Why Against SSD in Office ?

[ksec]

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.

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

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.

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

 

[AlienTech]

Ah yep the very same reaosn why most companies use mcafee anti virus for security when it is the least effective of all the major ones. But thats why they are the big shots in IT and think they run the place.. Actually unless you are close to the CTO there is not much you can do. Because anyone else you talk to will see reason but they wont be able to convince the guy who signs off on the check to understand this as he will be told, the IT department evaluated things and this is the most cost effective and safest environment. We had to pay form our pocket to get stuff that we needed because the IT would not agree. Not only did they take their time, they only bought from vendors who greased the palms and they usually did nto carry specialised things and when they ordered things it cost 4 times as much.. the motto was because it was enterprise quality and verified.. We could not argue with anything, because if something went bad or wrong, we would be held responsible.. Not that things did not go wrong or bad, but they would always shove those onto the vendor.. its a wonder anything gets done in corporate environment. Not many companies have knowledgeable people working for them. This is on purpose, once some idiot gets into a position of power he will make sure no one qualified will get in. For real work they hire temps and contractors to do a job. Just look at any company.

 

[coercitiv]

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

SSD failure rates are actually lower than traditional hard drives.

High amounts of RAM might help alleviate the mistake your IT guy made, since caching will hide some of the weak spots in HDDs, but overall it was quite a poor decision.

 

[saratoga172]

Unless they've done some specific reporting/testing unique to your work load it sounds like an uninformed it guy.

For us we tested with each of our various workloads, looked at failure numbers and started deploying SSD's about 2.5 years ago (crucial m4's). To this day we haven't had one fail. Have a mix of m4's, Samsung 830/840's, oem liteons from dell and a few others.

 

[therealnickdanger]

I'm sure it's just cost-related. Most companies in that range (120 computers) get the "government discount", which is to say that you pay Apple prices for outdated - but stable - technology. An SSD will certainly be an upgrade of at least $150 per unit, whereas a larger HDD will be more like $30 per unit.

To put it another way, imagine you are on Dell's or Apple's website configuring a computer. Take the already insane pricing of upgrading beyond the stock configuration, but now make the base price and each upgrade even more expensive. It's pretty absurd.

I had to fight pretty hard to get another 2GB of RAM in my Core 2 Duo E8500 machine. When I got it, it was still running XP, but then they upgraded us to Windows 7 64-bit. They wouldn't give me 16GB, 8GB, or even 4GB more, so they gave me 2GB and now I have 4GB total. Did I mention that they only approved 32-bit browsers and 32-bit applications like Office? What was the point of moving to 64-bit if you don't get to use it? The corporate IT world is not the place for an enthusiast.

When I asked if I could bring in my own RAM or SSD from home and offered to install it myself, they responded only with "Tampering with company equipment is a violation of policy." No fun.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

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

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=&quot].[/FONT][/FONT]

100% FUD. As coercitiv correctly pointed out, everything else being equal, SSD should have a lower failure rate the traditional mechanical HDDs.

Besides critical data shouldn't even be on a local drive in the first place.

I'm sure it's just cost-related. Most companies in that range (120 computers) get the "government discount", which is to say that you pay Apple prices for outdated - but stable - technology. An SSD will certainly be an upgrade of at least $150 per unit, whereas a larger HDD will be more like $30 per unit.

While I can see your point, they're going to pay another way when they decide to "save" on the hardware. All those little periods the employees are waiting on the HDD is going to add up. 5 seconds here, 5 seconds there. As if employees time is free...

 

[PliotronX]

I love SSDs myself and would wholeheartedly recommend them for any system as long as important data is backed up. This goes for any storage component as having fresh backups is key for disaster recovery and general wear and tear. That said, the failures of SSDs that I have personally worked on or analyzed with coworkers are far more scarey than mechanical drives. The likelihood of failure is lower, yes, but when it does, it comes out of nowhere and more than half the time in our cases no computer will detect the device following the failure. If there is priceless unique data on them, it is an automatic lab visit with a huge bill attached. You say the company data is centralized so this is a non-issue.

So, just reiterate with anyone who opposes the deployment of SSDs that with a backup procedure that should already be in place *cough* implementing them is not an issue. Qualm their concerns with the fact that the important data is safe. Regardless of storage type, there should be repeated notifications that important data needs to be backed up or moved off of company client devices. These will CYA in the high risk, low probability scenario of people needing their files on a defunct drive.

 

[corkyg]

Sounds like rationalization using years old info to protect costs. The mis-informed IT guy probably has a budget to adhere to.

 

[ronbo613]

Cost. Management starts at the bottom line and works back through the details. Usually, they don't get to far.

If somebody could show that SSDs would save time; in business, time is money, maybe they would be using SSDs now.

 

[PliotronX]

Cost is a possibility but it sounds like we have a slackjawed yokel of the IT world deadset in his ways. I have dealt with plenty of people like this, even my own boss.

 

[JimKiler]

That sucks, glad i do not work there my work gave me an SSD 4 or 5 years ago and could never go back.

 

[Elixer]

It should not matter the media type, since they have a rock solid backup plan... right?

However, OP don't specify want kind of work is being done, and there are a few types of places that won't use SSDs (or any new tech) until they are qualified for that environment, and that can takes years.

 

[Puffnstuff]

From a pure business standpoint the extra cost of purchasing a ssd is not effective use of resources. Most business machines, especially those where operations run 24/7 don't boot and reboot on a regular basis and all data is on a server. Once the machine is up and running a ssd wouldn't have any affect on the work being done at a local work station because all of the applications are server based which is a function of network capacity. It isn't cost effective to spend the extra money on a ssd in this environment and if I were the IT guy you could bank on all desktops being on hard drives.

