versus fiber. Without buffering.
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At present the size and cost of SSD's limit my use of them to critical data back-up. They're going to have to get bigger (in storage, not physical size) and cheaper before they become my drive of choice.
Way less wear and tear than C: drive.
I have been running my media player running from a USB stick or DVD drive rather than my internal disk. Having a solid state drive would work even better for SSDS Spectate Swamp Desktop Search.
This program can randomly play a mix of information. Text, Pictures, Audio and Video.
EXAMPLE:
Recently I shot 135 video clips at a local drag race. All very short of course.
With this app I can have it randomly play from the DVD or USB. The playback is as follows:
#1 LARGE FONT slowed print of the driver and car information.
#2 Video play of the RACE (interrupt will switch to slo-mo) and cause a replay
#3 RACE results in slowed print 48 point
Then the next random set. Pictures or audio can be easily intermixed with the above.
It has all the features that a Codger who wrote his first program in 1970. Everything.
Start-up and see the last page of notes and close-out in under 4 seconds. When things are that fast you'll use it.
Retrieve email address, passwords and URL links to the CLIPBOARD. and waay more.
See the thread:
http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/13917.aspx Nobody Shares Knowledge Better Than This
2480 responses explaining just how easy it is to share knowledge when you have the ultimate control.
This app is lurking just below the surface, ready to snap up everybody else...
If my old laptop would take two hard drives, I would do it sooner.
I plan on including one in my next HTS refresh. I want a SSD for the OS and apps, and a 2 Tb hard drive for the video files. I see a lot of high end laptops, with all the latest guts and two hard drives(SSD & HDD) for very reasonable prices now! They have to compete with tablets, and the manufacturers are tricking them out to the max to compete.
The laptop has truly reached the desktop in capability! However, I'm not going that route for my HTS; I will get a dedicated box custom built for this - and it will DEFINITELY have a large SSD in it! ![]()
I recently installed a Crucial 64 SSD as the operating drive in my desktop and still use a 1TB HDD for other data. Happy so far. However, my computer is subject to sudden crashes (not caused by the SSD - it did it so before installation too). I understand that hard reboots (pressing the reset button) shortens the life of an HDD, but what effect does it have on an SSD? Also, if I hard reset my system is the slave HDD degraded even though it is not part of the boot system?
I'd love to read some discussion on this. Thanks.
1. Do you see an SSD in your future or do you have one already?
I have one already. I have a 120GB as my C drive and 2 ordinary HDDs as well. An SSD is OK for a dedicated Windows only drive but if you keep deleting and writing to it, it will fail quite quickly.
2. Was your SSD part of a new PC purchase or DIY upgrade?
I built my own PC with a AMD Phenom, 12GB RAM, a 3.5" multi-card reader and USB 3.0 ports X 4, as well as the 10 X USB 2.0 ports and a 1GB DDR5 Graphics card (PCI 16, slot.)
3. If you made the switch, what's your satisfaction level on a scale of
1 to 5 (5 being the highest)?
I think it would have to be 5!
4. If the switch was a DIY upgrade, what brand and size (GB) did you
choose and why?
120 GB and Samsung. 120 GB is big enough for Windows 7 and all the other ad-ons, like Office etc. Samsung, because it is a well known brand.
5. Do you feel the SSD technology is ready for "primetime?" Why it is
or why not?
It's good enough but the technology has a way to go to become a more economic way for most of us. It is still a bit expensive, although it has come down in price since I bought mine last year.
But Lee needs to start a new thread on how to restore, maintain, repair,
solid state hard drives.
I'll just give you one tidbit of an experiment I did a short while ago.
#1 before you start...save a drive image of your SSHD onto an external
hard drive. ****Very important.... astounding discovery I made.
A work PC I created a few months back (120 GB OCZ solid state sata II hard drive)
just got slower and slower so I checked it out.
I discovered it had bad sectors (8
and I repaired all the bad sectors BUT every time
I scanned it I got the same bad sectors (8
with 44 of them right at the start of the
hard drive.
So I formatted the SSHD and scanned again and again I got 88 bad sectors.
No matter what I did with this particular SSHD I could not restore it to NO
bad sectors.
Now comes the best part...
