5 ms·

Don't forget the spinning, humming & clicking rust they use rather than an SSD. One errant kid hits it too quickly and shatter goes those platters!

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
SSDs have many advantages over rotary drives, but reliability is not one of them.
- Klinky 9y ago
  I've yet to see any reliable evidence that SSDs are less reliable than hard drives. Plenty of anecdotes, but those also exist aplenty for hard drives. Personally I've had multiple hard drives fail on me, but no SSDs.
  - StudentStuff 9y ago
    I've seen early model SSDs fail (eg 60GB and 120GB consumer SSDs years ago), but an 850 Pro will keep on going for a long time.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    At my work I have to get a new SSD every 6-12 months because they just fail after writing around ~100TB to them, or if they don't straight up fail they become slow and start giving you read errors. I can write even a petabyte to a normal HDD and it will still work fine, but SSDs have a finite number of writes, and if you do what we do, you're going to run out within months rather than years.
    - msl 9y ago
      You might want to consider trying another manufacturer's disks next. None of the SSDs tested by The Tech Report failed anywhere near that early [1]. [1] http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/3 http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
      - gambiting 9y ago
        They are always either Samsung 840 or 850 PRO - so according to that test they should last much longer than they do. But they don't - I suspect it's the nature of what we're doing that's killing them, it's almost all random writes, very little sequential writing. Techreport did sequential writes - so each cell was only written once per pass, while when I write 1TB of data to my drive majority of it might be focused in the same area - sure broken cells they will get moved around but the drive will run out of cells to relocate to after a while.
        pixl97 9y ago
        If you're using Samsung in Windows, make sure you turn on RAPID mode. Also, don't run any SSD almost full, it kills your speed. Killing PRO's in 100T is an aberration
        gambiting 9y ago
        I'm running 2x1TB in RAID 0, so Samsung Magician doesn't let me enable RAPID mode, it just says it's unsupported. And yeah, I never run them near full, usually about 200-300GB are completely free. Besides, RAPID mode seems to destroy performance if you care about number of operations per second(and I do very much, I'm writing millions of files to the drive every day) http://techreport.com/review/25282/a-closer-look-at-rapid-dram-caching-on-the-samsung-840-evo-ssd/5 http://techreport.com/review/25282/a-closer-look-at-rapid-dr...
- ballenf 9y ago
  That thinking is a little dated IMO, but even 6 years ago: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-driv... (where's ssd's 'hotness' is more important than their 'craziness')
timthelion 9y ago
Have you ever taken apart a hard drive? I did and was shocked to find the platters were so strong that I had a hard time bending them with two hands.
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  But knock them while it’s spinning and it would be game over for hundreds of sectors.
  - dkersten 9y ago
    ...and possibly the read/write heads.
- qquark 9y ago
  A side note: a lot of "newer" HDDs (< 15 years I guess ?) now have ceramic/glass platters that break instead of bending, so be careful if trying this to avoid hurting yourself.
sova 9y ago
Platter Shatter would be a good name for a chiptune metal band
- sova 9y ago
  Come on, downvoting Abraham, it's a guitar hero thread!

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

SSDs have many advantages over rotary drives, but reliability is not one of them.

Klinky 9y ago
I've yet to see any reliable evidence that SSDs are less reliable than hard drives. Plenty of anecdotes, but those also exist aplenty for hard drives. Personally I've had multiple hard drives fail on me, but no SSDs.
- StudentStuff 9y ago
  I've seen early model SSDs fail (eg 60GB and 120GB consumer SSDs years ago), but an 850 Pro will keep on going for a long time.
- gambiting 9y ago
  At my work I have to get a new SSD every 6-12 months because they just fail after writing around ~100TB to them, or if they don't straight up fail they become slow and start giving you read errors. I can write even a petabyte to a normal HDD and it will still work fine, but SSDs have a finite number of writes, and if you do what we do, you're going to run out within months rather than years.
  - msl 9y ago
    You might want to consider trying another manufacturer's disks next. None of the SSDs tested by The Tech Report failed anywhere near that early [1]. [1] http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/3 http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
    - gambiting 9y ago
      They are always either Samsung 840 or 850 PRO - so according to that test they should last much longer than they do. But they don't - I suspect it's the nature of what we're doing that's killing them, it's almost all random writes, very little sequential writing. Techreport did sequential writes - so each cell was only written once per pass, while when I write 1TB of data to my drive majority of it might be focused in the same area - sure broken cells they will get moved around but the drive will run out of cells to relocate to after a while.
      - pixl97 9y ago
        If you're using Samsung in Windows, make sure you turn on RAPID mode. Also, don't run any SSD almost full, it kills your speed. Killing PRO's in 100T is an aberration
        gambiting 9y ago
        I'm running 2x1TB in RAID 0, so Samsung Magician doesn't let me enable RAPID mode, it just says it's unsupported. And yeah, I never run them near full, usually about 200-300GB are completely free. Besides, RAPID mode seems to destroy performance if you care about number of operations per second(and I do very much, I'm writing millions of files to the drive every day) http://techreport.com/review/25282/a-closer-look-at-rapid-dram-caching-on-the-samsung-840-evo-ssd/5 http://techreport.com/review/25282/a-closer-look-at-rapid-dr...
ballenf 9y ago
That thinking is a little dated IMO, but even 6 years ago: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-driv... (where's ssd's 'hotness' is more important than their 'craziness')

timthelion 9y ago

Have you ever taken apart a hard drive? I did and was shocked to find the platters were so strong that I had a hard time bending them with two hands.

colejohnson66 9y ago
But knock them while it’s spinning and it would be game over for hundreds of sectors.
- dkersten 9y ago
  ...and possibly the read/write heads.
qquark 9y ago
A side note: a lot of "newer" HDDs (< 15 years I guess ?) now have ceramic/glass platters that break instead of bending, so be careful if trying this to avoid hurting yourself.

sova 9y ago

Platter Shatter would be a good name for a chiptune metal band

sova 9y ago
Come on, downvoting Abraham, it's a guitar hero thread!