SSD external backup--what to choose?

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g1tigi

Limp Gawd
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I need an SSD for external backup purposes of about 120GB. I'm a bit sick of seagate and WD's 2.5'' failing on me, so going SSD to ensure lowest probability of drive failure.

I'll probably make a back up about once a week of about 40-60gigs.

Was thinking of getting either the OCZ core series or OCZ solid series (don't know the difference between the two...just saw the 'solid' series on newegg for the first time today)--but really I don't know what of all the brands would be most reliable and cost effective. Since this is for backup purposes, speed isn't necessarily an issue (though I suppose fast write speed would be a plus). Looking to spend about ~300 including an external enclosure.

Any thoughts?
 
g1tigi said:
I need an SSD for external backup purposes of about 120GB. I'm a bit sick of seagate and WD's 2.5'' failing on me, so going SSD to ensure lowest probability of drive failure.

I'll probably make a back up about once a week of about 40-60gigs.

Any thoughts?
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Unless you're using this external drive as a hammer a regular hard drive would be a much better choice. Reliability of the latest SSDs is supposed to be great but there isn't much real world experience yet. They aren't really designed for that purpose. Writing a huge amount of data every week will be very slow and probably significantly decrease the lifespan of the drive since writing to flash memory causes a little wear each time it occurs.

It might make sense when prices come down, but I would stick with a good 2.5" 320 or 500 GB drive for backups. The failure rate can't be that bad and you can get a lot more GBs/$.
 
true, the flash drive probably would wear out easily if I backed up a 40-60GB image weekly. I suppose an incremental weekly backup would circumvent that problem.

though does anyone have any experience with SSDs and which ones? or has any SSD actually failed on anyone?

and what 2.5'' non-seagate/WD HD would be best to get if I went that route?
 
You'd be backing 40-60GB of data up to that drive for over 80 years before you could/should/would expect to have problems, actually a lot longer than that since you said weekly and not daily. People freak out entirely too much about SSD wear-life on the data cells, and it's misplaced. They're not going to run out unless you were rewriting hundreds and hundreds of gigs per hour and even that would still give you 40+ years of use more than likely.

If he gets a 128GB SSD, and he writes 40-60GB of data to it the first week, he's used roughly half (on average) of the data cells for storage and he's written to those cells one time. The next week, when he chooses to write another 40-60GB of data, typically the first 40-60GB would be erased (since we're doing new backups that overwrite the old ones I'm assuming) - and when he went to write the "new" 40-60GB of data, the wear-leveling technology in the drive's controller would say "Ok, we wrote to data cells aaa through bbb last time, this time we'll use ccc through ddd so we don't use those other ones again till we've given every data cell at least one write pass."

That's how wear-leveling works: it keeps track of every bit that's been written and ensures it doesn't just erase and re-write to the same exact data cell immediately - it "levels the wear and tear" on the circuits and cells by allowing the spread of the activity. So in a month's time, theoretically with his 40-60GB figure, and 4 weeks of backups, he'd have written to the data cells only twice in theory: the first 40-60GB once, the second 40-60GB once, then the first 40-60GB a second time, then the second 40-60GB a second time, etc. SSD cells are rated (conservatively) at 100,000 write cycles and the technology is improving.

If he's doing ~2 write passes a month, he's got nothing to worry about for wearing out even 1 data cell for oh... say... a few thousand years? :)

The info about wear-leveling and how it affects the lifespan of current SSD technology is out there, so reading up on it would do everyone some good I think. But wearing out an SSD in such a way, as a weekly backup device? Never happen...

I just can't understand why someone would choose to use a relatively high performance storage medium as a "backup" device. If you're having issues with WD 2.5" drives, stop wasting your money on 'em and get another brand, simple. Much less wasteful... :D
 
Joe Average said:
I just can't understand why someone would choose to use a relatively high performance storage medium as a "backup" device. If you're having issues with WD 2.5" drives, stop wasting your money on 'em and get another brand, simple. Much less wasteful... :D
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so what would you recommend? :p

in reality, this is actually something a family member wants; I back up all my stuff on the 320gb seagate in my sig...it's just easier to ask questions when pretending it's my own... (if I had the cash to buy an SSD, it'd go straight to displacing my raptor)

but I suppose would it be safe to assume that if the SSD isn't DOA, then I shouldn't worry too much about future failures (as opposed to a traditional HD which could feasibly die some time later even if it wasn't DOA)?

btw thanks for the comments about ssd's
 
Any piece of technology can fail at any given time just because. There's no logic behind it most of the time, no reasons that matter, shit just happens. :D

Like I said, get some other brand of drive. Hard drives will always be the preferred method for cheap fairly reliable long term storage for the next decade or so. The cost involved, the amount of storage, etc, all favor hard drives for simplistic backup duties unless you prefer to use a lot of DVDs which require time to burn, etc. I use DVDs over anything else because they work better for my patterns of usage and backups. Not interested in losing several hundred gigs or more if a drive fails - with a DVD I never lose more than ~4.5GB at a time, if that much.
 
