Posted on 05/18/2020 5:59:01 PM PDT by ducttape45
They are a whole lot faster. A 500GB SSD gave my 12-year old Dell Latitude E6500 a whole new lease on life. It’s fast enough for development work now.
As far as your media problem, without a time machine or the gift of prophecy it is difficult to know what the future will hold.
Some thoughts:
Something without moving pieces usually lasts longer than those with.
I have a voice recorder I got from Radio Shack 10 years ago. It has ‘static memory’. I haven’t used it for 8 years. Got it out of the drawer and it works, everything I recorded is still on it.
Even the SSD storage will eventually be replaced by something else. It is the nature of the beast (electronics industry).
SSD for the win. I switched all my boxes to SSD years ago and have not had any issues. So much faster for boot, reading and writing. Never a need to defrag. More energy efficient. You should be backing up your systems anyway, so even if one craps out after a few years (which none of mine have), it’s super simple just to throw in a replacement and restore the backup. I would never go back to spinning drives.
The supposed limits of SSD life are based on number of writes not how long they're powered on. Unless they're reading and writing 24x7, that should be irrelevant.
Same here. Small population tho'.
SSD failure mode is "data lost, period."
SSD failure rate depends on maker, and is never zero.
i LOVE LOVE LOVE SSD. Backup to spinning iron, with at least two duplicates there.
No brainer to me, SSD on the laptop. Much higher tolerance of drops, so much faster, and the downside risk of data loss is easy to manage. Copy to off the laptop.
Over the years I have found it best to keep the operating system on a different drive from most documents and programs... or at least partition the drive and separate them that way.
Oh, and a portable backup drive for all things that you really need to save. All of it will crash or die eventually.
It depends. Low grade SSDs do not last as long as HDs or high grade SSDs. They can be crap. High grade SSDs are about four times as expensive as low grade SSDs. I like a good quality SSD for the OS and everything else to a hybrid drive or standard HD. Boot time is excellent. Backup is entire disk imagine so it is easy to restore (been through it, use an 8GB backup drive.)
Not sure how you’d configure the laptops but this has worked great for me. Just be aware of the difference in grade of SSD if you go that route.
Boot up speed and access speed during operation - both of these are striking improvements. Then there is the weight factor - SSD machines are lighter.
As for the lifespan, many other things can and will break or wear out earlier.
You want Samsung SSDs and no others. Samsung SSDs have the longest life. Choose their higher end series and they last even longer.
SSD, it’s the only way to be sure, I have had too many HD’s crash in the past.
Hard Disc drives are mechanical devices with moving parts, bearing and a motor and any of these can and will fail. The most life I have gotten is around three years.
The Solid State drives are basically the same as the main memory in your computer and I have had these going on 6 years with no problems.
Samsung SSD’s are the best IMO while the Western Digital SSD
is made by SanDisk and are a little less in cost but also good.
I have 6 portable and external hard drives ranging from 250 GB to 8 tb, all SSD’s. Not one of them failed. The ones that failed within 5 years were in the laptops. The earliest one I have which works I bought in 2006 Maxtor, and damn thing still works. But it sure is heavy plus needs lots of wires to power and connect.
| Cost | Speed | Durability | Highest capacity | Energy efficiency | |
| HDD | Cheaper | Slower | Less durable | 10TB | Use more energy |
| SSD | More expensive | Faster | More durable | 4TB | Use less energy |
I was in IT support for 20 years - I vote the SSD route. Not prone to head crashes, easier to recover data if the OS corrupts, and quicker to reimage. Unless you’re trying to run multiple resource-intensive apps all at once and/or need huge gobs of storage, an SSD drive will fit the bill.
My MacBook Pro 2012 became a brand-new computer when I replaced its HD with an SSD. Saved me from buying a new machine.
so it depends on your corp replacement cycle. if your looking at a 2-5yr life, go for SSD. under no circumstances should you consider mechanical platter based hard drives. As your IT infrastructure is replaced in the 12-24 month cycle, newer architectures will be coming on line that blur the line between storage space and ram. (its the biggest performance bottle neck) You already see it in phones and tablets. So if you need to keep legacy systems going, go SSD. otherwise replace the entire system.
I wonder if Paul Combretta has been able to weigh in on the thread?
Paul knows a thing or two about hard drives.
Hybrid drives come in two forms: ones with a large cache memory built in (kinda old school) or ones with both SSD and HDD built into one device. The device figures out when to move stuff to HDD based on how long it’s been since you last needed that information.
And don’t worry about rpm if you go with HDD or hybrid. Go with transfer rate. Just like it’s possible for a car to have low acceleration and top speed even if the engine can have a high rpm, a HDD drive’s transfer rate is not completely linked to it’s rpm.
“SSDs do have a finite lifespan, but it’s much longer than you need“
For an average user, true. For a developer or analyst who process big files, not sure. Keep in mind many companies don’t even have desktops for devs or users.
I will say, that the flash drives I’ve seen fail, fail completely and unrecoverably with zero warning.
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