Solid state hard disks

[mistermack]

Are they any good? I'm thinking of getting one for the laptop.
I hear that they start windows quicker than an ordinary hard disk. Is that right?
Do they last as long as a hard disk?

[macdoc]

4-8 times faster
50% more reliable.

[piscator]

Yep. Ludicrous Speed for ~ $0.50/Gig US @ present.
240-256 GB seems to be the sweet spot cost/GB, tho 480-500GB may be the thing this holiday shopping season.
Copying an existing OS installation from HDD to SSD requires a bit of tech to align sectors optimally for SSD, but most any cloning software is aware of SSDs and should keep things straight for you. When in doubt, use the software that comes with the SSD.

[klr]

They are not, technically speaking, disks at all AFAIK. But that's by the by.

Yes, they are much faster than traditional hard drives. And no, they don't last as long on the whole, although you can pay a lot more for better reliability. The best approach is to use a smallish SSD (say 60 GB) a a system drive. Put your operating system(s) there, and your data on a hard drive. And don't forget to backup.

[Tero]

I always back up to floppy disc. It's magnetic! They stored the Beatles 50 yrs on magnetic tape.

[Hermit]

The best approach is to use a smallish SSD (say 60 GB) a a system drive.

Going by what I read, the larger the storage capacity, the greater the life expectancy of the SSD. The NAND cells your info gets stored in have a limited number of times they can be read from or written to. That's where wear levelling comes in. The SSD's controller keeps cycling through all cells evenly for writes. That ensures that no cells get used up, so to speak, faster than others. It also means the larger the SSD is, the longer it takes for a cell's turn to be written to again. So, basically, the life span of an SSD depends on how busily you write to it. That in turn means it's a good idea to configure your system optimally by, for instance keeping temp files off the SSD, switching off defragging and so on. Also, go for the more expensive SLC type chips rather than MLC ones. The former are good for 100,000 writes per cell while the latter only goes to 10,000.

Altogether, the life expectancy of of SSDs is reasonably good and improving. Some are sold with five year guarantees now. My current desktop is too old to make any upgrade worth while, but my next computer will have one.

[piscator]

Running a new 2TB Seagate SSHD (E:) next to a Samsung 840 Pro SSD (C:) on a new build.
Not a lot on the SSHD yet, but it's significantly faster than a HDD. I srsly can't tell what's on what drive by the way it loads up.

[cronus]

Does seem to be hype. Initial loading is quicker but most normal hard drives have 64mb+ of cache which is plenty for anything except maybe HD/4K Video. The big savings appear to be in shipping costs from the factory to the consumer, and the novelty mark-up, for the manufacturer. I guess if I was doing a lot of high end video editing it'd make sense to buy a hybrid drive. For normal purposes what is the point in paying twice for something half the size that'll likely conk out after a couple of years?

[pErvinalia]

Significantly faster for me

[epepke]

They are fan-fucking-tastic. Very fast, never break. I've had one for five years.

This kind of memory used to be unreliable, with a limited number of writes, but the modern devices are just fine.

[mistermack]

The reason I asked is that a friend of mine just bought a fairly new desktop, and it has a 150 gig sshd in it, which he didn't realise at the the time.
It does start windows 7 much quicker, but doesn't seem to run particularly faster.

But he did have one incident after about four weeks, when the machine wouldn't boot. Simply did nothing.

I told him to take the HD out and run anti-virus and all of the advanced systemcare scans on it, in a sata docking box from another pc.
He didn't find any virus, but it did find disk errors, and fixed it.

That was about a month ago, and it hasn't played up since.

I do fancy one for my laptop, if it makes it boot quicker, but for a pc that gets left on most of the time, there seems less point to paying more for one.

[epepke]

Depends on what you want to do. Most things aren't disk-intensive; they're memory- and computation-intensive. But I keep my machine on for months, and I still get a lot of speedup when necessary.

It's too bad about your friend's experience, but I don't think it's due to the category of solid drives, just a bad one.

For the record, mine's a Toshiba. Toshiba makes great parts.

[mistermack]

Depends on what you want to do. Most things aren't disk-intensive; they're memory- and computation-intensive. But I keep my machine on for months, and I still get a lot of speedup when necessary.

It's too bad about your friend's experience, but I don't think it's due to the category of solid drives, just a bad one.

For the record, mine's a Toshiba. Toshiba makes great parts.

I suppose, if wear only happens when the disk is written or read, then leaving it on shouldn't shorten the life.
In theory anyway. Maybe it's different in practice.

I have an SD card with Ubuntu on it, and that will run a pc perfectly well through the usb port.
I don't understand why they don't make a sata adapter for SD cards, as I have several 32 gig ones and 64 and 128 gig SD cards are fairly common now.
Is the SD memory not suitable for use as a hard disk? I haven't found any problems with the UBUTU one, but that's only 2 gig, and it's only for emergency or academic interest.

[Hermit]

SD cards are slooooooooow. You're likely to have class 10 cards at best. Their read and write speeds max out at 10 MB/s. That's probably ok for loading an OS or some other program or recording a video, but for anything more demanding it's truly a PITA. SSDs typically read and write data beyond the 500 MB/s range.

[epepke]

There are adapters for SD cards, but they're more likely to be found with small, slow systems such as the Arduino and Raspberry Pi, where they work great.