You can get several hard drives for the price of one SSD. That's what I'd do: get several hard drives and run the same backup on each on a rotation. Having multiple backup drives will lessen the possibility of losing everything. Since it'd be on a rotation you'd also be able to go back and recover something you edited several weeks ago.
 
Joe Average said:
People freak out entirely too much about SSD wear-life on the data cells, and it's misplaced. They're not going to run out unless you were rewriting hundreds and hundreds of gigs per hour and even that would still give you 40+ years of use more than likely.
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Definitely. :)

I think the wear-effect is chimed by a lot of people who just don't welcome SSD technology; with wear-leveling algorithms and usage that ISN'T something that hardcore datacenters or real-time rendering would read/write the disk in such a manner, SSD should far outlast mechanical failure rates in standard disk drives. I'd be more worried about misplacing the drive or spilling water on it, to be honest! :eek:
 
SockMan! said:
You can get several hard drives for the price of one SSD. That's what I'd do: get several hard drives and run the same backup on each on a rotation. Having multiple backup drives will lessen the possibility of losing everything. Since it'd be on a rotation you'd also be able to go back and recover something you edited several weeks ago.
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using multiple drives or setting up like a raid 1/5 would be the easiest and most cost effective way to make the backup fail-proof---but the key thing is that I need (er my family member) portability, i.e. I can't be lugging around a bunch of HD's. So cost aside, I guess we're all in agreement that the SSD would be the most reliable single harddrive solution?

thnx for the comments
 
Uhmmm... no. For cheap capacious portable storage, hard drives are still the only reasonable solution from the capacity standpoint and from the cost perspective. Get a 2.5" 500GB hard drive, put it inside a 2.5" portable USB enclosure (believe it or not, it's usually cheaper this way than buying a pre-manufactured 500GB 2.5" external USB hard drive), and put whatever you want on it then store it in a safe place.

As for "fail-proof" there is simply no such thing. I've been build RAID setups for years - real ones, for serious data backup purposes, and the one lesson I've learned that is firmly implanted in my psyche is that no backup medium is "fail-proof", ever. :)

You can do a lot to prevent a lot of mishaps that will cost you the data, but you can't prevent everything that can possibly happen. Store the stuff underground in a data center that was an ex-missile silo? Watch what happens when an earthquake cracks the walls and the underground river destroys everything... etc... just going off on a tangent but, honestly, there is no perfect backup medium, unfortunately.

Just do what you think is best for the time, the cost, and effectiveness. I'd recommend a hard drive over an SSD anytime and twice on Sunday.

And it's Sunday soo...

I'd recommend a hard drive over an SSD anytime. ;)
 
Get a MLC drive with Jmicron chipset. It is plague with random write problems but that would not effect you so it will be more cost effective. OCZ Core series is one. Not sure about Solid. I believe Patriot Warp SSDs are also under that category.
 
lixuelai said:
Get a MLC drive with Jmicron chipset. It is plague with random write problems but that would not effect you so it will be more cost effective. OCZ Core series is one. Not sure about Solid. I believe Patriot Warp SSDs are also under that category.
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:eek:

That's almost like recommending an IBM DeathStar 75GXP back when it was around! Almost. :D
 
Joe Average said:
You'd be backing 40-60GB of data up to that drive for over 80 years before you could/should/would expect to have problems, actually a lot longer than that since you said weekly and not daily. People freak out entirely too much about SSD wear-life on the data cells, and it's misplaced. They're not going to run out unless you were rewriting hundreds and hundreds of gigs per hour and even that would still give you 40+ years of use more than likely.
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It's amazing how you can write a dissertation about a secondary point, Joe. ;)

The companies that make the drives seem to be worried about it. They put disclaimers to not defrag the drives and some (like OCZ) even provide detailed instructions for turning off all unnecessary write operations in Windows. If they're worried about Windows keeping the drive defraged at night (which shouldn't be too bad after the first few runs) that tells me that there are still legitimate concerns about the lifespan of these drives

They really haven't been in the wild long enough to tell how well the newer flash cells and wear leveling systems will cope. I've got quite a few flash memory cards of various formats that died on me, and those were just for taking pictures.

It may well be that these drives will keep on trucking for years even if you write several gigs a day, but we're in agreement that the price/gigabyte is still way too high. Newegg has all 2.5" 320GB 7200 RPM drives available for 89.99 with free shipping at the moment, 109.99 for the 500 GB 5400 RPM drives.
 
lixuelai said:
Get a MLC drive with Jmicron chipset. It is plague with random write problems but that would not effect you so it will be more cost effective. OCZ Core series is one. Not sure about Solid. I believe Patriot Warp SSDs are also under that category.
Click to expand...

plagued with random write problems? isn't that a pretty serious issue?

as for the price/gig issue: yeah :/ we'll have to wait until enterprise starts mopping up SSDs to help drive down prices.
 
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