I put the recovery CD in I made when the SSHD was new and restored the drive
image I saved when I first set up the PC.
It restored the drive image perfectly to the day I created it and GUESS WHAT..
I scanned it and it found NO bad sectors.
I was surprised but if you think about it there are no moving parts...so it isn't that
astounding but I sure was surprised because until I restored the drive image on this
particular SSHD I could not scan it without getting 88 bad sectors.
I learned an incredible amount of knowledge about SSHD's with
this experiment.
Question for you guru's out there..
What did I learn about a SSHD with these results?
Remember...clue...there are no moving parts.
After reading all the replies to date, 3 pages (actually 2 and 1/2) I am still sitting on the fence post. Undecided! While there were a lot of god pro's and cons in the blog I still can't see me running out to buy one!
#1) They seem, at the present time, way to pricey for me!
#2) I didn't see any talk about "defragging"!
#3) MTBF still still in the lacking department!
#4) Recovering info, still in the sketchy department.
My thoughts on the post's. Not in my immediate future. To much hanging in limbo! I loved the "Oh yes their so much faster but be sure to back up ALL your data to a HHD drive". Backing up is definitely they way to go regardless of the type of drive. Yet that implies the SSD's are susceptible to dying without warning!
Running 2 drives at all times, one for the OS only and the other for storage only is a little over the edge. Why? The people stating this say to minimize the read/ write cycles to the SSD, again again the "ticking time bomb" syndrome (mtbf)!
Even if you run the OS only on the SSD, every time you install/ remove a program, the program messes with at the very least the registry. I have yet to see many, if any, program that completely (100%) removes itself and ALL traces/ changes it makes! Ergo the need for registry cleaners, orphan finders, defrag programs.
Some replies hinted at constant make images of the SSD "religiously" and replace images almost as much to preserve the just like new installed system. WAY to much work, hassle. My dinosaur HHD, while slow don't require this much work!
My thoughts are that they might be the future of drives but they "just aren't as ready for prime time as some are suggesting!!"
Maybe in a couple of years they might reach that plateau, they aren't quite there yet! To many questions to be sorted out/ fixed for my liking and wallet!!!!
Guess how many Macbook Airs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, Androids, MP3s, BIOS chips and SATA SSDs are in use today? Don't know? Me neither but I'm guessing the number is large. They all have flash memory with finite lives but remember hard drive motors and actuator arms are finite lived too. Are ALL or MANY flash users running around demanding repairs and replacements because of failed flash? I don't see it.
The real complaints about SSDs, ie. without counting those speculating about flash wearouts, are they slow down after some time or they stop working altogether and the finger is pointed at flash, period! And of course these are happening before SSD warranties expire (usually 3 yrs) which to the complainers compound the sins of flash. Wait a minute, why isn't it happening to the users in mobile gadgets? Smaller capacities thus fewer errors? Probably, but with the total gazillions of terabytes in use, errors must manifest as gadget failures, causing consternation and global meltdown in sales of devices containing flash. Not happening!
So why the bad rap on SSDs versus flash in general? SSD controllers and firmware. When a controller/FW stops recognizing a cell, it fails on read or when writing it tries another until a "good" cell is found, sometimes never. Good and bad are in the mind of the controller/FW. Flash usually isn't dead yet, at least not before warranties expire.
Where does that bring us in the thick of SSD FUD? The choices are:
1. Sit on the sidelines until ...??? Because it's too much risk, too much trouble, too much work, too many worries, too FUDdy. Who is spreading the FUD? Dunno but you can guess. When planes took to the air (sorry for pun), ships felt threatened. But they both still co-exist in the world and both still have their equivalent of BSODs and dark screens. And yeah you can still sail to Southampton or Tokyo because it's too risky to fly. Compared the price of intercontinental tickets and travel times lately?
2. Try SSDs for less than a buck per GB, then write a review or blog about your experience. Some of the adopters may still sail cross oceans but it's a choice, not a fear of planes.
but I'd like to add some.
#1 Price wise, the smaller SSDs are very comparable to smaller HDDs. You really only need about 32Gbs to leave a very comfortable space for operating system files and applications. Those prices have dropped so low as the be ludicrous to even consider. Besides regular HDDs were very high not long ago because of the tsunami in Japan; and as someone else pointed out in this discussion, the floods in the Pacific Rim. I don't see a price issue.
