Anyone else got a SSD yet?

[Masure]

Stop posting so much, your browser cache will wear out your SSD.

Oh noes you're right

Just ordered a dual 80GB Postville to fix that

[CarRepairer]

Stop posting so much, your browser cache will wear out your SSD.

Oh noes you're right

Just ordered a dual 80GB Postville to fix that

I was hoping you'd say lol a third time so that I could tell you to go directly to jail, and do not pass go.

[Caydr]

SLC SSDs do not wear out quickly at all. Even with aggressive usage they have a longer expected lifespan than a typical HDD.

Even modern MLC SSDs (what I have) are expected to outlast a regular HDD. Your ideas are all based on years-old information. Modern drives have whole sections that remain dormant until a "bad" sector is detected on the primary drive partition, then any writes to the "bad" sector get redirected to the new area. Because fragmentation has no effect on SSDs, there is no tradeoff for this extra insurance either. It's not like an area just wears out and become unreliable - it's digital, it will either write or it won't. And even when it's unwriteable, it's still readable, so the device's firmware takes care of it and you don't even know something went wrong.

OCZ Vertex 120 (exactly what I have): $330. It's a perfectly good investment, it will eliminate lots of common game problems like dynamic content loading stuttering (STALKER), improve load times dramatically, greatly improve general Windows performance, etc. That's a bigger improvement than you'll get from spending that money just buying a slightly better GPU.

When your time is at a premium, halving load times for all your applications is invaluable.

[Neddie]

Not ready to move over. Life span is too short, space for cost is too little. I don't abuse my hard drives, though I have had a few failures, HDDs last between four and twelve years for me (I run my Macintosh Plus off a classic external) and there is no SSD I've encountered which even touches the bottom of that range.

[aegis]

iirc mlc was supposed to last five years at medium usage and slc was supposed to last 50 at medium usage... apparently you run into something like 6 months (mlc) and 5 years (slc) with heavy usage...

[Neddie]

Really? Hurm. I may have to reevaluate.

[jK]

Not ready to move over. Life span is too short, space for cost is too little. I don't abuse my hard drives, though I have had a few failures, HDDs last between four and twelve years for me (I run my Macintosh Plus off a classic external) and there is no SSD I've encountered which even touches the bottom of that range.

Yeah, SSDs aren't made for Windows. Their lifetime depend strongly on the amount of write cycles. That's something Windows doesn't take into account and kills those very fast.
But on Linux SSDs are worth to think about, cuz
1. there are special FileSystems for those (which try to balance the write accesses across the whole disk)
2. there are directories which are known for less write and many read accesses (/usr/bin for example)

[aegis]

yeah, and in linux you can mount heavy-rw directories in memory or on a different drive.

[CarRepairer]

Not ready to move over. Life span is too short, space for cost is too little. I don't abuse my hard drives, though I have had a few failures, HDDs last between four and twelve years for me (I run my Macintosh Plus off a classic external) and there is no SSD I've encountered which even touches the bottom of that range.

Yeah, SSDs aren't made for Windows. Their lifetime depend strongly on the amount of write cycles. That's something Windows doesn't take into account and kills those very fast.
But on Linux SSDs are worth to think about, cuz
1. there are special FileSystems for those (which try to balance the write accesses across the whole disk)
2. there are directories which are known for less write and many read accesses (/usr/bin for example)

I never thought I'd say this but windows kinda sucks.

[aegis]

but it's also really good at some things the other operating systems still need to catch up on >_< something like installed user base and hardware/software support

[==Troy==]

You know what ?

I DON'T CARE

People don't buy SSD with years of usage in mind. In 2 years, they will be deprecated and another 200$ shot will provide some brand new fresh SSD to play with.

Fixed it for you.


I still have a 12 years old 8GB fujitsu drive which boots up my server, and it works perfectly, hasnt had a single badblock yet.

Caydr, yes, there are those fallback banks, but you do realise that its basically like buying 2 SSDs? Since you might as well use those fallback bits as extra space immediately available.

And no, I am not advocating against SSDs, I use them myself quite frequently, and I have to say that I love them, its just they still have problems, as any other new technology.


Oh and btw, ever heard of graphene?

[Neddie]

Who the hell said I was running on Windows?

[Caydr]

I've heard of graphene, yes! Although I don't recall what exactly it is. It is... related to carbon nanotubes though right?

You guys are basing your ideas of what a SSD is on last-generation technology. They're not such a ticking timebomb anymore. Windows 7 detects if you have a SSD and disables things that would be wasteful of write cycles, like defragmenting, etc.

There's a TON of misconceptions about SSDs out there. The problem is that everyone's referencing articles that were written a year ago or more, and the articles even then weren't reviewing cutting-edge stuff. Current-generation SSDs are light-years ahead of that technology.

For instance, last year drives based on JMicron controllers were very common and they had all kinds of problems. Well JMicron never fixed the problem adequately so a new chip is being used, which solves a multitude of speed problems. They also went from under a megabyte of cache to 64 mb on most drives. When you're writing to the drive, it writes to the cache. As the cache fills, whole blocks of data are written to the actual drive at once, reducing the number of small, wasteful writes by an order of magnitude. Newer drives are also compatible with the Trim command, which Windows 7 will be using, and it too dramatically reduces the number of small writes that are done.

All new OCZ drives come with a 3-year warranty now, and previous 2-year warranties have been extended for free. If they were having significant failure rates, this wouldn't be happening. 3 years is better than you get with many regular hard drives. Should you hit the write cycle limit in one sector, the area will still be readable, and the drive transparently moves the data to a reserve sector. In 3 years I'll want a newer, bigger, faster SSD anyway, so why worry?

Microsoft's Michael Fortin has a lot to say on the subject here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/0 ... s-and.aspx

Say what you will about Microsoft, they've made a lot of progress with Windows 7. If only by virtue of buying out everyone that poses at threat, they have some of the best programmers in the business. He's so confident in the design of modern SSDs that he's actually recommending people put the page file on their SSD - something people would consider unthinkable on the older drives.

[AF]

Just note that hard drive technology advances and their visible performance improvements havent been keeping pace lately, hence why theyre lagging so far behidn cpus, hard drive technology has mainly advanced in terms fo capacity, leaving the rest untouched.

SSDs are moving a lot faster and gathering pace. Their reliability and speed has surpassed hard drives in a fraction of the time it took hard drives to do the same thing, and the underlying technology is used everywhere so its got huge investment.

The only things you can levy right now at SSD drives are price and storage capacity, and perhaps the sequential write thing but most drives are so fragmented that they're never going to do a sequential read that will give meaningful superfast read rates

[lurker]

Side note: you can move folders to other drives in Windows too.

[PicassoCT]

And another Systemfreeze and delayed write with data lost.. take my recomendation of ssd back. Sux.

[very_bad_soldier]

And another Systemfreeze and delayed write with data lost.. take my recomendation of ssd back. Sux.

I assume you are not using an Intel SSD, right?

[PicassoCT]

right

[Floris]

Running almost a year on SSD, and noticed quitte a speedup after installing it. I'm really happy with it and use the old HDD for backup purposes. And I love it because it shock resistant and I use it in my laptop. Running win7. It does get very hot at times.

The SSD: 128 GB Kingston SSDNow V series
http://azerty.nl/8-1990-357488/kingston ... rade-.html

[aegis]

the newer SSDs have really nice technology for wear-leveling and performance. I'd recommend them unconditionally now (I'm using them in three systems - never looking back)