9 replies to this topic

[jfrydom]

An interesting read link

[utengineer]

Keep in mind, this article focuses on enterprise use of SSD tech. You can take 10 of us on this forum and we will never hit the IOPS a 100 SSD datacenter does in one day. One aspect of my job is getting failure reports from my General Service Delivery Manger on servers and storage arrays in my customer's data centers. We track every failed part and system, look for trends and spikes in failure rates. Once we identify a specific part number has exceeded our standards, we will investigate and take appropriate steps to rectify and prevent service calls. This is the advantage major OEM's have in the Enterprise market. We can get real-time data on part performance and implement our fixes. Right now, Intel and Samsung have the largest footprint of our SSD integration. Companies like OCZ, Corsair, and Patriot haven't integrated well in to the enterprise market yet. They make good consumer SSD solutions though. I also know SSD tech is really new, as controller and software algorithms are quickly changing. It will be a while before the dust settles on SSD tech.

Edited by utengineer, 31 July 2011 - 12:47 AM.

[jfrydom]

utengineer, on 31 July 2011 - 12:46 AM, said:

It will be a while before the dust settles on SSD tech.

And until then, it won't be worth the headache

[dirtylarryuk]

jfrydom, on 31 July 2011 - 04:41 AM, said:

And until then, it won't be worth the headache

In the meantime you hamstring your GPU GPU and RAM with storage that has a iops around 200-400 pionts vs 60-90k for any half decent SSD these days and 2 million + for your RAM!. Even the G1 SSD drives could write over 100TB's before any issues. And most gamers write about 5-10GB a week....

Not putting a SSD in a decent rig is like gaming on a IGP and ignoring a decent GPU.

I have 11* SSDs in the house 4x vetex 2 60GBs 1x Corsair force 160GB 1x revo x2 (which is another 4 vertex 2 60 gbs) G1 Intel (And flash storage on my Tablet and phone) My first SSD is 28 months old and still works great. Not one of my SSD's has had a single issue yet. One of my enterprise class raptors blew after 3 years and plenty of my HDD have failed in the last 20 years. At work we had probably about 100+ SSDs and probably 200+ large HDDs and they failed at a very similar rate when pushed hard with IOPS use.

Most reported SSD errors are user related with bad mobo compt' or bios issues or users formatting and defragging the drives when they should not. From my perspective SSD fail about the same as CPU's and RAM and also tend to outlast GPU's. Also like RAM dirty power from the wall or PSU can also harm SSDs something they are more at risk from than a HDD in almost all other areas like physical knocks or drops heat or humidty or cold SSD are far more reliable vs HDDs.

As the article correctly suggest you can get the benefits of mega IOPS and RW speeds from SSD's you just have to backup the data to HDD (which is so cheap per GB is almost like buying photo copy paper now). There is no need for some for pricey SAS raid arrays as SSD takes he work load they can bung in very cheap storage HDD systems to ensure there is no loss of data if a SSD fails.

I have the same system at home as external HDD's backup data on SSD's and I use single non raid SSDs to host the OS and raid SSD's for storage apps and games. That way avoiding the issue of Array fails wiping the OS which is more annoying to install and reconfig than just running a backup install for data.

Edited by dirtylarryuk, 31 July 2011 - 08:14 AM.

[isaac]

I don't care about the failure rate of SSDs, because I tend to buy a new drive for my OS every 3 years, and to be honest, I'm expecting my SSD to outlive 3 years easily, so I shouldn't be worried, but I did buy a cheap 1tb HDD to back all my stuff up on. Personally, I've got an OCZ Vertex 2e 120gb, and after using that for just under a year now, I would never ever go back to using a HDD for my OS; Everything still boots up as fast and is as responsive as when I bought and installed Windows 7 on it. It is easily the best computer component I have ever bought.

dirtylarryuk, on 31 July 2011 - 08:07 AM, said:

Most reported SSD errors are user related with bad mobo compt' or bios issues or users formatting and defragging the drives when they should not. From my perspective SSD fail about the same as CPU's and RAM and also tend to outlast GPU's. Also like RAM dirty power from the wall or PSU can also harm SSDs something they are more at risk from than a HDD in almost all other areas like physical knocks or drops heat or humidty or cold SSD are far more reliable vs HDDs.

Lol, you would expect someone who buys an SSD wouldn't try to defrag it, and to make sure they've got their SATA settings in the BIOS correctly xD! It took me 3 minutes to find out what I had to do before installing my OS onto the SSD

Edited by isaac, 31 July 2011 - 10:04 AM.

[dirtylarryuk]

isaac, on 31 July 2011 - 10:01 AM, said:

I don't care about the failure rate of SSDs, because I tend to buy a new drive for my OS every 3 years, and to be honest, I'm expecting my SSD to outlive 3 years easily, so I shouldn't be worried, but I did buy a cheap 1tb HDD to back all my stuff up on. Personally, I've got an OCZ Vertex 2e 120gb, and after using that for just under a year now, I would never ever go back to using a HDD for my OS; Everything still boots up as fast and is as responsive as when I bought and installed Windows 7 on it. It is easily the best computer component I have ever bought.



Lol, you would expect someone who buys an SSD wouldn't try to defrag it, and to make sure they've got their SATA settings in the BIOS correctly xD! It took me 3 minutes to find out what I had to do before installing my OS onto the SSD

I had to email valve of late as Steam can come up with a warning about defragging game files as they are fragged on rigs with raid SSD's (not seen it ona rig with a non raid SSD). So some software can still screw up, not everyone has their heads around SSD's even after they broke through 3 years ago!

[jfrydom]

I don't know about you, but I've got no problem with waiting . I rarely ever update storage, meaning I like my drives to last 8+ years (it is possible!). Nor do I do any backing up of data. So the recoverability of hdds is appealing. Perhaps when ssds are no longer in their infancy I will start to use them 2014-2015. The year when ssd will reach a magical $1 or less per gb. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

[jfrydom]

O also I use large page files ( about 8 gbs) this would drastically increase the amount of writes on the memory. And I definitely would NOT use an hdd for a page file when I have an ssd.

[dirtylarryuk]

jfrydom, on 01 August 2011 - 12:17 AM, said:

O also I use large page files ( about 8 gbs) this would drastically increase the amount of writes on the memory. And I definitely would NOT use an hdd for a page file when I have an ssd.

indeed once you have used them you would never go back like say Colour TV vs black and white or Stereo Vs mono. The problem is till you use them you don't notice the lag and the overall impact on the system. once you do use them you just can;t go back. Hell i find SSD's laggy vs ramdisks but Ramdisks make SSD's look cheap.

HDD are very useful they offer very cheap storage. No point putting 2TB of media files on SSD unless your editing them in HD. But even placing a cheap £1 per GB 60GB drive as either a SSD-HDD accelorator or even better as the OS host makes even a dog old system feel like a 2600k at 5 GHZ.

[Moyt]

Someone please write a short simple list of do's & not's for SSD's
Trust me I'd find it useful for a start

I don't want to fek up my 240gb Corsair GT, I'm already in deep sh!t with other things lol.