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Can someone explain the discrepancy between > I still hear stories of users thinking it's perfectly normal and economic to replace burned out Intel SSDs every
by marshray 13y ago
Can someone explain the discrepancy between
> I still hear stories of users thinking it's perfectly normal and economic to replace burned out Intel SSDs every 6 to 12 months
and
> How long have you got before the disk is trashed? ... 51 years!
- cclogg 13y agoDitto. Also, assuming it's 51 years, that generally means I have nothing to worry about with an iPhone or (new) MacBook, right?
- fletchowns 13y agoAssume that any hard drive can go away at any time, for any number of reasons. Especially portable devices like those. Always use some sort of automated backup to a remote location for data you want to keep around.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dasil003 13y agoBecause time correlates only very loosely with SSD failure, it's all about writes and people write at widely varying rates.
- marshray 13y agoI thought the 51 years was supposed to be worst-case.
- Symmetry 13y agoThere's a big difference between using consumer grade MLC flash and running a very high intensity workload and using enterprise grade SLC flash and only using 80 MB/s of bandwidth. As a consumer you really don't have to worry about write endurance, though. I mean, how much do you write to your drive every day, maybe 5 GB at most? Even with MLC flash and a fairly small 120 GB drive that'll last you for a couple of hundred years. And even when it fails you can still read the data out, you just can't write new data. The problem you should worry about is a firmware bug in the part of the drive that handles the wear leveling abstraction. I haven't seen one of those in a while, but when many companies were just starting to develop SSDs they occurred fairly frequently, though usually the manufacturer would figure out the problem and patch the firmware for new drives after enough failures in the field.
- wslh 13y agoBut, is a hybrid approach the best option? I mean an SSD for the software and an HD for the data?
- Symmetry 13y agoI actually think the best approach, longterm, would be to use the SSD as a cache for the HD at a filesystem level. I believe something along those lines was just merged into the Linux kernel.
- supergauntlet 13y agoYep, dm-cache essentially does what Intel Smart Response does except it's done in the OS and not the BIOS.
- baruch 13y agoIf the SSD part fails you pretty much lost all benefit of the HDD itself. It might or might not function with the bad flash chips but you definitely lost all the performance boost. The caching options sound much better overall but they do take more space (2 slots vs. 1 for the hybrid).
- wslh 13y agoWith hybrid I didn't mean those hybrid HDs but two separate storage devices using two slots.