ssd's are they reliable?

A

ar09

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Feb 23, 2009
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i was reading on the net, and i found some new info about ssd's. did you guys know that intel ssd's stop working, with age? that is alarming, and it sucks... now i am afraid to buy a larger capacity ssd. i am sticking with hdd's for now. any input?
 
SSDs will outlast hard drives. They may have a fixed number of writes, but due to not having any mechanical parts, they still outlast disk based storage. The MTBF on my SSD for example is 2 million hours. Very high end enterprise hard drives are rated for 1.6 million hours and consumer level hard drives are normally 500 thousand hours.
 
Are they reliable enough to not have one dedicated to mirroring/parity?

Although Spectrumbx seems to suggest he wouldn't drop Flexraid just yet over the controllers.... :)
 
thanks.

what about all this talk that the intel x25-m is no good. what do you guys think, should i buy it?
 
If you're [Hard] :rolleyes:, go for it. Otherwise, do a search on it's developing problems to see if it's risk you want to take with your money.
 
X25-M is an amazing drive. What are you smoking? It's just expensive for what little gigs you get....otherwise, it flies.:)
 
The thing with the Intel SSD is that while being advertised as the fastest SSD out there, it slows down to half its rated speed with normal usage. Intel hasn't confirmed this yet and is working together with the site which reported this to replicate the issue. It could be that fragmentation is to blame.

SSDs at this point are a largely unproven technology. There's nothing inherently wrong with them, it just pays off to use a filesystem and OS which is aware of SSDs and can properly use them. Regular defragmentation tools for example will worsen the performance of an SSD.

Long-term prospects of SSDs are largely unknown at this point. SSDs have a fixed limit in the form of write-cycles to each section (10k for MLC and 100k cycles for SLC SSDs). HDDs have no fixed limit and will last longer in theory for that reason.
 
The thing with the Intel SSD is that while being advertised as the fastest SSD out there, it slows down to half its rated speed with normal usage. Intel hasn't confirmed this yet and is working together with the site which reported this to replicate the issue. It could be that fragmentation is to blame
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Is this just a problem for Intel though, or do other manufacturers also suffer the same issue, just nobody has bought it up yet.
 
SSDs hold a lot of promise, but until now, hype has far exceeded substance. For the price you pay, and the limitations of capacity and write cycles, flawless performance is to be expected, but that does not seem to be the case in reality.

When the X-25 came out, I was really excited... almost bought one impulsively (luckily a lens for my dslr 'stole' that outlay)...it's a good thing I didn't.

I am going to wait for the technology to mature a bit more before taking the plunge.
 
Toytown said:
Is this just a problem for Intel though, or do other manufacturers also suffer the same issue, just nobody has bought it up yet.
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Disclaimer: speculation ahead.

It's supposed to happen with all SSDs, but is probably different from Intels because the wear levelling algorithms are different. From what I've read, free space fragmentation at the filesystem level causes random writes, which causes delays when writing at the physical block level since erase-write occurs for more cells than is 'necessary'. Wear levelling exacerbates the internal fragmentation anyway, so the chance of sequential writes decreases at the cell level too over time as more cells are used up.

So random writes + internal fragmentation = bad for SSD performance. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, since the above is partial speculation.

On the PCper site, there is a thread on Hyperfast where a Diskeeper engineer has posted; he mentions that the Intel is only one that doesnt benefit from hyperfast. Let me see if I can dig it up.

EDIT: links
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?p=4351675
http://www.diskeeperblog.com/archives/2008/12/hyperfast_is_al.html
Check out the comments towards the end of the blog post.
 
Tolyngee said:
Are they reliable enough to not have one dedicated to mirroring/parity?

Although Spectrumbx seems to suggest he wouldn't drop Flexraid just yet over the controllers.... :)
Click to expand...

Nope, FlexRAID will become even more critical with SSDs (specially, corruption detection). :)
With capacity limits but lower power usage, having multiple SSDs in one system will be common and parity RAID will still be favorable.
Unlike with HDD (lack of RAID stripe alignment), FlexRAID's speed over SSDs will be greatly improved as reads are truly random.
 
Like any storage medium if you put all your eggs in one basket you are asking for trouble.
 
SSDs have a fixed limit in the form of write-cycles to each section (10k for MLC and 100k cycles for SLC SSDs).
Click to expand...
that is just sad. :)
HDDs have no fixed limit and will last longer in theory for that reason
Click to expand...
now i am thinking on getting a 15k sas drive.:)
I am going to wait for the technology to mature a bit more before taking the plunge.
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me too.:( :)
 
One thing to really pay attention to is the warranty on SSD drives.

Most only have a 1 year warranty with Intel having the best warranty at 3 years.
A 1 year warranty doesn't add much confidence.

It is clear that this will quickly change, and SSDs will gain great reliability.
However, we are not there yet.
 
thanks all.

i am doing this, i am going to buy another velociraptor 300g 10k rpm. and make a raid 0.
 
I am thinking of going with two small cheapo SSD with RAID 0 just to install Vista and another large 1 TB "normal" HDD for backup, installing games, etc.
 
spectrumbx said:
One thing to really pay attention to is the warranty on SSD drives.

Most only have a 1 year warranty with Intel having the best warranty at 3 years.
A 1 year warranty doesn't add much confidence.

It is clear that this will quickly change, and SSDs will gain great reliability.
However, we are not there yet.
Click to expand...

I wasn't aware of this yet... 1 year is indeed terrible. I wouldn't even want to buy an HDD with such a short warranty period. 3 year is just on the edge of being acceptable already.

SSDs do indeed have a long road ahead of them.
 
How long have SSD hard drives been out? Maybe a couple of years, 3 tops. Flash memory quite a bit longer, but not being used in this way.

It's a new technology. Where was the hard drive 3 years after introduction. SSD's are a whole lot more mature than hard drives were at this point in their lives.

Imagine what will be coming to market in the next 3 years. Boggles the mind. Yes there are a few issues with the current crop. If new tech is not your thing, so be it. But for a new technology, it actually works quite well, and is not that expensive.

If you constantly write and then erase your SSD drive, yes, it will prolly crap out fairly quickly. That is not how a hard drive gets used. For most cases, they will be long obsolete before the memory starts to die from rewrites.

Don
 
ar09 said:
thanks all.

i am doing this, i am going to buy another velociraptor 300g 10k rpm. and make a raid 0.
Click to expand...

If you're looking for reliability, you absolutely do not want RAID 0. You will lose all of your data if either drive fails.

RAID 1 would be great for reliability, though.
 
Been using a 30GB ocz core ssd for roughly 6 months without issue so far. I have the swap space and programs on another drive. It basically just boots and has firefox on it.
 
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