SSD vs Traditional HD

[brad310]

Im going to build in the next couple months and need to get my ducks in a row.

I can figure most of what i want, but i value the input the community can give me here as it relates to a SSD versus a regular HD. Ive built several of my own in the past, but it has been about 6 years since i delved into hardware for a home build.

All of the reading i can find on SSDs have many of the pros...but i keep running accross that they have "limited number of write operations". On the wiki page, it says that that is a problem for flash SSDs, but not for DRAM SSDs.

When i browse through newegg, none of the specs make mention of DRAM or Flash.

I was hoping someone in the know could set the record straight for me. BTW my build funds are $1500.

 

[hamunaptra]

Yes, in short, the reliability of them suck. I have experienced many SSD failures in the tech shop of our repair shop. I am currently going on 3+ weeks in trying to recover data from an SSD that has gone to shit. I also have seen SSD's w/ cells go bad randomly.
Pretty much like how HDD's get bad sectors.

So, for now I wouldnt trust SSD worth a crap.
Sure, they are nice for speed, but if you do go that route..I would strongly recommend some form of image backup software.

DRAM ssd's are simply devices that plug into an expansion slot that can house lots of RAM...and is usually kept static by some form of a battery on the expansion slot.... They arent that popular at all.

 

[frostedflakes]

Empirical testing has proven the write limit thing to be a non-issue, any half-decent NAND flash SSD should be able to handle 500TB+ of writes. Might not sound like a lot, but trust me, it is. To put that into perspective, most people seem to write between 5-15GB/day to their SSD as an OS drive. I've averaged about 10GB/day on my Vertex 2 over the last ~10 months I've had it and that's without moving or disabling the page file, turning off search indexing, or doing other tweaks that people typically suggested to reduce writes. Just using the SSD normally like I would an HDD (except for space reasons movies, music, and other large media files are stored on an HDD instead of SSD, the SSD is only used for OS, programs, and games). So at 10GB/day, it would take 137 years of usage to reach 500TB of writes. Assuming a much more aggressive (and completely unrealistic for a home user unless you reinstall Windows a couple times a day every day or something like that) 50GB/day, that's still like 27 years. The long and short of it is, with a modern SSD it will be obsolete or have failed in some other way long before the write limit is reached.

Here's the thread on XS with the write testing, fantastic source of information on SSD durability.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=271063

And that is not to say that SSDs have no flaws and aren't prone to failure. The biggest issue with SSDs seems to be firmware issues (which can cause the controller to go into a panic mode, rendering some drives inoperable), not hardware failure. SandForce based drives typically have a lot of firmware problems, which is a shame because otherwise they're great SSDs. If you want to avoid these potential compatibility issues and other problems, an Intel or Crucial SSD would probably be your best bet. They also have the occasional issue, but not nearly as many as SandForce drives, and Intel and Crucial are usually pretty quick to release firmware updates that fix problems.

 

[Blain]

You may experience some other type failure, but running out of write cycles is very low on the list.

If you're worried about losing data but still want SSD speed...
Use a SSD and regularly clone onto a spinning platter drive.

 

[brad310]

Great replies everyone, i really appreciate it. The write limit info should be more out there since its a non issue. I will probably do just that...use the SSD and image it. Ive been using Acronis for a while, i'll prob stick with it.

 

[Capt Caveman]

OP. This week, I jumped on the SSD bandwagon. I picked-up a Crucial M4 128gb SDD for $160. Steps I did to get it running as my O/S drive.

1. Upgraded the Crucial SSD to a brand new firmware - Article on it - http://www.anandtech.com/show/4712/the- ... ith-fw0009
2. Prepared to clone from my WD Caviar Black 640 OS drive
a. Enable Trim
b. Remove Hibernation
c. Remove Indexing
d. Disable Defrag
e. Moved Page File from other drive back to WD Black
3. Downloaded on my laptop trial version of Acronis Image
4. Using Acronis Image on my laptop with both drives as external usb drives, Backed-up my WD Black drive on my laptop and Restored it on the Crucial SSD with no compression and validation on.
5. Slapped in the Crucial SSD and it booted-up no issues

Just listed the steps in case I'm not doing something else I should do for the drive.

Windows Performance went from 5.8 to 7.5 for disk performance.
One HD test has me over 400mb on reads
It flies compared to my WD Black drive and I do scheduled file back-ups of my O/S drive on a larger HDD using the Win7 Back-up tool.

I believe the drive is on sale at Newegg for $169. It's not as fast a Sandforce 2200 drive but without the issues and not as fast as an Intel 510 drive but at a much lower cost.

 

[biostud]

The way to use an SSD without worrying:
Install software and run apps from it. Save critical data on HDD + do regular backup.

I have my document folder on a HDD since it includes so many photos, so if my SSD decides to fail I'm not going to loose any important data, and I regularly do backup of my important data. I also use windows live mesh to store the documents I work on daily.

 

[mfenn]

Just listed the steps in case I'm not doing something else I should do for the drive.

Cloning from a HDD to an SSD isn't normally recommended due to alignment issues. Usually you want to do a clean install because the Windows installer will put a small (couple of megs) offset at the beginning of the drive. This makes sure that the filesystem's blocks are aligned with the underlying flash blocks. If you're not aligned, then you will actually have to write two flash blocks at a time, which isn't optimal for performance or longevity.