Old SSDs vs New Short-Stroked 10K HDD

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SlipperyPete

Gawd
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It's time for a new workstation but IT will not budge on installing an SSD in place of the 900GB 10K enterprise HDD. My current system has two old SSDs (120GB Corsair ForceGT, 128GB Corsair Nova) from 2010.

I think I can keep my current SSDs (swap into new system). My question is how much of a performance hit will I take if I go to the HDD? I don't use anywhere near 900GB so it will be heavily short-stroked, and keep in mind it is brand new (I think it is the Seagate 10K.8 but I can't be sure) vs the 5-year old early-generation SSDs.

Also, do you think the current SSDs are reliable at 5 years old? They get 86% and 92% health in CrystalDiskInfo but I'm still worried about reliability.

Thanks!
 
I wouldnt be afraid to use them and consider them reliable assuming there's no more to the story, Your IT guys may be concerned about recovery post failure. Most of us have a good handle on how to go about recovering data from a failed HDD and the symptoms leading up to a failure. If your data or downtime is valuable, might be why they want to stick to the HDD vs the unknown of SSD recovery.
 
SSD access times are going to be orders of magnitude faster than any platter drive, it doesn't matter how short you stroke it, it's physical movement vs. solid state.

In terms of reliability, they should be as reliable today as they were when you bought them. Again, no physical parts moving around wearing out.
Older SSDs were manufactured on larger processes and had higher P/E cycle life than newer SSD's, so in terms of life-expentancy, they probably have more life left than a brand new SSD.

Bottom line, keep your SSDs and use them. If IT insists on giving you a 900GB spinner, maybe use it as a scratch drive, or near real time backup?
 
Install OS and apps to the SSDs, move userdata folders to the spinner.
 
What OS are you using. Do OS and programs on SSD and send data and snapshots to HDD
 
Depends on your organization, but I've found at my work it's easier to get the standard issue equipment and then request an SSD separately -- do the migration on your own.
 
What about using VeloSSD or MaxVeloSSD to use the SSD as a cache for the HDD?
 
So I ran AS SSD bencharks on the SSDs I have, and there is definitely some sort of problem. The drives are connected to a Dell SAS 6/iR SCSI / SATA RAID Controller (Really LSI).

Corsair ForceGT 120GB

Seq Read: 133.29 MB/s
Seq Write: 16.29 MB/s

4k Read: 11.17 MB/s
4K Write: .38 MB/s

4K-64Thrd Read: 28.33 MB/s
4K-64Thrd Write: .75 MB/s

Acc.time Read: .291 ms
Acc time Write: 10.249 ms

Score read: 53
Score Write: 3
Overall Score: 82

Corsair Nova 128GB

Seq Read: 243.09 MB/s
Seq Write: 171.44 MB/s

4k Read: 14.96 MB/s
4K Write: 8.41 MB/s

4K-64Thrd Read: 43.88 MB/s
4K-64Thrd Write: 5.29 MB/s

Acc.time Read: .204 ms
Acc time Write: .605 ms

Score read: 83
Score Write: 31
Overall Score: 159


Based on this information I think I am just going to take the 10K 900GB drive. Don't want to risk performance issues in the new system. I do sometimes notice that ArcCatalog sometimes takes a long time to open, but everything else is very zippy.

Edit: So I tested by copying some 1GB folders and both drives are capable of writing at up to 150 MB/s. Not sure what is wrong with AS SSD but I don't think the numbers are reliable.
 
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Looks like the curse of SATA II to me.

My Dell workstation is native Intel SATA II and will push at max 260 MBps through a SSD. To be honest I don't notice any difference for general use between SSDs on SATA II or III. I ran AS on my T5400 and the 60GB Sandisk SSD (current gen, used for games) got pretty similar scores to your Nova. It's just the bog standard cheap Sandisk, not an extreme or Pro so basically as good as the top end SSDs from 3 years ago.

Thing is those SSDs will still 'feel' faster than that noisy (I assume) 100GB shortstroked 10k drive. All in the access times, not so much the raw MBps.

Can you simplify the disk controller and just plug them in using pure SATA with the SAS part switched off? I did that with a few T7400 Workstations and it improved things, not to mention reduced the boot time.

What does HDTune say? Do the SSDs have the latest firmware?
 
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I don't like to tinker with the workstations at the office; if something breaks, and they find out I was in there, I could get in trouble :-/ So no firmware updates / changing configurations here.

I'll get HDTune and see what it says.
 
Ah well then you are stuck. Just have to live with it unless you have a tech there that knows what they are doing.

Basically you have a 2007/2008 vintage controller that won't give you the best that SSDs can offer.

No point running any more benches really.
 
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