disks are pure s**t.

Maybe when something like MRAM is used for SSDs I'll buy one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_Random_Access_Memory

Intel claims that their 80GB MLC SSD can handle 100GB of writes per day for five years before reaching the write limit of the flash. 100GB/day is a pretty high and unrealistic load for a desktop. I mean a server could probably kill a drive pretty quick, but with the kind of stress your average user puts on one, it will hold up for a long time.

If you assume a much more reasonable (but still high IMO) write workload of 20GB/day, it will be 25 years before the flash cells wear out. Needless to say, the write limit thing has become a non-issue for desktop usage with modern controllers.

 

[Valis]

5-10 years? Where have you read that? I've heard 2-5 years, and that's normal office use. With linux/ (insert your favorite *nix here) you can atleast easily put /usr or /home /var on another media, easily.

Intel claims that their 80GB MLC SSD can handle 100GB of writes per day for five years before reaching the write limit of the flash. 100GB/day is a pretty high and unrealistic load for a desktop. I mean a server could probably kill a drive pretty quick, but with the kind of stress your average user puts on one, it will hold up for a long time.

If you assume a much more reasonable (but still high IMO) write workload of 20GB/day, it will be 25 years before the flash cells wear out. Needless to say, the write limit thing has become a non-issue for desktop usage with modern controllers.

It's not a matter of the amount of data/bytes, it's the number of writes in a cell. How man? 100k? I can thin of a number of applications that does 1000s of writes every day, that's what 100 days use.

 

[frostedflakes]

Actually yeah it has to do with how much is being written.

Just some quick math. MLC cells are supposed to have a lifespan of at least 10,000 writes. Each block is 4kB, so for an 80GB disk, that's a total of 20 million blocks. You can rewrite each of the these blocks at least 10,000 times according to the manufacturer, so that means over the whole disk, you can perform 2x10^11 write operations. Each write operation is 4kB, so you can write a total of 8x10^11 kB, or 800TB, to the drive. And this is a minimum, like I said, the flash manufacturer will guarantee it for 10,000 writes, but it may last up to 15,000 for example, or more.

Of course this assumes perfect wear leveling and write amplification of exactly one. In real life you're not going to get quite this level of endurance, but with a good controller, it should come pretty close. Intel's claim of 100GB per day for 5 years comes to 182.5TB of total writing.

 

[linster]

If anyone is worried about wear, wait for the upcoming Sandforce controller drives. 0.5x write amplification should help.

 

[Valis]

What about the LARGE amount of data you have on the disk that you never move, say windows, and all the programs. The part of the disk where the most data is written over and over is a small one. It works fine if it is a flash memory in a camera which you fill up and empty / repeat.

 

[Nintendesert]

These drives ship with 5 year warranties, so the companies know they'll last longer than that. If they didn't they wouldn't have warranties that long or they'd lose money on it.

In 5 years, you should be purchasing a new HD. People claiming to hold onto theirs since the 90's are ridiculous.

 

[Voo]

What about the LARGE amount of data you have on the disk that you never move, say windows, and all the programs.

Wear leveling - if you're interested in that topic please read the great articles by Anand about that topic, he explains all that stuff in great detail.

Even the really pessimistic estimates show that no usual desktop usage will be enough to consume all write cycles of a Intel SSD (or any other new ssd with a good controller). I've used my drive since september last year with Win7 and I've not even 4TB of data written to it so far - that's so far away even from the really conservative 100GB/day that Intel claims, that I really not care about that. And yes I'm having my swap file on the SSD, search indexing, everything - no reason to deactivate something just because some people panic for no reason at all. So far all known technical facts really point into one direction, so "I've heart that and that" really isn't a good argument.

Also just think about it: We know that Intel and other manufacterers stress tested their drives and have a good idea about how long those drives will last. Do you really think they would sell them with 5yr warranty if they knew they'd last 2-3 years under normal desktop usage? That compared to the 1-3yrs HDD manufacterers give their drives is also a nice little indicator

If MLC write cycles are a problem for some people than they're running a server/heavy database or other enterprise things on it - there's a reason why we have SLC drives.

 

[shuji07]

IMO mechanical hard drives have higher failure rates.

 

[Ayah]

I got an SSD in December. I'm at 520GB written to drive. This drive probably won't max out its writes in its useful lifetime.

 

[frostedflakes]

How do you guys keep track of the amount of data written to the drive? Is it something that's stored in the SMART data?

Because I was trying to figure this out for my SSD. It's a Samsung drive, though.

 

[Voo]

How do you guys keep track of the amount of data written to the drive? Is it something that's stored in the SMART data?

Because I was trying to figure this out for my SSD. It's a Samsung drive, though.

Intel toolbox with a intel G2 160gb drive under SMART data - host writes. No idea for other controllers, sorry.

 

[frostedflakes]

Unfortunately my Samsung controller doesn't appear to have that SMART parameter. I recently found out that HD Tune Pro has a feature that allows you to monitor disk reads and writes, though. I need to let that run for a few days sometime and get an idea of how much per day I actually write to my SSD. I've run the disk monitor for a couple hours, and extrapolating those results out, I'm writing about 10GB per day to the SSD. But letting it run for a couple days would probably give me a better average.

 

[RU482]

These drives ship with 5 year warranties, so the companies know they'll last longer than that. If they didn't they wouldn't have warranties that long or they'd lose money on it.

In 5 years, you should be purchasing a new HD. People claiming to hold onto theirs since the 90's are ridiculous.

oh come on...what's wrong with hanging on to a hard drive that sounds like a combine, with all the capacity of a $5 flash drive

 

[Blain]

Not all old drives are dead or sound like a jet taking off.
Sure their capacities aren't anywhere near drives today.
But they use longitudinal recording which is one of the reasons they're still in service today.
Perpendicular recording drives won't have such a stellar record of longevity.

 

[her209]

Any word on SATA 6Gbps SSDs?

 

[jimhsu]

What about the LARGE amount of data you have on the disk that you never move, say windows, and all the programs. The part of the disk where the most data is written over and over is a small one. It works fine if it is a flash memory in a camera which you fill up and empty / repeat.

Again I highly recommend the anandtech articles. Wear leveling is designed to shift existing data around, even if it is rarely changed, to ensure that all blocks are .. well, evenly "weared out".

I submit this picture:

This is a block level map of the entire SSD, sorted by block lifespan. Note the delta between the minimally and maximally used block.

If you want some hard figures:

I got my SSD on 7/22/09. That is 271 days ago.
So far I have 6.3 TB of writes. Yes, I'm a heavy user. That translates into 23.2GB/day. I frequently move entire dozen GB game folders to and from the drive, hence the usage.

Using an ultraconservative estimation of 1000 write cycles, I get
1000/(6.3TB/80GB) * 271 days = 9 years and 5 months.

Remember that the SSD is shipped with spare blocks so that the tiny number of blocks that fail after 1000 cycles or so are transparently mapped to a different physical block without changing the logical position. This is called a "reallocated sector"; currently, I have 2.

In reality the number of cycles is closer to 10000 (Intel claims 100000, but I'm not too sure about that), making the life span several decades. By that time, you'll probably find the drive in a museum.

 

[jimhsu]

Intel toolbox with a intel G2 160gb drive under SMART data - host writes. No idea for other controllers, sorry.

Try crystaldiskinfo or similar. Every SSD should report these numbers. The relevant fields are E1 (Host Writes) and 05 (Re-allocated sector count).