Concerned about using an SSD over a mechanical HDD

Update the firmware when you first get the drive, before you install anything on it. The SSD Toolkit that came with my Intel 335 240GB made it perfectly easy.

People in this forum with older SSDs that got newer ones can't feel any real-world difference between them. The difference between any SSD and a HDD is so vast that choosing between, say, a Samsung 840 or Intel 335 is really just splitting hairs.
 
People in this forum with older SSDs that got newer ones can't feel any real-world difference between them. The difference between any SSD and a HDD is so vast that choosing between, say, a Samsung 840 or Intel 335 is really just splitting hairs.[/QUOTE]

I get a kick out of seeing people arguing about benchmarks for SSD's and which one is better and faster. While there is a difference between how some controllers handle non compressible data the fact is that for most of us the difference in real world speeds is not going to noticable. This would be true for most all of the latest generation SSD's available.
Stick with a good name brand that has a decent rep, buy the biggest you can afford and sit back and enjoy the difference between a platter and a solid state. I guarantee you be happy with the difference regardless of whether it is a Crucial, OCZ, Plextor, Intel or Samsung.
 
I'm of the opinion that the best time to buy a SSD these days is right after a new generation comes out, in which case you look around and buy whichever one of the last generation that seems to have reported the fewest problems and is currently on sale because they're dumping stock to make room for the new model
 
wow long post! i too was concerned about using ssd but, been using one for over a year and not had any problems.
 
Old Hippie said:
Unbelievable and all your questions have been answered many times.

In short, take as chill pill, buy an SSD, and don't worry about it. :)
Click to expand...

listen to the old hippie

dude knows what he is talking about
 
I second what Jojo69 says...

Relax, you are worrying too much and over thinking the SSD switch.

I use a Samsung 830 non Pro its fine, as would a 840 non Pro if your concerned about price.

You can find a 840 non pro, 250GB for as low as $169.
You can find a 840 Pro, 256GB for as low as $226.

You may be able to find them on super sales but those are the best prices listed currently and are darn good too for the quality of the drive.

Just use a service such as www.Pricewatch.com to find the Lowest Price. You can then maybe get a price match if your not comfortable with the retailer that has the lowest price at a retailer you do trust.

I buy 99% of my computer parts from www.ncix.com, best pricing in Canada hands down and they price match anyone, Ship fast and are reliable.

Heck, I'd sell you my Samsung 830 256 as I'd like to step up to an 840 Pro my self.

PM me if your interested.
 
That's it. I've had it. I am sick and tired of my computer running worse than old computers I used to have (I distinctly recall a 600 MHz Pentium II machine I had long long ago that ran Windows 98 being faster than this is at booting up). My bootup times suck, it takes me 3-5 minutes from power off before I can use my desktop. A good 1 minute to get to login screen and then 2-4 minutes before I can actually click on something on my desktop without it spazzing and locking up.

The 840 256 GB is up for $150 at Newegg, but I refuse TLC technology - too untested. I won't gamble my OS drive to be their guinea pigs. I'm just going to go blow $220 on the 840 Pro 256 GB. I actively watched my HD status light on this bootup and it's solid, never even flickers. It's just that slow, I swear it has to be 95% of the reason my computer is slow. It can't be anything else at this point. I never turn off my firewall or antivirus and they filter out basically anything bad, I run my malware scanner and it never finds anything, CCleaner never helps, defrag is literally the only thing I didn't do. I even turned off startup processes I figured were slowing the computer down and it helped but it's still slow. I'm going to run a full defrag and optimization to see if I can make it any better but this is just ridiculous. I literally never power my PC off because I don't want to have to wait for that ridiculously slow bootup time.
 
The OP was TL/DNR, but I'll share my opinion...

I can sure as hell tell the difference between the older/newer SSD's and hate the idea of every using a HDD as my primary drive again. When I was on the fence about switching over someone used a internet bandwidth analogy that I found to be very helpful in describing what the switch was like.

Originally had some Intel 310's that replaced my WD Raptor. It was like going from 56k to a 1.5M dsl line. I then replaced that with an OCZ agility 3, felt like an upgrade to a 6M cable line. Just recently replaced the agility 3 with a Samsung 840 pro and holy hell, feels like I'm on a 50MB+ fiber line.

If I were to backtrack from any of my drives to the previous one I had, I would notice the difference everywhere. The lag time for the OS to start, the lag in start browsers or office programs, etc.

On the reliability side. Yeah SSD's had issues initially. Some still do, but just do your research. The dud drives/brands are well documented throughout the internet. I've never had a SSD fail on me but have had plenty of HDD's fail on me.

I have both a Samsung 840 pro in my desktop and 840 non-pro in my laptop, would recommend. OCZ drives were crap through the 2 series, but 3 onwards are great drives for the price.
 
Remind me why I hate coming on forums some more. God forbid you actually provide details to give an informed suggestion in a post when you have a reason for believing what you do. My post should've literally been:

"Halp, don't know if SSDs are reliable enough. Trust platter drives more. Should I trust SSD?"

And then posted 50 times to explain bit by bit the same thing one post could. Not a big surprise no one reads books anymore, apparently it's just me and a few other people in the world. Opinions noted, thanks.
 
When you're asking for help, Vistance, it puts you in a very poor position to criticize the responses you get.

But I agree, your initial post literally should have been what you just said. It's more than a little crass to use a wall of text to ask a few complex questions and then complain when people don't appear to be reading it.

