Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Solid State Hard Drives

This is topic Solid State Hard Drives in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 07-16-2008, 12:14 PM:

Anyone use them or have any yet? Any reccomendations? I've read about getting 50% more battery life and near instant boot up and so on. Seems like there may be some advantage to them. I am interested in putting one in one of my service laptops and using it for the OS and programs where either a 32 or 64 gb would be just fine. Then use a seperate standard HD for data.

Thanks,
Mark

Posted by Jason Burroughs (Member # 68) on 07-16-2008, 01:05 PM:

No experience in the laptop market, but have been seeing them in servers for about 6 months. Haven't seen any failures yet.

Server market (especially in blades) is all about size, and power consumption. Both of which are down for solid state drives.

Performance has appeared to be pretty good.

Posted by Chris Slycord (Member # 4239) on 07-16-2008, 01:51 PM:

The problem for solid state drives is the maximum number of write cycles.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 07-16-2008, 02:49 PM:

How does the maximum number of cycles for a typical flash memory drive before failure compare with that of an HDD? Is the lifetime significantly shorter?

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 07-16-2008, 05:33 PM:

Most of the SS drives are claiming 2 Million hours to MTF and some are as high as 4 million so I don't know if the number of write cycles really pertains to these specs or not(at least in my lifetime!). I do know there is a max number of write cycles on some flash memory but many SS drive makers claim many decades of life writing 50GB a day every day... thats a really long time. I just thought that running my service setup laptop on one of these drives would be beneficial in many ways.

Edit: I ordered an OCZ Core series 64mb SSD from Tiger Direct. It'll be replacing the 80gb drive in my laptop but boy howdy I'll keep the original HD with me for a while till I see how reliability is. These droves which are available as alrge as 128gb seem to be a good deal and place to start with these. OCZ stuff gets really good reviews from those buying them. $269 isn't bad for this size SS drive and the read/write times are still really fast for one in this price range. The other interesting thing is that they don't require defragmentation.

Will report back after I install it.

Mark

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 07-17-2008, 05:02 AM:

I read somewhere (can't remember where, sorry) that the average consumer grade HDD has a designed lifetime of seven years assuming average usage. In that case, using flash memory for the same application should be a non-issue if their makers are claiming decades.

Posted by Dave Macaulay (Member # 813) on 07-17-2008, 09:37 AM:

The last thing I read said they are power hogs and reduce laptop battery life considerably. Apparently they take less power than a spinning HDD, but the HDD stops and goes into standby quite a bit of the time. The SSD takes less power but takes it all the time your laptop is on. For most users the balance favours the HDD, if you do stuff where the drive never spins down during use then the SSD wins.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 07-17-2008, 10:09 AM:

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
Most of the SS drives are claiming 2 Million hours to MTF and some are as high as 4 million

That's a ridiculous claim. 2 million hours = 228 years. Anything computer-related will be completely obsolete within less than 87,600 hours (ten years) whether it still works or not.

Posted by Chris Slycord (Member # 4239) on 07-17-2008, 10:41 AM:

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
Most of the SS drives are claiming 2 Million hours to MTF and some are as high as 4 million so I don't know if the number of write cycles really pertains to these specs or not

A write cycle is the number of times you write data to the disk. And flash drives generally have a max of 300,000 - 500,000 write cycles and SSDs usually have a max of 1-5 million. If you're writing stuff like log files (which you'll get a bunch of them in a server environment) you'll definitely exceed the write cycles far earlier than 2 million hours. And once you've exceeded your write cycles you cannot possibly write to the drive.

Also, the mean time to failure you're quoting can't be trusted as anything more than a company's hot air. Take a look at
this.

quote:
The MTTF (Mean Time to Failure) is not a guarantee or estimate of product life

In short: If the mean time to failure doesn't measure how long one can expect the product to last before it fails, then how exactly is that number actually the "mean time to failure"?

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 07-17-2008, 07:15 PM:

Chris,

While I don't dispute the finite write life span of flash memory Super Talent for instance rates their 64gb SS drive at a life span of 350.7 years while doing 50gb per day of write/erase while they rate their flash memory modules at only 100K cycles. There is obviously a big difference either in the memory being used in the SS drives OR how it is being addressed during write time. Now I never write 50gb a day and 350 years is a long time. This would even last a long time in a server. I usually get a new laptop about every 3 to 4 years ssince they get pretty hammered. Interestingly though I've never had a laptop drive ever fail. Have had lots of 3.5" drives fail though. My main desire for a SSD is for increased performance, longer battery life, cooler operation, never having to defrag, and lack of noise... in that order.

Mark

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 07-31-2008, 08:48 PM:

I have to say that I'm truly impressed with the OCZ SSD!!! I did a fresh install of XP Pro and load time was just 21 minutes start to finish. Boot up time is on the order of 9 seconds but right now but XP's all thats on the drive. Im going to dump this install and just do a restore from my Windows Home Server backup file for this puter. That'll fill the driver about 40% so we'll see what happens then. All in all a winner but we'll see how the reliability aspect goes... 3 year warranty on this drive just in case.

Mark

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 07-31-2008, 11:45 PM:

I was looking at this site and it mentioned that these drives are only good for laptops made withing the last year and a half - being SATA drives. Thus, for my old DELL that I tagged in '05, I wont be able to take advantage of these drives.

(Mark must have a new laptop to do this conversion...)

..bummer on my end ..

-Monte

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 08-01-2008, 11:13 AM:

No, My Dell laptop is about 2 years old by now...

Mark

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 08-01-2008, 04:44 PM:

Not sure how long SATA drives have been the norm on laptops, but they've been pretty much standard on full-size PCs since 03-04. My last laptop (bought September '05) was IDE; my current one (bought last month - the September '05 one was stolen) is SATA.