Solid State Drive on my PC

[Mike Henderson]

I just replaced my mechanical (rotating) disk drive with a solid state drive. WOW, that really sped up my computer! Booting is fast, loading a program is fast, pulling a web page up is fast, everything is fast. I know I'm going to get accustom to how fast it works and just view it as the way computers should be - so I thought I'd tell you now, while I'm still amazed at the speed.

Mike

[Chuck Wintle]

I just replaced my mechanical (rotating) disk drive with a solid state drive. WOW, that really sped up my computer! Booting is fast, loading a program is fast, pulling a web page up is fast, everything is fast. I know I'm going to get accustom to how fast it works and just view it as the way computers should be - so I thought I'd tell you now, while I'm still amazed at the speed.

Mike
what brand of drive did you install? and what did it cost you? Solid state drives are the future of mass storage, the end of electromechanical drives is on the horizon.

[Mike Henderson]

what brand of drive did you install? and what did it cost you? Solid state drives are the future of mass storage, the end of electromechanical drives is on the horizon.
I bought a 256GB by Crucial. I bought the "kit" which comes with a USB connector to connect the new drive to the computer and software that clones your existing drive to the SSD. I paid $194. You can see the drive here (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004W2JL84/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00)(on Amazon). The price jumps around so if you plan on buying one, watch until it drops to your target price. My target was under $200.

Mike

[Brian Elfert]

I bought a new Dell laptop last November. At the same time I bought an 80GB Intel SSD for it and 8GB of RAM. It is really fast, but I never used it with the mechanical hard drive so I have no idea how much the SSD helps.

[Chris Parks]

Make sure any SSD you buy has TRIM support, apparently it is is one of those important things no one tells us about. I replaced the old mechanical drive in my car with a 126 Gig SSD. Wow is all I can say.

[Chuck Wintle]

What is the connection the the drive? Is it a single sata type?

[Steve Baumgartner]

+1 re TRIM. "They" don't tell you that despite having no moving parts, the memory cells in an SSD eventually fail. This makes the controller an essential part. It spreads the load so that some cells don't get worked harder than others and manages remapping around the ones that have failed. The drives are made with enough extra cells initially to maintain their listed capacity for a reasonable time despite the failures, but eventually they will wear out.

[Don Morris]

I bought SSD in a MACBook Pro for my wife. She likes FAST, and is very happy with it. I understand that in the future MAC will only make them with SSD. Makes sense to me. No moving parts to go wrong. Just back up stuff because if it goes, there's less chance of recovery.

[Brian Elfert]

If you're buying a current model SSD drive they should all have TRIM now. If you are running Windows you really want to run Windows 7 with an SSD drive. Windows 7 will automatically turn on the proper features for use with an SSD drive. Windows XP will require some tweaking for use with an SSD.

[Andrew Pitonyak]

Everyone that I know that has an SSD drive LOVES it. I have seen them initially on Laptops. A word of warning, however. In the past six years I have dealt with 10 or 12 failed hard drives. In every instance, I was able to pull most of the data from the failed / failing drive. This is not always possible, of course. I had one drive with a total failure in the mid 80s and another in mid 90s, and I have lost files. My only point is that the failure mode that I have usually seen with a regular hard drive is that something is failing on the platter and that usually does not cause everything to fail. Of course, it may also take a while to notice because you won't notice until you attempt to read those portions of the platter.

I have never personally used an SSD, but I know people that do. I know three people that have had SSD failure and in every instance, the drive was totally dead and no data was recovered from the drive. Things went from just fine to totally dead.

So, do you want an SSD drive? Yes, you probably do. Just keep regular backups. I wrote my own software to backup my computer (it takes entire snapshots using hard links to previous backups for files that have not changed and uses cheat methods - that are sufficiently accurate for my uses - to determine if files have changed..... and it allows me to troll through a few 100 GB in a few minutes). The point of this is that it means that I am willing to backup often. Oh, I run this on Linux. Have not tested my software against Windows. it is on my list of things to do... but it is not near the top of the list. For those Windows loving software dweebs out there want to test it on Windows.. knock yourself out https://github.com/pitonyak/LinkBackADP.git

Other things to consider. When that SSD drive fails and you send it back for a warranty replacement, were you able to wipe the drive? Probably not.

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/02/09/1525212/ask-slashdot-how-to-deal-with-refurbed-drives-with-customer-data
http://techsecuritytoday.com/index.php/our-contributors/ephraim-schwartz/entry/motorola-resells-refurbished-xoom-tablets-containing-old-user-data

Seems like it might be a good idea to encrypt your drives if they contain sensitive information so that you don't need to worry about your data if the drives fails. But wait, some drives (Intel 520 series, for example) use compression and deduplication as part of what they do, so encrypting your drive will degrade performance in these cases. That said, everyone that I know that has done this likes it much better than an encrypted regular drive.

Some drives have this built-in. I have not spent time pursuing this since I am not currently in the market for a drive, but it is worth investigating (see http://smallbusiness.chron.com/samsung-ssd-encryption-work-39204.html)

[Eric DeSilva]

One of the benefits of SSD is a lower failure rate, but agree that people need to keep regular backups.

As far as wiping drives, it is my understanding that as long as you are running Win7, the user files are encrypted. Unlike with prior versions of windows.

[David Weaver]

How do they test them? I used to look at MTBF when deciding whether I'd leave something on or bother to turn it off, and see if there were other mitigating factors like failure based on startup cycles.

I see two different drives advertised as 1.2 million hours MTBF and 2.0 million hours MTBF.

That doesn't seem to make sense with real world experience, and if they are failing that frequently, might lead someone (like me) to be a bit too lazy about backup thinking that it's unlikely the drive will fail.

It would be nice if their data matched real world experience, or at least if there was some risk data providing that the MTBF isn't a good thing to rely on on an individual basis.

[David Weaver]

Ahh... i just found the annual failure rates. Listed in one place as 0.73% for the 1.2MM hour drive and 0.44% for the 2.0MM hour drive.

1.2MM hours is about 137 years

0.73% annual failure rate doesn't match up with that (if 0.73% failed annually, after 137 years, 37% of the drives would be left).

I don't think the people who put those two numbers together were looking for consistency.

But to know that about 1% fail a year is worth knowing - it's a lot easier to grasp that over an 8 year period, you can expect approximately 1/12 chance that you'll have a catastrophic failure, or 1/16 or so given 0.73%.