[IceFire]

Lol.

Even if you leave your machine up all the time, fewer moving parts means longer life.

granted i have hard drives from 8 years ago that still work great. but as i understand flash technology, it has long term reliability issues. limited write cycles are limited, thats just the way flash works. much of the ssd technology revolves around wear leveling to compensate the inherent issue of memory cell degradation. that said i still like the technology, and will probably switch to them once their prices are more affordable with respect to mechanical hard drives. ssds have other bonuses such as removing inductive loads (motors), and the electrical noise that comes with them, from the system, requiring lower voltages, and generally reducing overall power consumption. my next computer or two will likely have mechanical drives.

Don't disagree...but I suspect that my SSD will wear out about as fast as the mechanical ones with less of a catastrophic failure at the end when a drive head fails and screws up a bunch of data in the process. If I remember right the expected lifespan of the current gen SSD's are about 5 years or so given average usage. Standard hard drives last about that long too.

[KyadCK]

Don't disagree...but I suspect that my SSD will wear out about as fast as the mechanical ones with less of a catastrophic failure at the end when a drive head fails and screws up a bunch of data in the process. If I remember right the expected lifespan of the current gen SSD's are about 5 years or so given average usage. Standard hard drives last about that long too.

But Thats just it. Define "Average use". Intel SSDs come with a 5 year warranty (damn good for any SSD), but does that cover natural wearing to the point of unusability? Most companies will blame it on you writing too much to the disk and you're out of luck. How do you replace a controller card on an SSD to recover the data if it fries? (which I have already had happen to me with my 1st SSD which has now been RMA'd). To top this off, any HDD that lasts -only- five years is bad quality. I've seen tons of poor old 40-80GB IDE drives from Dimension 8300s that live for eight years, then continue to serve as I find uses for them in other old computers. I expect them to live that long.

If you do use an SSD, it would probably be a very good idea to disable pagefile and hibernation on it to help it last longer, and to enjoy those < 20 second boot times.

[S-99]

What i want to do is go a step further with flash storage. Buy some good thumb drive or sd memory card in a card reader, boot to ram, and user data storage would just take place on a normal hard drive. Yes boot time will suffer, but everything be fast as hell if you have enough ram for the os and open programs. It would be low cost and see how much head room i really have with 4gb's of ram.

On boot time. I usually mitigate boot time altogether by leaving the computer booted, using suspend to ram (my computer's ready to use in 5 seconds of hitting the on button) works great powering down everything but your ram for when you do power down. Of which case, i find suspend to hard disk to be no longer relevant (except possibly the few special cases it's used for god knows what by others i don't know) nowadays since boot time has improved so much on the software optimizing side of the subject (faster just to just boot a computer like normal with a modern day os, than to restore a session stored on the hard drive).

Don't disagree...but I suspect that my SSD will wear out about as fast as the mechanical ones with less of a catastrophic failure at the end when a drive head fails and screws up a bunch of data in the process. If I remember right the expected lifespan of the current gen SSD's are about 5 years or so given average usage. Standard hard drives last about that long too.

I don't disagree with your estimate of ssd wear out time either (ssd's intended as upgrade and replacement of magnetic storage work fantastically), even for normal magnetic hard drives. Although, i was able to see the longevity of normal magnetic storage for many a year.

9 years is how long an average hard drive from 2001 in a work environment will take to die. Work environment being virus scans, defrags, on 8 hours a day, surfing web, email, word processing, etc (what i consider average usage in a work environment).

5 years is a great time to replace magnetic storage. Lest trust your data with uncertainty past that. I'm not in any way recommending 9 years. **** that. People will likely scrutinize me for saying 9 years, but this 9 years of hard drive longevity is another story for another thread on a different day about bosses not wanting to listen.

[Nuke]

get one of those dram drives and fill it with your unused old ram and use that for your pagefile. computers are starting to have as much ram as they did hard drive space 10 years ago. at some point these machines will go obsolete and we will need something to do with all that ram. using it as a ultra high speed page file sounds hella awesome complement to an ssd.

i really wish we could come up with some revolutionary way to make sram smaller, at least die space equivalent to dram. sram is currently only used as cpu cache and main memory in microcontrollers. its very fast, but very expensive in terms of cost and die space. but the other feature it has is a very low power consumption at idle. making it easy to power one of these things with a small battery or even a supercapacitor for very long periods of time. of course when that happens say bye bye to booting all together.

[jr2]

I've heard SSDs include the ability to basically map data usage out so that no one are of storage gets over-used, instead usage is distributed evenly throughout the drive; it's transparent so the requests are still the same (the OS doesn't see this process, the drive takes care of it by itself).

[General Battuta]

I've heard SSDs include the ability to basically map data usage out so that no one are of storage gets over-used, instead usage is distributed evenly throughout the drive; it's transparent so the requests are still the same (the OS doesn't see this process, the drive takes care of it by itself).

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=78737.msg1557425#msg1557425

i heard that too

[Nuke]

I've heard SSDs include the ability to basically map data usage out so that no one are of storage gets over-used, instead usage is distributed evenly throughout the drive; it's transparent so the requests are still the same (the OS doesn't see this process, the drive takes care of it by itself).

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=78737.msg1557425#msg1557425

i heard that too

i see what you did there.

read the ****ing thread, lol.

