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Which SSD?

UltraNEO* said:
With all this talk of people upgrading to SSD's for speed. Has anyone thought about the consequence, should one of those devices fail?

I mean... with a HD a data recovery centre could remove the platters and recover the lost data due to hardware failure, right? But what if a SSD fails? How would data be saved then? Cause, despite what we all know and should do. The fact of the matter is this, NOT everyone make backups on a regular basis, do we??

And with the emphasis on added security, some SSD's will eventually encrypt data, before it's written to the storage device. I know seagate has this feature on some of their HD's.
Click to expand...

A thought and a question. With the Intel drives they've been engineered to fail safe, meaning that on the next write if the cell is dead it will throw an OS level error. However you can still read the data in the cell out so theoretically if all the cells failed to let you write you should be able to get the data back out.

What if you can't read the card though is my question? I did some googling to find problems with SD cards and reading the data and found some hits. Looks like most of the issues are with the reader device drivers. With these drivers essentially being on the disk I would guess it wouldn't be a problem.

Things always fail, but honestly the more I find out about SSD's they seem pretty tough. The design itself is just inherently better than traditional hard drives from a mechanically complexity point of view.
 
UltraNEO* said:
With all this talk of people upgrading to SSD's for speed. Has anyone thought about the consequence, should one of those devices fail?

I mean... with a HD a data recovery centre could remove the platters and recover the lost data due to hardware failure, right? But what if a SSD fails? How would data be saved then? Cause, despite what we all know and should do. The fact of the matter is this, NOT everyone make backups on a regular basis, do we??
Click to expand...

I think it's safe to say the people interested in SSD's are pretty technologically inclined and already making backups. Heck, Time Machine is built into the OS.

The small 80 - 120GB capacities of SSDs means backing up is quick and painless.
 
frimple said:
A thought and a question. With the Intel drives they've been engineered to fail safe, meaning that on the next write if the cell is dead it will throw an OS level error. However you can still read the data in the cell out so theoretically if all the cells failed to let you write you should be able to get the data back out.

What if you can't read the card though is my question? I did some googling to find problems with SD cards and reading the data and found some hits. Looks like most of the issues are with the reader device drivers. With these drivers essentially being on the disk I would guess it wouldn't be a problem.

Things always fail, but honestly the more I find out about SSD's they seem pretty tough. The design itself is just inherently better than traditional hard drives from a mechanically complexity point of view.
Click to expand...

Oh so cell failure has protection..

But what happens if the interface fails? It's not like you can 'swap' out the controller, since the chips are part of the same board (this would be equal to the controller failing on a HD, or the heads dying/crashing).
 
UltraNEO* said:
Oh so cell failure has protection..

But what happens if the interface fails? It's not like you can 'swap' out the controller, since the chips are part of the same board (this would be equal to the controller failing on a HD, or the heads dying/crashing).
Click to expand...

You're right, but your data is ok. I think you would be in the same spot you would be if the controller on your traditional hard drive failed. It's not user replaceable so it would have to go to a data recovery center.

But if we accept that controller failure is probably the most common failure of an SSD, I would ask how often do you hear of controller failure on HDD's? It's most certainly more common to have a problem with the moving mechanical parts of a HDD so right there we're increasing reliability.
 
frimple said:
You're right, but your data is ok. I think you would be in the same spot you would be if the controller on your traditional hard drive failed. It's not user replaceable so it would have to go to a data recovery center.

But if we accept that controller failure is probably the most common failure of an SSD, I would ask how often do you hear of controller failure on HDD's? It's most certainly more common to have a problem with the moving mechanical parts of a HDD so right there we're increasing reliability.
Click to expand...

With traditional HD's the controller is separate from the mechanism, in many commercially available SSD's it's all on one PCB (due to cost cutting and environmentally more friendly)
 
UltraNEO* said:
With traditional HD's the controller is separate from the mechanism, in many commercially available SSD's it's all on one PCB (due to cost cutting and environmentally more friendly)
Click to expand...

Excellent point! I hadn't thought of that. Well I suppose ultimately that's the risk you'll take then. And it's a risk I'm willing to take (with backups! :D)!
 
frimple said:
Excellent point! I hadn't thought of that. Well I suppose ultimately that's the risk you'll take then. And it's a risk I'm willing to take (with backups! :D)!
Click to expand...

Ain't such a problem with 120~250Gb...
But it'll soon be a issue once they reach a TB or two.
i guess a few high capacity BD's won't be enough. aya!
 
UltraNEO* said:
With all this talk of people upgrading to SSD's for speed. Has anyone thought about the consequence, should one of those devices fail?

I mean... with a HD a data recovery centre could remove the platters and recover the lost data due to hardware failure, right? But what if a SSD fails? How would data be saved then? Cause, despite what we all know and should do. The fact of the matter is this, NOT everyone make backups on a regular basis, do we??
Click to expand...

