General Computer Thread

[Amaris]

SSDs look pretty awesome, and from what I've been told are performance powerhouses. Unfortunately for me, any drive below 1 TB and above $50 is out of the question. Plus, there are some new care and feeding requirements for SSDs that I'm not sure I like.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

SSDs look pretty awesome, and from what I've been told are performance powerhouses. Unfortunately for me, any drive below 1 TB and above $50 is out of the question. Plus, there are some new care and feeding requirements for SSDs that I'm not sure I like.

Such as?

My ssd hasn't caused me to do any more then I would previously have done with a mechanical drive so far. Seems to run the same but a hell of a lot faster.

 

[Amaris]

Such as?

My ssd hasn't caused me to do any more then I would previously have done with a mechanical drive so far. Seems to run the same but a hell of a lot faster.

Well, from what I've been told, SSDs can suffer from flash wear. It's also a bad idea to defrag them (there are other options, I realize, but defragging is a hard habit to break for me). SSDs are supposedly more prone to failure, and writing large amounts of data to an SSD is almost as slow as, or slower than, the same process on a platter drive.

For personal experience, when I worked at Dell as a warranty technician, SSDs were just becoming a part of the mainstream market, but even so we were getting in piles of them that had failed due to memory errors, flash wear, and other catastrophic failures. It kind of put me off on them.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Well, from what I've been told, SSDs can suffer from flash wear. It's also a bad idea to defrag them (there are other options, I realize, but defragging is a hard habit to break for me). SSDs are supposedly more prone to failure, and writing large amounts of data to an SSD is almost as slow as, or slower than, the same process on a platter drive.

For personal experience, when I worked at Dell as a warranty technician, SSDs were just becoming a part of the mainstream market, but even so we were getting in piles of them that had failed due to memory errors, flash wear, and other catastrophic failures. It kind of put me off on them.

I'd say in the early days of SSD drives wear on the memory cells was an issue. Not so much now and a good quality SSD should last as long as its mechanical counterpart..

I don't think you need to defrag an SSD as they don't need that. If your drive has been set up right the TRIM command usually runs in the background and that clears unused cells..

 

[Amaris]

I'd say in the early days of SSD drives wear on the memory cells was an issue. Not so much now and a good quality SSD should last as long as its mechanical counterpart..

I don't think you need to defrag an SSD as they don't need that. If your drive has been set up right the TRIM command usually runs in the background and that clears unused cells..

That's good news, then. Still, for now I'm far more comfortable with standard HDDs.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

That's good news, then. Still, for now I'm far more comfortable with standard HDDs.

Mechanical drives are still very good. Just now that I've used an SSD for a month or two I am loving it. I still will keep my normal drives to use for storage.

 

[Santaman]

Actually, the newer the manufacturing process the worse its long term reliability becomes, SSD's also can't deal with heat.
A bigger problem is aging, the cells literally become fragile the older the drive gets.
One last drawback is that you can't use them as long term storage, my 30 year old MFM drives still hold their original content, put your SSD away for half a year and you'd not be happy to find out that your data has evaporated...

 

[Amaris]

Actually, the newer the manufacturing process the worse its long term reliability becomes, SSD's also can't deal with heat.
A bigger problem is aging, the cells literally become fragile the older the drive gets.
One last drawback is that you can't use them as long term storage, my 30 year old MFM drives still hold their original content, put your SSD away for half a year and you'd not be happy to find out that your data has evaporated...

I forgot about that, yes! If you don't use your SSD often, data starts to deteriorate. That is a huge issue, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[John Clark]

VooDoo II in SLI? back in the day that was eye watering expensive, I skipped it and got a VooDoo III 2000 AGP card later on, mainly played The Need For Speed III with that card upgraded to a Hercules Geforce 2 MX after that, a few years later I upgraded to a AMD Duron 850 with a Geforce 440 MX, that was a huge upgrade in speed, those old Durons were dirt cheap and beat the crap out of most Intel chips.

It was a little, but boy, did it run things

I also had a Geforce 440 MX for a while. With that, on the graphics side I tended to stick to the Nvidia side until one died on me (a 9800 if I recall). My last two cards (a HD5850 then R9-290) have been AMD.

As far as processors have been concerned, after the P2-233, it's mostly been AMD processors and they've worked fine for me.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Actually, the newer the manufacturing process the worse its long term reliability becomes, SSD's also can't deal with heat.
A bigger problem is aging, the cells literally become fragile the older the drive gets.
One last drawback is that you can't use them as long term storage, my 30 year old MFM drives still hold their original content, put your SSD away for half a year and you'd not be happy to find out that your data has evaporated...

Oh wow OK now I'm scared just a little.

I do have my system duplicated on a mechanical drive as well.

If I run into problems I know it's there still.

 

[Metryq]

Oh wow OK now I'm scared just a little.

Backups are always a good idea, but don't panic just yet:
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2873551/data-center/debunking-ssd-myths.html

The health of SSDs can be monitored and planned for. It’s this predictable reliability and the absence of mechanical parts that give SSDs a huge advantage over the unpredictable performance and high failure rate of HDDs.
...
For example, some SSDs are designed to accommodate 10 drive writes per day consistently. At first glance this doesn’t sound like very much. But this metric means every single cell on the drive can handle 10 writes per day over a five-year life of the drive.