#2 Defragging is generally held to be unnecessary in SSDs. Memory filing is totally different in flash technology. You don't have a spinning disk with its attendant geometry issues. If defragging were an issue at all, you would probably only do it once in the life of the operating system. This is because the memory is not quite like the old random access model of the past.
#3 MTBF is a legitimate issue, but is greatly counter balanced by today's large RAM architecture, where paging rarely has to access the boot drive, and paging can be set to use another HDD to do that function, anyway. I see so many failures, from my clients, because of malware and other software crashes, that regular HDDs fair not much better in reality. However, because the old tech(HDD) involved high speed platters and crashing read/write heads, you are just as likely to come out of a major failure, with an SSD that is still intact and only in need of a re-image. Also - because many use sleep, or hibernate mode, the operating system rarely gets read at all, until reboot.
#4 Recovery has not been a problem every since regular flash hit the market. Some time ago many of the recovery software companies have been capable of reading damaged flash memory and recovering most, if not all data. One advantage of reading an SSD is that you don't have to limit the attempts to recover the data, like you do on a failing HDD. In the case of HDD technology, you do not want to use the hard drive at all, until you are ready to transfer data from the failed drive; where as in the case of SSD, the state of the drive after failure does not change as rapidly to the more corrupt state. Chances are that if you have a backup image of the drive, you will never need to recover the data, because none of the data will be documents, pictures, or video. There is not a need to recover that data. The secondary drive or other backup assets with have all of that. I have noticed that law enforcement has had no trouble using software and hardware forensics to recover data thought to be lost on flash devices of all kinds. Just because it was erased or corrupted does not mean it is gone, anymore than with the old magnetic storage technology.
I've been using two drives in every machine I have for over 10 years now, and it really is a no brainer. I have never had to actually recover an image from one of my machines after failure, because only the OS drive is usually the one that fails. I've also never had a total crash on the primary drive, or total hardware failure of the "C:\" drive on any of my machines. I attribute this to the fact that because the load is spread between two drives, that the mean time to failure has been extended. I had to throw away the last PC that had a drive that never failed in over 10 years - not because of failure, but plain old obsolescence.
With the exception of a temporary blip in prices in the HDD market, hard drives are becoming amazingly cheap, and buying an extra one, is not a financial problem. My next PC will have the price of two drives already embedded in the purchase, as manufacturers are lowering the cost of the machine with two drives already installed. I see many laptops now sold with one SSD and one large size HDD installed from the factory! The prices are unbelievable when you consider that, and the fact that they have the latest Sandy Bridge processors, huge ultra fast RAM, with the motherboard bus to match, and graphics hardware to make previous rigs look sick!
I've not had any trouble at all implementing these procedures, and I can't see any of it as a hassle at all. In fact - because of the redundancy and security of doing things this way, I've had less hassles and problems. I will never go back to how I used to run in the past. It is true that with the migration of the public at large, to smart phones and tablet architecture - things will change again - but this will certainly be way in favor of SSD or other flash tech and not any obsolete systems.
No - all in all, I'd disagree with your assessment Glenn51.
I already own...let's see, let me count.
One, two, three and a fourth on the way. (No, wait, I already have four. The fifth is on the way.)
Both in new pc's and upgrades.
Satisfaction on 1 to 5 scale is a 9. I had one flaky one, or it would be an absolute 10.
I've bought OCZ and Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe. (OCZ is fast, Mushkin is smokin' WEI = 7.9)
Anyone who builds, upgrade, or even just tinkers around with their PC should absolutely, log out of here, go to newegg NOW and BUY a SSD. This upgrade will set your pc on fire!!! Not literally, LOL, but the hd is the weak link in most systems and an SSD makes even an old Pentium D system I have run pretty fast given its age and that's windows seven.
I can't emphasize this enough. BUY AN SSD. Intel, Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe, OCZ, any decent brand.
Forget upgrading your cpu if your don't already have an SSD. Boot times in 8-12 seconds. Immediate app openings. SSD's ROCK!!!
Even with the best wear leveling firmware they die too fast for the cost, and don't have a large speed margin over magnetic, except for some PCIe ones..