[jr2]

I did... or rather, I skimmed it... missed the second part of the E's post.  Was really only looking for a mention of wear-leveling but I missed it, so I mentioned it.  Gotta get better at speed-reading...

[S-99]

Good thing to mention next in the area of flash drives wearing out. Don't defrag them. You wont get any performance benefit out of flash storage doing this.

Defragging is meant to make a magnetic hard drive's read write head move less since it can find all of the data it needs to find in a smaller area of the disk as opposed to looking for data spread out all over it. This is why defragging really can speed up load times on magnetic hard drives.

Defragging a flash drive will add no performance benefits and will rather instead, make it go through lots and lots of reads and writes for no good reason (sounds like a good torture test for killing flash storage on purpose though). Flash drives organize data themselves for wear leveling so you wont wear out one area of the storage more than another (defragging ****s with that). I get asked this question all the time about defragging flash drives; in a nutshell, i just tell people it's a really great way to decrease the longevity of it really fast.

Defragging: only meant for magnetic hard drives...pointless for storage with no moving parts.

[Nuke]

what he^ said. flash is random access, it can be fragmented to hell and back for and the speed loss is negligible (sequential read is faster than random read, because of switching times, on the order of nanoseconds).

[jr2]

Caveat: The NTFS filesystem might get its panties in a bunch if it wasn't evar defragged... IMHO defrag an SSD once a year to keep your filesystem sane.

[S-99]

You go ahead and do that.

I just wont use a journaling file system on flash storage.

[Nuke]

wasnt windows 7 supposed to come with ssd-friendly features?

[S-99]

It'd be cool if the windows disk defragmenter would restrict defragmenting of flash storage.

Flash storage friendly features in windows 7? I don't know anything about that...must research

There is the usage of exfat which is a lot friendlier than journaling file systems on flash storage. The exfat driver for linux is in beta, so linux is currently lacking for the moment, but macosx and of course windows support it.

[IceFire]

wasnt windows 7 supposed to come with ssd-friendly features?

It does and everything I've read suggests it works fairly well. When I installed Win 7 on my SSD it immediately figured it out and disabled some features and enabled others to take advantage of the drive.

[IceFire]

Don't disagree...but I suspect that my SSD will wear out about as fast as the mechanical ones with less of a catastrophic failure at the end when a drive head fails and screws up a bunch of data in the process. If I remember right the expected lifespan of the current gen SSD's are about 5 years or so given average usage. Standard hard drives last about that long too.

But Thats just it. Define "Average use". Intel SSDs come with a 5 year warranty (damn good for any SSD), but does that cover natural wearing to the point of unusability? Most companies will blame it on you writing too much to the disk and you're out of luck. How do you replace a controller card on an SSD to recover the data if it fries? (which I have already had happen to me with my 1st SSD which has now been RMA'd). To top this off, any HDD that lasts -only- five years is bad quality. I've seen tons of poor old 40-80GB IDE drives from Dimension 8300s that live for eight years, then continue to serve as I find uses for them in other old computers. I expect them to live that long.

If you do use an SSD, it would probably be a very good idea to disable pagefile and hibernation on it to help it last longer, and to enjoy those < 20 second boot times.

Typically my systems tend to last about 5 years anyways before a power surge or some other malady happens to the system that makes it difficult to work with and ultimately time for a new one. I feel pretty good out of my last system that got 6 and a half solid years before a transformer in the nighborhood blew up (I saw the glare from the explosion) and it never worked very well after that. Never could figure out what was wrong with it either. So... I built this one. It's a year old and I figure it's got 4-5 great years ahead of it before it gets zapped by lightning or hit by a freight train

But in all seriousness I think 5 years is about what I trust my standard HDD's to last. Some of them have lasted far longer and the odd one has failed. In four years time when this SSD starts to reach the end of it's useful lifespan I'll start to phase it out and get a new one. Probably with something that is significantly faster, bigger and cheaper.

[S-99]

Or you could go for the 9 year attempt

[Fury]

It'd be cool if the windows disk defragmenter would restrict defragmenting of flash storage.

It does, in a sense. If Windows 7 detects SSD drive, it unselects them by default in disk defragmenter. AFAIK you can still re-select them manually however. For W7 to detect SSD's, you need to have the latest service pack and subsequent updates as well as have AHCI enabled in both BIOS and W7. Depending on chipset, it may also be necessary to update chipset drivers. Updating BIOS and SSD firmware shouldn't be necessary for this, but you never know.

Caveat: The NTFS filesystem might get its panties in a bunch if it wasn't evar defragged... IMHO defrag an SSD once a year to keep your filesystem sane.

Don't, just don't. I repeat, do NOT defrag SSD drive even if it is once in 10 years.

[S-99]

Yeah, it'd be cool if windows restricted the defragmentation via the properties window of said flash storage drive.
At least they did something.

Now, it'd be cool if windows supported partitioning of flash storage. It's stupid that they don't unless something changed recently.

[The E]

Caveat: The NTFS filesystem might get its panties in a bunch if it wasn't evar defragged... IMHO defrag an SSD once a year to keep your filesystem sane.

Bzzt, wrong. The natural state of an SSD is to be heavily fragmented, and if you have a defragmentation prog that attempts to defrag an SSD, you should delete it immediately. If you do it anyway, you will massively decrease your SSDs lifetime, as defragging involves A LOT of writes.