4 ms·

I agree. I believe their performance increase far out-weighs their high failure rate and high cost. Just make sure you have good back up.

xyzzy123 14y ago
Yeah, sand >> rust, and I couldn't imagine switching back now. However, I now prefer to buy SSD models that have been available for more than 6 months. I've owned 6 SSDs and 4 of them failed (3 OCZ, BTW). I've seen some really crazy failure modes. I don't buy OCZ anymore :/ One SSD I had, it came from the store booting into a busted Win98 install. I managed to install an entire new OS, including a soft reboot. OK, OS install complete. After a hard reboot (power off), the drive would boot back up into the broken Win98 install. That was my first inkling of just how fundamentally different SSDs were internally compared to standard HDDs. I had trouble even coming up with a reasonable hypothesis to explain that failure mode. See e.g: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SS... It would now not surprise me to learn that other types of SSD failures could result in data loss you might not neccesarily notice at first. But definitely, backups to HDD. 256GB backs up fast, so it's not too bad.
fjorder 14y ago
The last I checked the MTBF on SSD's was substantially longer than for hard-drives. Barring firmware bugs you should probably strike that off your list of reasons for not using a SSD. Even if you do think SSD's are horribly unreliable, they're so fast that they're still worth using. Just put your OS and programs on a SSD and store your data on a HD. If the SSD fails, you've lost nothing you can't reinstall easily. I started doing this a couple of years ago and there's absolutely no going back.
- qq66 14y ago
  We've had 3 SSD failures out of 5 SSDs, and 0 magnetic failures out of 8 magnetic drives in our office over the last 2 years. We definitely keep only OS, programs, and VMs on SSDs.
  - jcnnghm 14y ago
    Your sample size is too small, and your data isn't independent. Both magnetic disks and ssds fail, multiple backups are the only way to protect data.
  - barrkel 14y ago
    I've had 3 failures out of 8 HDDs and 0 out of 2 SSDs (Intel X25M and Samsung 830) in the same period. At this point I would recommend buying SSDs that have proven track records; don't buy cheapest on the basis that any SSD is better than any HDD.
    - qq66 14y ago
      We bought all of them on reliability track record alone.
- wmf 14y ago
  Unfortunately almost all SSD models have had noticeable firmware bugs. But they're still worth it; just have backups.

xyzzy123 14y ago

Yeah, sand >> rust, and I couldn't imagine switching back now. However, I now prefer to buy SSD models that have been available for more than 6 months. I've owned 6 SSDs and 4 of them failed (3 OCZ, BTW). I've seen some really crazy failure modes. I don't buy OCZ anymore :/ One SSD I had, it came from the store booting into a busted Win98 install. I managed to install an entire new OS, including a soft reboot. OK, OS install complete. After a hard reboot (power off), the drive would boot back up into the broken Win98 install. That was my first inkling of just how fundamentally different SSDs were internally compared to standard HDDs. I had trouble even coming up with a reasonable hypothesis to explain that failure mode. See e.g: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SS... It would now not surprise me to learn that other types of SSD failures could result in data loss you might not neccesarily notice at first. But definitely, backups to HDD. 256GB backs up fast, so it's not too bad.

fjorder 14y ago

The last I checked the MTBF on SSD's was substantially longer than for hard-drives. Barring firmware bugs you should probably strike that off your list of reasons for not using a SSD. Even if you do think SSD's are horribly unreliable, they're so fast that they're still worth using. Just put your OS and programs on a SSD and store your data on a HD. If the SSD fails, you've lost nothing you can't reinstall easily. I started doing this a couple of years ago and there's absolutely no going back.

qq66 14y ago
We've had 3 SSD failures out of 5 SSDs, and 0 magnetic failures out of 8 magnetic drives in our office over the last 2 years. We definitely keep only OS, programs, and VMs on SSDs.
- jcnnghm 14y ago
  Your sample size is too small, and your data isn't independent. Both magnetic disks and ssds fail, multiple backups are the only way to protect data.
- barrkel 14y ago
  I've had 3 failures out of 8 HDDs and 0 out of 2 SSDs (Intel X25M and Samsung 830) in the same period. At this point I would recommend buying SSDs that have proven track records; don't buy cheapest on the basis that any SSD is better than any HDD.
  - qq66 14y ago
    We bought all of them on reliability track record alone.
wmf 14y ago
Unfortunately almost all SSD models have had noticeable firmware bugs. But they're still worth it; just have backups.