I don't want this to sound overly critical, but I've spent time on forums that almost pride themselves on really massive posts and they have a name for the kind of behavior you're exhibiting here, it's called "special snowflake". Put simply you have a very common question that's askable and answerable in a paragraph or two--but instead of reading the existing body of knowledge from people who have asked before, you use walls of text to explain how your concerns are different even though they're really the same concerns anyone in that situation would have (and there's lots of people in the situation.) It gets a little more egregious when you start complaining that people are giving you quick answers because it's a question they've answered many times before with a nearly identical list of concerns. The "special snowflake" begins to sound entitled and petulant, almost more concerned with people admitting their situation is different than actually getting the information they need.

I'm explaining this because I know that some years ago I did similar things and wish someone would have explained it to me like this. Sorry if this sounds unnecessarily negative but in QA-ish forums such as this behaving in this way is generally tiresome for all parties.
 
So TL;DR version: How is the degradation of SSD in actual real-world usage for a standard desktop user, and how long can one expect an SSD to work compared to how long it will be fast. Also, is there ever a way to speed up an SSD that has many things on the drive (Formatting or some such)? Do SSDs when old enough/written to too much just suddenly die with no warning signs? If one were to simply put the OS on the SSD and write occasional documents and media (No DVDs - just random 3-150 MB videos) along with a small number of games would the SSD's performance ever degrade noticeably? How long would I probably get out of something like the OCZ Vertex 4 128 GB? Lastly, do SSDs that are "defective" in the sense produce random BSODs and errors along with crashes on a hardware level? This would be a huge concern for me as I don't need the hard drive to contribute to any system failures.
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I believe these are your main questions.

SSD's slow down after they start getting filled with data, the higher percent of capacity filled the slower they get, but this is only noticable on a drive that is very full. Erase uneeded data, free up the space, and performance will return.

You can do 10 to 20gb of writes a day for at least 7 years or more before having to worry about the drive dying.....although like any device it could die unexpectantly. When it dies it could give some sign before it goes or it could just crap out....same as what can happen to a platter drive.

Your concern about data loss has a simple soloution, regular backups. Having had my main drive go bad on me, a Hitachi HDD at the time, I have done regular backups ever since.

I was concerned about TLC in the 840 just like you. Then I read several reviews and the consensus is that the 250 gb version should last at least 7 years at 10gb a day. Thats a lot of writes, more than the average user would rack up. Most of us will get a lot longer than that barring a catastropic failure.

Does this answer your question?
 
I doubt you'll be sorry by getting the Samsung 840 Pro, that is one of the best out there at the moment.

I'm probably ordering one this coming week my self.

But you really should not insult people for providing their opinions. This is an open forum and everyone is entitled to respond if they feel their input may be of value.

Like Phyltre said, your wall of text doesn't represent any new concerns that have been discussed in many other threads. A little searching through these forums and you would have found your answers or links to in depth reviews by other reputable sites.

Your responses are almost like your looking to pick a fight, especially by Insulting everyone in this thread by insinuating their intelligence is inferior to your own, making claims that nobody reads books anymore, is just childish.

You will find some of the most useful threads on the internet covering a myriad of topics here in the HardForm.

Since you are finding your system slow and you suspect your Hard Drive use a program like Crystal Disk Info to inspect the drive and read its SMART information. This may yield you some information that will help you identify the problem. If there are error's found here you may need to RMA your drive, assuming it is still under warranty.

Your system seems pretty good by your specs quoted in your Sig. If everything is working 100% correct I can't imagine this system being as slow as you mentioned, unless there is a problem.

I would also ensure you have all the latest drivers for everything, latest BIOS for your Motherboard, etc...etc...

My system, cold boot is about 30-40 seconds, this includes posting with an LSI Raid card, with Windows 8 Pro.

It could be that you just need to re-install Windows and the OS has become damaged/corrupt in some fashion that isn't generating errors.
 
For desktop use SSDs actually should be more reliable than magnetic media. You really don't write that much to disk during regular desktop use, and that is the main thing that affects their life. For most desktop workloads, you'll find they'll easily last a decade or two, after which the problem is more likely to be the flash itself decaying.

Now something you can do, if reliability worries you, is get a magnetic drive too and use something like Acronis TrueImage to back your stuff up. Then, should the SSD fail, you get it fixed and just image the system back.

In terms of speeding up an SSD, you shouldn't really need to under normal use. However you can do a few things. One is to over-provision, meaning leave space blank. You just make your partition less than the total space. So you have a 256GB drive, maybe you make a 230GB partition. This gives the drive's garbage collection more space to work with and keeps performance higher.

Also you can do a SATA secure erase. This blows away everything on the drive completely, including all remapped areas, and sets it back to a fresh state. That'll restore performance to like-new, but of course remove all data. Don't do it often though, as it is writing data to all the flash chips and this does decrease drive life slightly.

There can be defective SSDs for sure, but it is pretty rare. No more common than HDDs in my experience. Mostly when they are defective they just flat don't work, so it is real obvious what the problem is.

In terms of your system speed, that sounds like something else that needs looking in to. I have magnetic drives only at work and my boot time isn't near that long. Not saying SSDs wouldn't help, but try and fix the underlying problem first/as well. You may find a reinstall does the trick, and of course if you get an SSD and reinstall on that your bootup should get lightning fast. It's 10ish seconds on my desktop.
 
evilsofa said:
Did you know that Google makes plagiarism extremely easy to find, and that copying and pasting a paragraph from a review website kind of sticks out? You are busted:

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/storage/49301-samsung-ssd-840-series-250gb/
Click to expand...

To all the Sherlock Holmes out there, of course I have used the para from the review. Came across the info and shared it here. Thought forums are meant for such info sharing o_O helping users with the valid info for the SSDs they purchase.
 
Wrong Thread bud...

Posting information from someone else's work is ok, as long as you are giving credit, like providing a link, or reference to where you got the information.

Posting as you did is not ok.

Yes forums are meant for sharing but please do it responsibly and correctly.
 
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