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SSD Problems

Here's what I did:

I got one of those Hitachi HDs and put it into an enclosure and will use it as a backup drive and continue using the SSD as the main drive.

If, and I mean IF, the SSD continues to lose blocks, SCSC (the guys who make Scannerz) said it was abnormal and I should contact the vendor for a refund, exchange, or update, but so far so good.
 
Keep in mind that the Hitachi HD will be bottlenecked by a USB or Firewire 400 connection. Both of them are only able to realistically support about 50 or 60 Mbs and that drive can crank out almost 140 MB/s (capital "B" in bytes, not lower case "b" as in bits).

You should try it inside the computer just once to see how much faster it is than the drive it likely replaced. It doesn't compare to an SSD speed wise, but you're getting 500GB of space for what, 50 or 60 bucks?

Now that's what I call a good deal.
 
Do you think you could get us a throughput rate on that Hitachi HD and maybe compare it to an SSD and maybe the old hard drive? You could use Blackmagic Disk Speed Test or if you have the latest Scannerz release, use Performance Probe 2 to plot out the data using it's advanced button. I don't really want a graph, just data rates.

I don't know what type of system you have so that might be near mission impossible, but if you can do than many thanks in advance.
 
Do you think you could get us a throughput rate on that Hitachi HD and maybe compare it to an SSD and maybe the old hard drive?
Click to expand...

No.:eek:

That's a lot of work. I'd have to open the unit up, swap out disks, test, and repeat 3 times. I'm sure there's somebody else here with an old Fujitsu installed in their system and someone with an SSD that could give comparable speed tests. It's a 2009 MacBook Pro 13" mid 2009 model.

I can and did do some speed tests with black magic on the Hitachi and they yielded the following:

READ: 124.3 MB
WRITE: 104.5 MB

If I'm not mistaken, a SATA "byte" is 9 bits because of some extra error correction they need or something like that, so this give an equivalent serial data rate ( X 9 ) of:

READ: 1118.7 bits/sec or 1.1187 Gb/sec
WRITE: 948.6 Mbits/sec or 0.9486 Gb/sec

FYI I do have log files left over from Scannerz tests on both drives. It really can't give a speed test because it's not speed testing software but it's got timestamps

To go from 0 to 5 GB, the Hitachi (new) and Fujitsu (old) compare like this:

New Hitachi: 35 sec
Old Fujitsu: 83 sec

so clearly the new drive is running over twice as fast as the old one.

I would like to emphasize that fact that I'm not putting Fujitsu down, I'm comparing one of their old products to one of Hitachi's brand new products. Both companies make great drives, as far as I'm concerned, and I wouldn't put down either one!!!!
 
You should be able to test an old Fujitsu on any system because the data transfer rate from the platters to the system will be slow enough that it will bog everything else down. You should also get in the vicinity of about 50MB/sec from one of them.

I'm talking about standard HDs, not RAID units or anything else.
 
FYI I had access to an older system yesterday using one of those older Fujitsu's and it looks like it's running read and write ops in the vicinity of 50MB/sec (Note: MB/s not Mb/s)
 
I had access to an old Titanium today running at 1GHz using Leopard. It booted using an ancient IDE HD in less time that it takes me to boot Mavericks on an SSD.

The correct term to describe this, for anyone interested, is "code bloat." The older OS versions simply seem to be much, much more efficient.
 
As an FYI I built a home made Fusion Drive and the Hitachi I bought and described earlier boots faster than the Fusion. It doesn't boot faster than a standalone SSD, but it is just a little faster than a Fusion.
 
TheBSDGuy said:
I had access to an old Titanium today running at 1GHz using Leopard. It booted using an ancient IDE HD in less time that it takes me to boot Mavericks on an SSD.

The correct term to describe this, for anyone interested, is "code bloat." The older OS versions simply seem to be much, much more efficient.
Click to expand...

And they still havent found a way to squeeze all these new functions into zero code yet have they.....:rolleyes:

My measures are more that Yosemite takes up less disk space than Mavericks, uses RAM better, runs faster and has more functions....
 
And they still havent found a way to squeeze all these new functions into zero code yet have they.....
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That may be, but there is such a thing as abusive programming. It usually occurs when someone is trying to rush something out to market.

As an FYI I built a home made Fusion Drive and the Hitachi I bought and described earlier boots faster than the Fusion. It doesn't boot faster than a standalone SSD, but it is just a little faster than a Fusion.
Click to expand...

