Why Against SSD in Office ?

[Oyeve]

I am I the middle of replacing all my companies servers. All new ones include enterprise level ssd drives. Spin drives are old tech. Performance is amazing.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

I put an SSD in my work laptop without asking. If there's ever a problem, I'll just throw the hard drive (in pristine condition with the fresh install of Windows that came with my computer) back in before I bring it to them.

I work at a small university - I've never seen a single Windows machine with an SSD anywhere in the school. Of course, some important people have Mac Pros with solid state storage, but it'll be years before the little folk get computers with SSDs.

Hell, the machines in most of the classrooms are C2Ds with 4GB of RAM and incredibly old, slow hard drives. I've stuck post-its on them with "please do not turn off this computer" because if - god forbid - they get shut down, I can say goodbye to 5 minutes of my class just waiting for the machine to get to a state where I can open a word document or PDF file.

Enterprise IT moves slowly.

 

[Red Squirrel]

The OEMs charge an arm and a leg for a SSD so it's cheaper to go with a HDD. The stupid part is, a SSD will be about the same price as a HDD these days, yeah it will be smaller in capacity at that price, but for an OS drive who really cares, 120GB is more than good enough, people should be saving stuff to the network anyway.

It amazes me that most OEM computers, even laptops still come with a HDD by default. SSD should be standard, the option should be to add a HDD for extra storage. But instead they'll milk the SSD as being "the latest and greatest" and charge an arm and a leg for it.

In my dept it used to take about 45 minutes to an hour to be ready to work from a cold boot. We got permission to buy a SSD on our corporate card and installed it ourselves and it cut that down to about 15 minutes and that time is determined more by your own speed to open up and login to stuff and the network, rather than the speed of the computer. Well worth the investment.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Hell, the machines in most of the classrooms are C2Ds with 4GB of RAM and incredibly old, slow hard drives. I've stuck post-its on them with "please do not turn off this computer" because if - god forbid - they get shut down, I can say goodbye to 5 minutes of my class just waiting for the machine to get to a state where I can open a word document or PDF file.

Enterprise IT moves slowly.

Haha reminds me of college, we had this lab we called the "P2 lab". It was these old P2 computers, standard issue OEM beige case and all, and the teacher always had to make sure to have a decent lecture at the start of the class as by the time he was done our computers were booted up and we could start to do work. I'm not that old, this was maybe like 8 years ago... damn, ok, I am old. The next year they upgraded all those to P4's, damn those machines flied! The hard drives in the P2 lab were super old IDE drives that were super loud. That room sounded like a 1920's telephony switch office.

 

[escrow4]

Core 2 ain't enough for anything in 2015. I've used IVB and Haswell Celeron's which are the rough equivalent to an E8500 and when you load up a half dozen tabs + the standard pdf's (bloated adobe to boot too likely) plus Word and other bits and pieces and they just slow right down (never mind dropping frames in HD videos). You need at least an i3 and an SSD and they are good to go. The modern web has gotten increasingly bloated.

 

[Enigmoid]

I work at a small university - I've never seen a single Windows machine with an SSD anywhere in the school. Of course, some important people have Mac Pros with solid state storage, but it'll be years before the little folk get computers with SSDs.

Hell, the machines in most of the classrooms are C2Ds with 4GB of RAM and incredibly old, slow hard drives. I've stuck post-its on them with "please do not turn off this computer" because if - god forbid - they get shut down, I can say goodbye to 5 minutes of my class just waiting for the machine to get to a state where I can open a word document or PDF file.

Enterprise IT moves slowly.

And heaven forbid you are on powerpoint and fail to see windows update kicking in. Waiting easily 10 minutes as the updates take forever on a slow disk drive.

 

[rsutoratosu]

Your IT guy is an idiot.

Totally

 

[bononos]

One reason ssd's might be more problematic compared to harddisks is dealing with power outages. I think its because of how they work, harddrives have all sectors/tracks lined up which rarely ever change unless its remapping bad sectors while ssds have to constantly shift things around because of wear levelling and tantalum capacitors are expensive.

Its not an issue with laptops and offices equipped with UPSs for desktops.

 

[Cerb]

One reason ssd's might be more problematic compared to harddisks is dealing with power outages. I think its because of how they work, harddrives have all sectors/tracks lined up which rarely ever change unless its remapping bad sectors while ssds have to constantly shift things around because of wear levelling and tantalum capacitors are expensive.

Its not an issue with laptops and offices equipped with UPSs for desktops.

HDDs can and will corrupt data just fine.