At home is a different story where all software being used is on your local media and this is where the ssd shines. I bring my pc's up and down as required and I absolutely want a ssd doing the data transfers on my machines which are all ssd based. This is where the ssd makes perfect sense and why the manufacturers cater to people just like ourselves. Where I would want a ssd in business is in the laptops where power usage is a concern along with boot times since they will be moved about during the course of the business day and need to be powered up and down depending on their use.

 

[Hulk]

Last year ago I asked my wife to ask her work if I could replace the hard drive in her work laptop with an SSD, that we would pay for. Her boot times were so long it was just ridiculous.

They said "no, SSDs are too unreliable."

6 months ago she got a new laptop from work. It came with a 500GB SSD.

My how things changed in a few months!

 

[dave_the_nerd]

$100 SSD vs. $50 HDD = $50 * 120 machines = $6k they could spend on management bonuses, hookers, and blow.

Doesn't seem like much compared to the sanity and productivity of 120 people, but save/shave $6k per project per year and that's a crapton of coke.

 

[Jeff7]

Sounds like rationalization using years old info to protect costs. The mis-informed IT guy probably has a budget to adhere to.

Which is unfortunate, because there could be some long-term cost savings. A worker who's sitting waiting for their computer to do something is not doing a whole lot to maintain the organization's profitability or productivity.

But, that depends on the user. I see plenty of people who could probably get by with an 80GB hard drive, 2GB of RAM, a single small monitor, just a mouse and no keyboard, and a browser that predates tabs. (As a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts, I don't always have to use the mouse, but when I do, it's a 10-button mouse. )
Some of them might not benefit as much from an SSD because they couldn't keep up anyway.



I find two monitors to be limiting, and my taskbar is two rows high to accommodate the numerous programs I usually need to have running. It's nice to be able to load Firefox, Outlook, Pro Engineer, EAGLE, and possibly Adobe Illustrator all in rapid succession. An SSD was a huge improvement for me.
Mechanical hard drives take more time just to load one of those programs.

 

[ShintaiDK]

The IT guy in question needs to work with something else. Because he isnt suited for IT work.

Did he order all the new PCs with floppy drives too?

 

[ksec]

Thx, I think i will have a go with my boss then. We only use normal office, ERP system and lots of web browsing .

Most business machines, especially those where operations run 24/7 don't boot and reboot on a regular basis and all data is on a server.

That is excluding the performance benefits of faster office application, searching of Emails, faster OS response. You could move all this processing on to the cloud, but you will still be limited by your browser, and SSD brings faster experience.

Another reason IT gave me was capacity, the Lenovo we are getting now are 500GB HDD. And SSD will be with smaller capacity of 128GB.....
Then I site that most of the colleagues uses only 30GB, with some extreme cases of 70GB........ Sigh......

 

[coercitiv]

Thx, I think i will have a go with my boss then. We only use normal office, ERP system and lots of web browsing

You might want to focus your efforts on getting SSDs in just a small number of units, say five or ten. Word of mouth will do the rest.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Yeah, same as my work. The guy doing the ordering refuses to get SSD's and instead gets 1TB HDD's, which is even more dumb because all our work is stored on file servers. So we give people i5 haswells with 8 gigs of ram....and a crappy HDD. Just kills the computer.

 

[saratoga172]

If you can get hard data that will go a long way. Maybe your boss will approve the purchase of a single hard drive for you to generate a report on. Measure the overall responsiveness compared to a mechanical drive (you'll need actual numbers), boot and shutdown times, times to launch applications, restart times, and browser responsiveness working with the ERP system. What's the speed to open excel/word docs etc?

We also put SSD's in new executive machines and that changed perception really fast when they can boot up their laptops in 10-20 seconds instead of 2 minutes.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

You might want to focus your efforts on getting SSDs in just a small number of units, say five or ten. Word of mouth will do the rest.

We also put SSD's in new executive machines and that changed perception really fast when they can boot up their laptops in 10-20 seconds instead of 2 minutes.

Focus on getting SSDs into the executives own PCs. That usually works wonders, because it lets them feel the difference for themselves. Its much easier to explain the benefits when they have some tangible knowledge of the improvements first-hand.

Also get that IT guy on an SSD, he might never have tried using one with the attitude he's showing. That usually works too.

 

[Puffnstuff]

As much as I love ssd's they just aren't needed in the office environment where most pc's sleep rather than get shut down not to mention network apps where the added expense of a ssd is not justifiable.

 

[Coup27]

Your IT guy is an idiot.

Sure certain drives from years ago you would not dream of putting in an office environment but modern drives from reputable brands like Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, Crucial and Plextor (sure there's more but that's about all I would consider) are very stable now and far less likely to randomly fail like a HDD would.

And even if it did if he was doing his job properly there would be no crucial data lost and it would take a few hours to swap in a new drive and reload from an image, update and carry on.

I upgraded our entire IT setup at work to Samsung 840's a few years ago and never looked back.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

As much as I love ssd's they just aren't needed in the office environment where most pc's sleep rather than get shut down not to mention network apps where the added expense of a ssd is not justifiable.

Since you can get SSDs at the same, or lower, price then regular HDDs, "added expense" is a very relative term indeed. The only thing you're missing out on is capacity, but since everything is stored centrally you could properly get by with a 64GB drive for an average worker.

Of course OEMs tend to charge a (rather large) premium for SSDs, but this can be easily migrated since you can buy cheaper systems to start with. Because with an SSD even a Bay Trail system can do office work just fine. Not to mention feel faster then an i3+HDD, and reduce your power bill.