I bet if you used the Hitachi in that Fusion it wouldn't have been that slow. ;)

The bottleneck is the HD part of the Fusion, and if the HD is old and slow it will just make the system creep that much more.
 
To add to my other comment, keep in mind that the Titanium I was using had a single core PPC processor, 1G of RAM, and an old IDE drive. Using MacTracker the performance rating is 559. Compare that with Apples new MacBook Air with a 1.4GH Core i5, and it has a performance rating of 6012. That's over a 10X performance change, and yet the OS is booting slower.
 
I've got an old 2006 iMac that I use as a web video server to watch some news shows. It boots Lion in about 35 seconds.

I've got a much newer MacBook Pro and it boots Yosemite in about 1 min. 15 sec.
 
Let's get this straight: SSDs are faster and more rugged than hard disks, but not necessarily more reliable, longer-lived or even more energy-efficient. And when they fail, you're lucky if it's just a bad block.
 
I'll tell you what I'm afraid of with SSDs.

SSDs are basically nothing more than elaborate RAM chips with a controller. How long will it be before they start soldering that right into the logic board with no option at all to upgrade. They're already doing this with the RAM in one of the Mini's. This would probably force consumers into buying a new system every so many years. If an embedded SSD failed, time for a new computer, period.
 
I guess hard drives just can't be avoided. I would have thought by now that SSDs would be used everywhere even in backups. Instead it looks like they can only kind of be trusted.
 
I have yet to hear of anyone using anything except hard drives for backups.

First, there's cost. A decent sized backup can be obtained in most areas for $100 (US) or less. Second, there's the "unknown" nature of SSDs in terms of true reliability. As far as I'm concerned there are still too many "gotcha's" associated with them - like just dropping blocks in the middle of a file.

Some commercial drives are now coming with their own bizarre manufacturer configurations. WD, for example, has a few drives that disable some of the drive features, like the power switch, unless you load their drivers. I believe that when Mavericks came out these drivers were incompatible with the OS and actually caused users to lose data, and I think in some cases delete volumes (sort of kills the purpose of a backup drive.)

Seagate had, or has, some bizarre NTFS formatted drive with what I can only call an "NTFS to HFS" translator. It sounds like a nightmare just waiting to happen to me.

My advice, FWIW, is just buy a case and get a hard drive and build your own. I've never had problems with that.
 
BradHatter said:
I guess hard drives just can't be avoided. I would have thought by now that SSDs would be used everywhere even in backups. Instead it looks like they can only kind of be trusted.
Click to expand...

Too expensive to make a sensible backup solution and the SSD speed advantage is pretty irrelevant.

HDD will still be the best backup compromise for some time I think.
 
With regards to my previous post, my wires may be a little crossed, or I'm misinterpreting what Seagate is saying. Take a look at the following specs and scroll down to the "What is included" section:

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/...en-us/_amer/docs/fast-hdd-ds1804-2-1401us.pdf

There, the statement reads "NTFS driver for Mac pre-loaded on drive" with footnote 1. Footnote 1 states "Reformatting for Mac may be required." I'm assuming the drive is by default in NTFS format and the driver allows someone with a Mac to access the NTFS file system.

I noticed that some of the Seagate line has drivers that allow compatibility between NTFS and HFS+ so they can be shared between a PC and a Mac without needing to reformat or isolate systems. This may be where I got the idea that they were producing NTFS drives with "HFS+ adapter software."

Just thought I'd clarify.
 
TheBSDGuy said:
With regards to my previous post, my wires may be a little crossed, or I'm misinterpreting what Seagate is saying. Take a look at the following specs and scroll down to the "What is included" section:

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/...en-us/_amer/docs/fast-hdd-ds1804-2-1401us.pdf

There, the statement reads "NTFS driver for Mac pre-loaded on drive" with footnote 1. Footnote 1 states "Reformatting for Mac may be required." I'm assuming the drive is by default in NTFS format and the driver allows someone with a Mac to access the NTFS file system.

I noticed that some of the Seagate line has drivers that allow compatibility between NTFS and HFS+ so they can be shared between a PC and a Mac without needing to reformat or isolate systems. This may be where I got the idea that they were producing NTFS drives with "HFS+ adapter software."

Just thought I'd clarify.
Click to expand...

It's STILL a bad idea!!!:)
 
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