IME, Sandisk U110, Sandisk Ultra Plus, Sandisk Ultra II, Sandisk SSD Plus, Plextor/Lite-On M5s, Plextor/Lite-On M6(suffix?), Crucial M5x0, Samsung 84x, and and now Samsung 850 Pro, all recover just fine, again and again, with bad shutdowns, without UPSes. NTFS remains the least protected part of it all. I'm sure most other major ones do fine, as well.

and tantalum capacitors are expensive.

Intel's high-end SATA use regular electrolytic. As time goes on, we'll see cheaper, yet more effective, solutions, as the controllers and flash are continually improved.

 

[ksec]

Christ, our Company isn't even big Enterprise, it is a 150+ people, more like SME.

If that is how IT works i can't imagine how big company will do. Most of this isn't a issue when we didn't have budget to upgrade our Computer for the past years, but when we do, it just seems money wasted.

Sigh

The OEMs charge an arm and a leg for a SSD so it's cheaper to go with a HDD. The stupid part is, a SSD will be about the same price as a HDD these days, yeah it will be smaller in capacity at that price, but for an OS drive who really cares, 120GB is more than good enough, people should be saving stuff to the network anyway.

We buy our computer from Lenovo. And our IT guys had no idea how much more it would cost if they came with SSD. Which i shall find out soon.

 

[smakme7757]

Your IT guy is just trying to save money. Or got told to do so.

Our company of nearly 170 has done a complete rollout of new PCs with SSDs.

Was well worth it.

 

[Lonyo]

Your IT guy is just trying to save money. Or got told to do so.

Our company of nearly 170 has done a complete rollout of new PCs with SSDs.

Was well worth it.

My company of I don't know how many started putting SSDs in our laptops last year, which was incredibly nice. 3 year upgrade cycle for people though, so I was one of the luckier ones.

Went from getting in, turning on my laptop, entering bitlocker key, going to kitchen with laptop to put stuff in fridge and grab a drink then type in username and password to log in while in the kitchen, then walk back to desk and finally it's nearly ready for me to start Outlook/etc to pres, PIN, username and password, wait for network to connect, go.
Used to be 5-10 minutes before I could actually start doing anything from first pressing the power button, and I timed it once or twice so that's not an exaggeration.

 

[Oyeve]

I totally went SSD on all my devices. My mid2009 MBP has new life with an ssd, 500gb on my Dell Venue 11 pro, 3TB on my home PC, and 1TB at work. Longest boot is the MBP at 28 seconds. still beats the 5 minutes it used to take. SSD for the win. I am going to meet with my boss and pitch SSD for the company (Im the IT manager) and will add one to his PC which should win over the idea.

 

[Nec_V20]

I totally went SSD on all my devices. My mid2009 MBP has new life with an ssd, 500gb on my Dell Venue 11 pro, 3TB on my home PC, and 1TB at work. Longest boot is the MBP at 28 seconds. still beats the 5 minutes it used to take. SSD for the win. I am going to meet with my boss and pitch SSD for the company (Im the IT manager) and will add one to his PC which should win over the idea.

To give you an idea of the difference an SSD makes.

I have a piss-poor little Lenovo IdeaPad S10e with a crappy little 32-bit Atom CPU. Booting up the thing when it had an HD was an exercise in trying to discover which of us would die first.

I upgraded it with a SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SSD. I also installed Win7 Ultimate 32-bit.

I got talking to someone who had a brand new Toshiba Satellite laptop with an HD. We were talking about the merits of an SSD and I told him that we could make a comparison.

The comparison was, that I could restart my system before his system would boot from scratch (we had bet a beer on it). In every single way his Toshiba was and is vastly superior to my little netbook (except for the SSD).

Needless to say my netbook rebooted and was useable quite a while longer before his was ready to use just from a boot.

I told him that I could show him what an SSD could do for his system. I had a spare SSD and backed up his system to my 512GB Corsair Voyager Air HD and then restored it to the SSD which I then placed in his system.

It is no exaggeration to say that he leapt back in amazement at how quickly his system booted and he could open his applications. He wanted to buy my spare SSD from me there and then, but I said that there were now better ones on the market for a cheaper price and that I would be cheating him if I sold him mine.

 

[ksec]

Your IT guy is just trying to save money. Or got told to do so.

Our company of nearly 170 has done a complete rollout of new PCs with SSDs.

Was well worth it.

It turns out that is exactly what is happening here.....:''(

A small, what’s call a super slim desktop cost a lot. It is basically the size as a Mac mini, or slightly smaller. Both quote from Lenovo or HP are awfully expensive in my opinion. Because i could get a Apple Mac Mini with Apple Care ( 3 years warranty ) at better spec ( HP ) or same price ( Lenovo ).

