Question about SSDs.

[U88]

I heard that SSDs work a little differently than HDDs when it comes time that they might fail. I know SSDs haven't been out long enough for many people to notice... but when some people have said some failed within 30 days, I wanted to know if it's more difficult to recover data as opposed to a HDD. Do SSDs give you any signs of failure before it actually happens so you can back stuff up?

 

[wywern209]

SSDs make no sounds like a HDD does when dying so you won't get much warning. Like any electronic device, some that you get will be defective and will break on you. SSDs are normally more reliable. more resistant to shock, no moving parts etc. As far a recovering data, something that everyone who owns a computer should invest in IMO, is get an external drive for backup of data. Time machine software will automatically do this if you have a drive set up to be a back up drive via TM.

 

[Baral]

SSDs are far more reliable than HDDs in terms of average lifetime (and basically everything else). The stories of them failing after 30 days is either a manufacturing defect and covered by warranty or a user error.

 

[LisaMaree]

Something I've always heard different things about is that ssd's have limited writes. Is this true? Also one more thing is that they are super fast in the beginning but get a lot slower over time and eventually become as fast as a hard drive.

 

[Syonidism]

thats like saying that your 4gb kingston flash usb memory has a lifetime.

SSD's are more or less the same thing. They will all fail eventually but a SSD will go a long way before it dies.

benefits of the ssd:
-faster (like really blazing fast)
-more reliable
-wont slow down or give you anonimous errors in the long ron
-there is no moving parts inside. Think of all the angles and styles you can use your mac!
-faster (so fast that this "-faster" is the same "-faster" as before and it has been going faster than light so you can understand how fast it is, its so fast that it needs to make its point twice. You know who understands this? Einstein does and he's all up in this shizzle with the time travel dizzle)

 

[Syonidism]

What noxxioius said ... enjoy it and don't worry about it. I used to worry that my monitor or hard drive or flash drive would die. But in the end, they were still working fine by the time I was ready to replace them. This doesn't mean that someone who does a lot of writing to their SSD won't suffer a failure.

Write cycles for SSD's are anywhere from 1 to 5 million, and with wear leveling this extends the life of the drive immensely.

But even so, assume the Eee SSD has a write speed of 40MB/s, if a 4MB SSD drive were being written to 24/7 365 days a year:

(1) 100,000 write cycles = (40MB/s * 60 sec/min * 60 min/hr * 24 hr/day) / (365 days/year) = 1.27 years

(2) 1,000,000 write cycles = 5.1 years

At worse case realistically, assuming you use it 8 hrs/day with half that being write time:

100,000 writes = 7.6 years
1,000,000 write cycles (minimum realistic) = 30+ years

And the fact that once it reaches its "life cycle limit" there's only a fracion of a % chance it will fail. Then when it does fail, that bit is blocked off as a non-useable bit. So relax and enjoy.

Check out these articles:

http://www.e-disk.com/article_misconcep … evity.html

http://www.bitmicro.com/press_resources_flash_ssd.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_drive

http://eeehackers.com/2008/01/11/ssd-wr … nce-myths/
Last edited by htwingnut (2008-02-06 10:22:04 am)

i read this while browsing

SOURCE: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=13825

one of my first ssd uses were with eee netbooks 4gb ssd ;p did quite nicely.