PRO's and CON's preferably CON's of SSD
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Hello all, I understand the advantages of the SSD no mechanical parts, ultra fast access, heating resistant,... But which are the drawbacks? (apart of the price of course). Thank you in advance!
[www.tamautomation.com] Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing.
Cost is obviously the biggie, but they also have both slow write times (particularly for small files) and a limited MTBF (if you use them as a "normal" drive) So you have to rethink your attitude to your drive, and put only data that isn't going to change much on SSD - they have a limited number of write cycles, so if you don't, you could elephant the thing fairly quickly.
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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Hello all, I understand the advantages of the SSD no mechanical parts, ultra fast access, heating resistant,... But which are the drawbacks? (apart of the price of course). Thank you in advance!
[www.tamautomation.com] Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing.
Durability, or so I've heard. I have mine for 3 years and it still work flawlessly.
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Hello all, I understand the advantages of the SSD no mechanical parts, ultra fast access, heating resistant,... But which are the drawbacks? (apart of the price of course). Thank you in advance!
[www.tamautomation.com] Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing.
No drawbacks besides cost.
Let's agree to disagree! Boris the animal Just Boris.
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Hello all, I understand the advantages of the SSD no mechanical parts, ultra fast access, heating resistant,... But which are the drawbacks? (apart of the price of course). Thank you in advance!
[www.tamautomation.com] Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing.
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Cost is obviously the biggie, but they also have both slow write times (particularly for small files) and a limited MTBF (if you use them as a "normal" drive) So you have to rethink your attitude to your drive, and put only data that isn't going to change much on SSD - they have a limited number of write cycles, so if you don't, you could elephant the thing fairly quickly.
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
Actually, both the cons you mentioned are no longer true, or are at least vastly mitigated. Write times are not slow, because the drive's controller always keeps a list of free blocks to use for new writes. Blocks with old content are then cleared (necessary before a new write) when the disk is idling and under normal conditions this is not noticeable. Of course you need a modern OS that supports the trim command. Limited MTBF is also not a problem anymore, because modern flash memory cells easily sustain 100,000+ writing cycles. Yet again, the controller plays an important role and distributes writes evenly across all cells (without the OS even knowing about this).
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] My Blog
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Hello all, I understand the advantages of the SSD no mechanical parts, ultra fast access, heating resistant,... But which are the drawbacks? (apart of the price of course). Thank you in advance!
[www.tamautomation.com] Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing.
The main problem I see is that they're still a "new" technology. If you follow hardware websites and news, you'll see that manufacturers keep updating controller firmware because it's buggy and causes data loss or other problems. I expect this to improve over time, but for some reason the stabilization is taking much longer than expected. If you purchase one, just make sure to read all reviews you can find, and don't buy a brand-new model but instead go for one that is a few months old, so potential problems have already been discovered.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] My Blog
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Actually, both the cons you mentioned are no longer true, or are at least vastly mitigated. Write times are not slow, because the drive's controller always keeps a list of free blocks to use for new writes. Blocks with old content are then cleared (necessary before a new write) when the disk is idling and under normal conditions this is not noticeable. Of course you need a modern OS that supports the trim command. Limited MTBF is also not a problem anymore, because modern flash memory cells easily sustain 100,000+ writing cycles. Yet again, the controller plays an important role and distributes writes evenly across all cells (without the OS even knowing about this).