And since SSDs contain billions of cells, we’re talking about an enormous amount of data that can be written and deleted at every moment of every day of the drive’s life. For example, one 100GB SSD that offers 10 drive writes per day can support 1TB (terabyte) of writing each and every single day, 365 days a year for five years.

As for speed, I ran Blackmagic Design's Disk Speed Test utility which is designed for testing drives and RAIDs specifically for video editing. A 2-drive G-RAID from G-Technology tested adequate for 1080p editing, provided video codecs are used. Only half the matrix in the utility was greenlighted for this RAID. Out of curiosity, I tested the SSD in a new laptop—a single drive. The utility matrix includes performance up to 12-bit RGB 4:4:4 video at 2K—uncompressed video that size is an insane amount of data through-put. I was stunned to find the entire matrix greenlighted for the SSD.

I can live with that.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I don't know that program but the speeds look impressive

 

[Marc]

SSDs look pretty awesome, and from what I've been told are performance powerhouses. Unfortunately for me, any drive below 1 TB and above $50 is out of the question. Plus, there are some new care and feeding requirements for SSDs that I'm not sure I like.

Could always get say a 120GB for your system drive and then use spinning rust for your main storage. I've been using the that approach for several years and find it works well to the point I hate going back to any system that boots from a mechanical drive.

Can't say that I've had to do any special care and feeding with my SSD (which is over 3 years old). Never really bothed to defrag the drive either. Most SSDs have a feature called TRIM that helps keep them tidy.

As to the issue of the drives losing data if unplugged for a long period of time, there's more to it and it's been blown out of proportion.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2925...nt-lose-data-if-left-unplugged-after-all.html

 

[Santaman]

Backups are a must, really.

SSD boot and mechanical HDD for storage is indeed a smart way to have the best of both worlds, can't wait for them to switch to MRAM or other types of non volatile memory though.

 

[Amaris]

Could always get say a 120GB for your system drive and then use spinning rust for your main storage. I've been using the that approach for several years and find it works well to the point I hate going back to any system that boots from a mechanical drive.

Can't say that I've had to do any special care and feeding with my SSD (which is over 3 years old). Never really bothed to defrag the drive either. Most SSDs have a feature called TRIM that helps keep them tidy.

As to the issue of the drives losing data if unplugged for a long period of time, there's more to it and it's been blown out of proportion.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2925...nt-lose-data-if-left-unplugged-after-all.html

I'll check out that link. Anyway, I prefer to have the boot drive be a large drive, that way I can store all of the program data on that drive, and use the other drive for backups. I have two internal drives: 1 TB primary, 1 TB secondary (holds all of my movies and TV shows), and one external USB drive, which is a 500 GB backup drive. I prefer that setup.

Backups are a must, really.

SSD boot and mechanical HDD for storage is indeed a smart way to have the best of both worlds, can't wait for them to switch to MRAM or other types of non volatile memory though.

Yeah, when the memory issues are better addressed, and the price comes down, I'll consider an SSD. Until then, spin baby spin.

 

[Marc]

I'll check out that link. Anyway, I prefer to have the boot drive be a large drive, that way I can store all of the program data on that drive, and use the other drive for backups. I have two internal drives: 1 TB primary, 1 TB secondary (holds all of my movies and TV shows), and one external USB drive, which is a 500 GB backup drive. I prefer that setup.

Though it's always considered good practice to separate your data from your OS and applications (even if it's on a separate partition) so that if you need to restore one, you can do so without disturbing the other - especially in this day and ago of image based backup software.

 

[Santaman]

Yep! programs like drive snapshot are great, also when something has murdered your Windows install, just restore the last beackup, reboot and tadaa you've got a fully working and installed machine ready to go again.

As for backups, I use the most expensive way, I have a second machine with identical data on it, also comes in handy when the main machine breaks down, you always have a reserve machine left.

 

[John Clark]

For my laptop, I have a cloned drive as backup along with another drive full of my documents and (where applicable) programs that I don't have the cd for. Natuarlly, there's a bit of overlap there.

For my desktop, it's mostly just the documents as I have four drives in that and regular cloning of the whole thing can be a bit of an time issue. Fortunately, I have cd (or other) backups of all the files on that with a primary drive backup on another drive.

I'm looking at cloud storage as an additional backup, but there's a bit of stuff there if I'm doing everything

 

[Amaris]

Though it's always considered good practice to separate your data from your OS and applications (even if it's on a separate partition) so that if you need to restore one, you can do so without disturbing the other - especially in this day and ago of image based backup software.

True. I guess I'm stuck in a rut, because my hardware was so old that an image backup took many hours, and none of the software I had offered incremental backups until I got SyncBack. Of course, SyncBack doesn't image, it just lets you preserve all of your files in a hierarchy tree on another drive (so you can essentially just drag and drop it into the new installation). For me that has worked, but if there's a better solution (it has to be either free or very cheap as I don't have any more money), I'm all ears.

 

[Santaman]

Freeware: http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/

Will completely image a drive.