Using SSD as USB drive

MrValentine

MrValentine

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 5, 2004
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I use a usb powered HD at work all day. I use it mainly for imaging PC's. I have a WinPE boot partition with ghost, and another partition with 15+ ghost images, and various software and utilities. But I seem to be going through HD's once a year or so. (maybe this is an acceptable amount of time?)

I dont know enough about SSD performance under XP to decide if I should move from HDs to SSD's. Would performance degrade over time? The drive will be handled farily roughly, image about 2 PC's a day, and also get X-rayed about 2-3 times a day.
 
I use my WD Passport for exactly the same purposes you describe each and every day and have only had 1 fail in over 4 years. What brand are you using?

That said, I would DEFINITELY opt for a SSD in a 2.5" USB powered enclosure if the PC's you're imaging have USB3. WAY faster ;)
 
SSDs are much better at surviving rough handling, and they take much less power. the only thing i dont know about is xrays- are you talking about airport security xrays or something? as long as the USB enclosure and/or the shell of the SSD is metal it should shield the circuitry inside. i would spring for a SSD for sure.
 
ghost6303 said:
they take much less power
Click to expand...

This is a myth, for the most part. Solid state drives have lower power consumption under load than hard disk on average (not always), but where they really lose is on idle power consumption.

Hard disks can spin down to a low power state and continue to read/write at lower speed for background I/O. An SSD can't do that, it shoots up to full power draw just to do background I/O while idle. This leads to higher average power consumption from the SSD for normal desktop workloads.

Edit: Toms Hardware did an article on this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968-12.html
 
Hmm you're right, SSDs are going down fast then. Last time I checked they were a couple hundred bucks for like 32GB.
 
Unknown-One said:
This is a myth, for the most part. Solid state drives have lower power consumption under load than hard disk on average (not always), but where they really lose is on idle power consumption.

Hard disks can spin down to a low power state and continue to read/write at lower speed for background I/O. An SSD can't do that, it shoots up to full power draw just to do background I/O while idle. This leads to higher average power consumption from the SSD for normal desktop workloads.

Edit: Toms Hardware did an article on this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968-12.html
Click to expand...

Actually, the general consensus is that the article on Tom's Hardware is faulty. SSDs do require more power when they are reading and writing, but they are also doing operations a ton faster. So looking at the power/time argument with an infinite set of operations is misleading, because in real lefe the SSD will complete a set task much more quickly and then go into sleep mode. So the power required per operation is lower than HDDs, which is the metric you should really be using.
 
Thanks for the replys!! The xray machines are airport style. I work in prison setting and any movement between locations means 2 shakedowns and everything goes through xray machine each time.

I'll try the SSD and see how it goes. I'm not sure whats going on. My 80gb WD drive is still kicking (4+ years). But i've had 2 of my newer 500gb WD drives get click of death lately. Both right after the 1 year warrenty is up.

I dont use a memory stick as last time I tried (16gb corsair) ghost was going to take 3+ hours for a 10gb image. I was hopping SSD would do much better. The HD's can do 7-12 min depending on the machine.
 
Unknown-One said:
This is a myth, for the most part. Solid state drives have lower power consumption under load than hard disk on average (not always), but where they really lose is on idle power consumption.
Click to expand...
you mean it is not true in some select circumstances. yes there are a few HDDs that, in some situations, can consume less power than a SSD, but to say that its largely a myth that a mechanical drive does not consume more power than a solid state drive is untrue, especially with recent generations of SSDs.

the artical you quote is also almost 3 years old. those are first generation drives. two of the SSDs tested showd ONE QUARTER of the IOps of the HDDs. the fastest SSD only had 700 IOps. those drives are ancient and the test does not reflect current technology.

Peteman also brings up a good point on the SSDs completing the task at hand many times faster and then going into power saving mode.

idle power measurements dont matter in this situation anyway, because a portable hard drive can be just unplugged or turned off when not in use. the only reason i origonally mentioned lower power for SSDs is because you can use an enclosure without an external power source, or without those dumb USB Y-adapters that take two ports for power.
 
Unknown-One said:
This is a myth, for the most part. Solid state drives have lower power consumption under load than hard disk on average (not always), but where they really lose is on idle power consumption.
Click to expand...

HDD's also require a lot more juice at startup.
 
That Tom's article is 2.5 years old. While I'm sure hard drives have improved their circuitry some since 2008, they're still physically spinning the platters and moving the heads around. There's only so much you can improve on that as far as power draw goes. On the other hand, SSDs have improved dramatically since 2008. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-flash-trim,2593-3.html is from last April and shows the X25-M G2 as drawing only 1.5W under "workstation load", which puts it lower than any of the HDDs in the older comparison.

The power comparison from the newer SSD article (no HDDs) shows the G2 at 959.5 for streaming read ops/watt and 6,295.1 in workstation ops/watt. In the older comparison, the best SSD got 629 on workstation ops and the best HDD got 166. The G2 is 10 times as good as the older SSD, and almost 38 times as good as the HDD. Even at its highest load, the G2 is drawing the same amount of power (1.8W) as the best HDD did, and that's only looking at power and completely ignoring the massive performance increase.
 
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