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] My Blog
100,000 write cycles is not a lot. If you host a database, and update records at one update per second, that's 100,000 writes in just over a day. Ok, many of these will be "moved" by the controller, but it is still important to know that writes wear out the SDD - it isn't difficult to get get thos e writes in the same physical cell, particularly if the disk starts to fill up - which given the 4~5 times price premium over HDD it is more likely to do. The same applies to slow writes - it's the cell erase time that is the killer. Much better to use SSD for reasonably "static" data applications. :-D
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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100,000 write cycles is not a lot. If you host a database, and update records at one update per second, that's 100,000 writes in just over a day. Ok, many of these will be "moved" by the controller, but it is still important to know that writes wear out the SDD - it isn't difficult to get get thos e writes in the same physical cell, particularly if the disk starts to fill up - which given the 4~5 times price premium over HDD it is more likely to do. The same applies to slow writes - it's the cell erase time that is the killer. Much better to use SSD for reasonably "static" data applications. :-D
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
That's 100,000 writes per cell. Typical block size in SLC drives is 512KB (worst case), then in a 128GB disk you have 25 billion writes. Also, SSD drives always have an additional storage area, typically proportional to the "visible" storage, reserved for replacing failed cells and for avoiding problems in case the drive is almost full. As I mentioned, when the OS asks to erase a cell (or rather a block), the disk does not do that synchronously, but instead does that in the background when idle, so erasure times are not a problem anymore. That said, SSDs do have a lower MTBF than hard disks, but the performance gain is worth the risk. Trust me, I have 2 Velociraptors in RAID0 on my desktop, and my 2 years old MacBook Air with an average SSD is faster when it comes to random disk access.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] My Blog
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Hello all, I understand the advantages of the SSD no mechanical parts, ultra fast access, heating resistant,... But which are the drawbacks? (apart of the price of course). Thank you in advance!
[www.tamautomation.com] Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing.
I just started using one on my PC at home. It is silent and does not get warm. The astoundingly short boot time alone was enough to convince me to use them from now on. My time has value, especially my time away from work! I had also heard that the MTBF was bad, but that was in the early days of the product. As far as I can tell, SSD MTBF is at least as good as a "normal" hard drive now. If you are concerned, add a normal hard drive in the system and use it as the "data drive" for applications and to keep periodic backups of the SSD. I had to do that because I was too cheap to buy a SSD big enough to hold the applications (games) I use on my personal computer.
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Hello all, I understand the advantages of the SSD no mechanical parts, ultra fast access, heating resistant,... But which are the drawbacks? (apart of the price of course). Thank you in advance!
[www.tamautomation.com] Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing.
Joan Murt wrote:
But which are the drawbacks?
None if you are fine with the capacity vs price compromise, and as long as you aren't after a 2TB SSD. Harddrives for me last maybe a year or two (actually, I've not had a HDD last more than a year in any Mac I've owned), so longevity of SSDs is not a factor I worry about. They certainly can't be any worse. (though to be fair, I've had HDDs last years. A rarity) I have a pair of SSDs, stripped, as my main drive. It's nice. Very nice. I would never go back.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
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Joan Murt wrote:
But which are the drawbacks?
None if you are fine with the capacity vs price compromise, and as long as you aren't after a 2TB SSD. Harddrives for me last maybe a year or two (actually, I've not had a HDD last more than a year in any Mac I've owned), so longevity of SSDs is not a factor I worry about. They certainly can't be any worse. (though to be fair, I've had HDDs last years. A rarity) I have a pair of SSDs, stripped, as my main drive. It's nice. Very nice. I would never go back.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
I've not had a HDD last more than a year in any Mac
Wow! Those Macs must thrash the drives pretty hard! I haven't had a HDD fail in a PC in less than 6 years, excluding one infant mortality - DOA.
Chris Maunder wrote:
I have a pair of SSDs, stripped
I thought we were talking storage devices, not playthings tucked naked in your office. And that's the first time I've ever heard them called SSDs. Is that an acronym for side-by-sides?
Will Rogers never met me.
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Chris Maunder wrote:
I've not had a HDD last more than a year in any Mac
Wow! Those Macs must thrash the drives pretty hard! I haven't had a HDD fail in a PC in less than 6 years, excluding one infant mortality - DOA.
Chris Maunder wrote:
I have a pair of SSDs, stripped
I thought we were talking storage devices, not playthings tucked naked in your office. And that's the first time I've ever heard them called SSDs. Is that an acronym for side-by-sides?
Will Rogers never met me.
What happens in the office, stays in the office. Thankfully for Sean.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