Unfortunately, much like Apple their config to order option are insanely expensive. Apple doesn’t even allow SSD as an option, which is strange considering the config is the same as Macbook Air.
Both HP and Lenovo offer a 120GB SSD at an additional price of $200!
Yes, not only do I not get the 500GB HDD which was suppose to come with my buying price, I have to pay nearly 3 times the retail price for the SSD.

If it wasn’t for Software compatiblity reason i might just pitch to my boss to switch to Mac instead.

So this mean we are unlikely to get SSD. Unless we go our way and buy SSD ourself and install it.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

It's good to be buddies with the IT guys.
Most people at work got a crappy T440p/T540p, with 128GB SSDs and 4GB/8GB RAM.
I got a T540p with a 512GB SSD and 16GB

 

[ksec]

It's good to be buddies with the IT guys.
Most people at work got a crappy T440p/T540p, with 128GB SSDs and 4GB/8GB RAM.
I got a T540p with a 512GB SSD and 16GB

Depending on your workload,
T440p/T540p, with 128GB SSDs and 4GB/8GB RAM is more then enough for most of office works.

I am still confused as to Why OEM want to include HDD when they could have gone with SSD. ( When Price are the same )

 

[beginner99]

And yet our IT guy told me that SSD are dangerous and has a higher failure rate, along with unrecoverable data.

He is clueless. That might have been true over 5 years ago and limited to certain brands. Today? Not an issue.

The only truth is that yes, in case an SSD fails, recovering the data will be much harder or impossible. You know these companies you can send in your broken hdd and they can extract your data up to a certain extent and are very expensive? "HDD Forensics? This stuff is much harder with SSDs. That's true.

But if you need to resort to such measures you failed to do proper backups and hence you are the problem not the SSD.

EDIT:

Yeah and price certainly has an influence too. If you go via Dell, HP etc. you pay a huge premium on SSDs far larger than what they actually cost. For me this is just a convenience, one less cause for frustration at work. Yeah, in theory you save time with an SSD, but that less important IMHO than preventing frustration, delivering a good experience. People waste way more time during work, one thing for sure being smoking, other chit-chat about work-unrelated stuff and so forth. These are much bigger time consumers than waiting 5 sec on the HDD.

 

[Nec_V20]

He is clueless. That might have been true over 5 years ago and limited to certain brands. Today? Not an issue.

The only truth is that yes, in case an SSD fails, recovering the data will be much harder or impossible. You know these companies you can send in your broken hdd and they can extract your data up to a certain extent and are very expensive? "HDD Forensics? This stuff is much harder with SSDs. That's true.

But if you need to resort to such measures you failed to do proper backups and hence you are the problem not the SSD.

EDIT:

Yeah and price certainly has an influence too. If you go via Dell, HP etc. you pay a huge premium on SSDs far larger than what they actually cost. For me this is just a convenience, one less cause for frustration at work. Yeah, in theory you save time with an SSD, but that less important IMHO than preventing frustration, delivering a good experience. People waste way more time during work, one thing for sure being smoking, other chit-chat about work-unrelated stuff and so forth. These are much bigger time consumers than waiting 5 sec on the HDD.

Sending a damaged HD off to a data recovery firm to get data back is a very expensive proposition that no company will do for a lowly laptop.

Company data should be stored on a central server anyway and in the event of an HD or SSD failing they will just have a mirror image restored to them.

The thing is that from my experience when people do get company laptops they treat with no respect whatsoever. It is the mishandling of laptops which leads to HD failure and this point of failure would be eliminated if they were replaced by an SSD

 

[sao123]

We are currently in the midst of upgrading our 120 computers in office

( And I wasn't aware of it =.= )
[FONT=&quot]There are 30s new computer were all replaced without SSD. I was shocked, since SSD is the biggest performance upgrade in recent years. Much more then 4GB to 8GB Ram, or CPU upgrade, and this is especially the case in office environment. [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]And yet our IT guy told me that SSD are dangerous and has a higher failure rate, along with unrecoverable data. [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]I think those are just FUD. And since we share all our important documents on shared Network drive i see no reason for the concern.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Am i missing someth[FONT=&quot]ing[/FONT] here, where SSD may not suit the office environment?
[/FONT]

Traditional multipass DOD wipes are ineffective on SSD's... maybe they have security concerns?

 

[tweakboy]

With HDDs you got lots of them, SSD is expensive then that.