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General discussion

Seeking advice: HDD v SSD - Which is better?

May 15, 2011 3:16AM PDT

I'm currently doing research on getting an external hard drive for my laptop. I'm trying to decide whether to purchase a hard-disk drive or a solid state drive. I'm attracted to the lack of moving parts in an SSD, but I'm concerned about the possible Irretrievability of the data if the drive fails. Thoughts?

Discussion is locked

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Did you?
May 15, 2011 8:56AM PDT

Did you reveal you intend to not use either without a backup copy?

That can't end well.

As to SSDs, the storm clouds are gathering as more folk report how they do indeed fail in a year or two in spite of all claims to the contrary. At least they are fast!
Bob

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Go old HD
May 16, 2011 4:16AM PDT

Most current ext. HDs are made from typical platter drives. If yo see one at some very high price its usually a SSD based one. Excluding all problems either one can sustain, you may find the old std. HDs still do a good job and offer decent pricing. While the SSD are priced defeated yet they do offer speed.. However, IMO you really don't see that much in use as ext. storage unless power concerns come into play. Both offer what the other doesn't they've practically opposite it seems other than doing the final task, storage of some sort. As noted, SSD have a failure than not becoming favorable as it becomes known. SSD has it problems and HD do as well. Overall, IMO you're better served for now and likely for some time using the old HD style.

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I'd go with a standard HD
May 20, 2011 9:50PM PDT

You didn't say what interface your laptop has to the external drive, USB 2 or 3 or ESATA. I doubt you would get full benefit from a SSD on USB 2 but you may want to go that way for other reasons.

Normally, you would choose a SSD for performance (and maybe low power requirements but usually performance). The sacrifices you make for this are small capacity and higher price. Performance is usually not the major consideration on external drives, so I'd save some money and go for the extra capacity offered by a standard hard drive. Actually, a better use of the SSD would be to put it in the laptop and run a standard external HD.

I would also recommend you buy two, as Bob alludes to, you need a backup of your external data and another hard drive is the only device likely to have enough capacity. Whether you run them as some kind of mirrored RAID or simply copy the one to the other is up to you but a single copy eventually leads to data loss.

Whether you should go for a 3.5" separately powered unit, or a 2.5" USB powered unit is up to you, there was a discussion on this topic in last week's edition.

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Thanks for your response...
May 20, 2011 10:45PM PDT

Much appreciate the insight...I just checked out the interfaces on my system; USB 2 seems to be the standard (you'll have to be patient w/ me; I'm not as tech literate as you appear to be).

My concern would be for the failure of the drive. As I understand the technology to be (pls feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), if a HDD fails, there is still a reasonable chance to recover the data via external diagnostics - painful, but still doable. On the other hand, SSDs are particularly finicky; if the drive fails, the data is lost forever, and again, from what I understand, the failure rate on these drives is still rather high.

Can you advise further? Also, a question regarding one of your comments: Wouldn't purchasing 2 drives be uneccesarily redundant if the data can be retrieved otherwise, or do I misunderstand that point?

Thanks for your help

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SSD for on-board storage, HD for external storage.
May 23, 2011 2:09AM PDT

Due to the ongoing development (cost per gig) and unproven long-term reliability of SSD. I would recommend SSD only for your PCs (laptop or desktop) on-board storage.

On-board SSD can really, really boost performance of your operating system and other software as 'reading' commands and data from it is extremely fast compared to reading from an on-board HD disk; however ... SSD is quite expensive per gig of storage currently and there are questions regarding 'life expectancy'. On-board storage speed is also a factor in memory paging activities. External drives (of any type) should never be used for operating system files or the paging file, thus external drive speed does not effect overall system performance really.

Additionally, external data storage will always be impacted by the I/O port data transfer rates (ie: USB 1.1, 2 or 3, FireWire, etc) and by what else is running that is also competing for external resources (ie: how busy is the I/O buss with CD/DVD/MP3, internet, etc), where most motherboards are set-up to provide as fast as possible access to the on-board storage.

Both SSD and HDs must be backed-up as failure can and will happen. Counting on a 'disk recovery' service is not really practical or cost effective (unless you have a significant "business" investment in the data in which case you should have a full fledge disaster recovery plan/service in place). Disk recovery attempts are largely successful; however obviously they cannot guarantee success. Additionally, often you have to send off the bad drive, provide a new drive for the salvaged data, and wait 1-4 weeks for the recovery firm to get back to you ... that is a long time nowadays.

By the way: Buying and connecting a 1T second external hard drive and getting a solid backup software package can be done for $100-$150. That is probably much less than the cost of paying to 'hopefully recover' your data (and you don't have to wait a month).

The only argument for getting SSD currently is the trememdous increase in I/O speed from that of HD. That speed advantage is readily apparent for overall system performance only if SSD is configured internally.

To me, to get decent 'bang for your buck' don't use SSD externally (until price drops very considerably).

Happy shopping.

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I couldn't write a better article than this one.
May 23, 2011 5:27AM PDT
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

For me the flip side is I see external HDD failures too often. My bet is dropsies. USB memory sticks appear to take the worst of tumbles and trips through the laundry and still work even after Fido chewed half of the plastic off.

The lesson has to be what the Cnet Moderators write too often -> "We only lose what we don't backup."
Bob