Well, what I and a few of the others that have these drives are doing, in fact we're almost forced to do because of their small size, is just having system and apps on the SSD. All my data is going on "traditional" HD RAID. SSD dies, no significant data loss.
 
gesundheit said:
Well, what I and a few of the others that have these drives are doing, in fact we're almost forced to do because of their small size, is just having system and apps on the SSD. All my data is going on "traditional" HD RAID. SSD dies, no significant data loss.
Click to expand...

This is what I will do as well.
 
UltraNEO* said:
With all this talk of people upgrading to SSD's for speed. Has anyone thought about the consequence, should one of those devices fail?

I mean... with a HD a data recovery centre could remove the platters and recover the lost data due to hardware failure, right? But what if a SSD fails? How would data be saved then? Cause, despite what we all know and should do. The fact of the matter is this, NOT everyone make backups on a regular basis, do we??

And with the emphasis on added security, some SSD's will eventually encrypt data, before it's written to the storage device. I know seagate has this feature on some of their HD's.
Click to expand...

backup/update regularly, i'm not really worried about drive failure that much
 
ekwipt said:
backup/update regularly, i'm not really worried about drive failure that much
Click to expand...

Doesnt that depends on who's work you have stored on your system? If it's your own personal stuff, maybe you wouldn't be arsed much.

For the time being, I think it's still too early to jump on the SSD bandwagon, for a start they're too small and not really cost efficient.
 
UltraNEO* said:
I mean... with a HD a data recovery centre could remove the platters and recover the lost data due to hardware failure, right?
Click to expand...
How many individuals do you know of that have spent a few thousand dollars on such an operation?

I've had my share of drive failures. What do I do? Toss the bad drive in the garbage, get a new drive and restore from my last backup. Data recovery services are meant for applications where backup is impossible, impractical, not allowed or the data produced since the last backup is irreplaceable. Its not for average people.

But what if a SSD fails? How would data be saved then?
Click to expand...
The average user isn't going to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to get their data back so the SSD vs HD failure argument is pointless.

UltraNEO* said:
For the time being, I think it's still too early to jump on the SSD bandwagon, for a start they're too small and not really cost efficient.
Click to expand...

You're missing the entire point. Its not about capacity or cost, its about very fast data transfer and the nearly zero seek time. Almost every SSD on the market will outperform the fastest hard drives in nearly every category. Even the cheapest low-end SSDs have a seek time more than 100x faster than top-end performance hard drives (0.02ms vs 4.2ms) and 250x faster than the average HD (7ms).
 
Who stores other peoples work on the boot drive of a macpro, if you do pro work for other people at home you'd most likely have another drive for the task and i hope you have some sort of backup plan for that disk also

I have one drive for boot, one for video files, one for audio and one for time machine of disk 2 and 3), also have a firewire drive with cloned backup of boot drive for quick up and at em backup.

Don't have a ssd drive personally but would buy one if starting again

Older raptor 150 Gb still going strong:cool:

touch wood
 
ekwipt said:
Who stores other peoples work on the boot drive of a macpro, if you do pro work for other people at home you'd most likely have another drive for the task and i hope you have some sort of backup plan for that disk also

I have one drive for boot, one for video files, one for audio and one for time machine of disk 2 and 3), also have a firewire drive with cloned backup of boot drive for quick up and at em backup.

Don't have a ssd drive personally but would buy one if starting again

Older raptor 150 Gb still going strong:cool:

touch wood
Click to expand...

Whooops, my bad...
I was thinking more of working with mobile computers.

For the desktop. I have an hardware array with a workable, nightly backup solution.

Anyway, I was making enquires as to the possibilities of data recovery with failed SSD.
 
UltraNEO* said:
Anyway, I was making enquires as to the possibilities of data recovery with failed SSD.
Click to expand...

Its still a pointless argument.

SSD is far more reliable. It has no moving parts, no heads to crash, built in ECC, error detection on writes instead of read, wear leveling, etc etc
 
Weird Humming Noise!!!

Sorry guys I really don't feel like starting a new post but my pro is starting to make a really loud humming/grinding sound. This only started after the Apple Store replaced my 8800GT with a refurbished one. Before it was silent. Now the sound is distinct. Any ideas on what it may be? Thanks for all your replies, I think I might be getting two OCZ 120GB Vertex SSD's in Raid 0. But I'm going to wait a little for prices to drop.
 
ekwipt said:
That's the thing that has me worried too
Click to expand...

Slowdown should be gone when the TRIM tool is released and then later built into operating systems.

OCZ just released TRIM tool for the Vertex series. You have to run it in Windows right now (32 but only) and it'll purge the cells that contain data that was erased.

Get a Vertex or better drive and you'll be okay.
 
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