SSD Solid State Drives

Mud · 23 Aug 2008 at 19:18

I've been running a Samsung IDE 32GB SSD for 2 years now without a hiccup, and Vista is write-heavy. If you're buying a SSD as an OS drive it'll be long-outdated before dead.

edit: not sure if I'm going crazy, it's either 1 year or 2...

GeForce · 23 Aug 2008 at 19:34

Mud said:
If you're buying a SSD as an OS drive it'll be long-outdated before dead.

This is correct. Some newer SSDs will have write cycle lifetime of up to 5 million writes/deletes. That's a huge number, and will last a long time, even if your page file is on the SSD.The write cycle lifetime is going up continuously as well

As someone said, the data management systems in the SSD will scatter data around the drive to make sure one location is not used more than others.

Dano · 23 Aug 2008 at 19:46

Rainmaker said:
HERE is a nice YT video of some guy's RAIDed OCZ SSDs booting Vista. HOW fast?!

Awesome, comes as something of a shock to see the motherboard and raid controller boot sequence take longer than Vista did to start.

Energize · 23 Aug 2008 at 19:47

Mud said:
I've been running a Samsung IDE 32GB SSD for 2 years now without a hiccup, and Vista is write-heavy. If you're buying a SSD as an OS drive it'll be long-outdated before dead.

With the pagefile being constantly written to the drive in the same place over and over again, I wouldn't count on it on an mlc drive, that's why they only have a 1/2yr warranty.

Huw_Dawson · 23 Aug 2008 at 20:12

Thing is, if you bought a small one for your OS, you could get yourself a nicely sized HDD as your actual in-use drive.

I have to admit, I want a SSD drive now!

- Huw

Rainmaker · 23 Aug 2008 at 22:12

A mate of mine has done just that. Debian Etch (stable), installed on a 4GB flash card inside a home server. That baby loads in a couple of seconds flat

Mud · 23 Aug 2008 at 22:28

Energize said:
With the pagefile being constantly written to the drive in the same place over and over again, I wouldn't count on it on an mlc drive, that's why they only have a 1/2yr warranty.

The calculations for the eee pc SSD come out at years of constant write/rewrite before failure and people are scared of putting XP on those...the fear is only valid if your PC is on all the time and you're not going to upgrade for years. That's with just a 4GB capacity to kill.

Energize · 23 Aug 2008 at 22:44

If a drive has 100,000 write cycles it would only take approx 16mins of writing to destroy a 1mb sector of the disk, 273 writes per day for a year, so the fear is valid if you actually want to use the drive for a reasonable amount of time.

Aod · 23 Aug 2008 at 22:54

Energize said:
With the pagefile being constantly written to the drive in the same place over and over again, I wouldn't count on it on an mlc drive, that's why they only have a 1/2yr warranty.

NO!!!

all flash-based drives have hardware-level wear levelling. the even a file being constantly re-written is NEVER being re-written to the same sectors!

Energize · 23 Aug 2008 at 22:57

Aod said:
NO!!!

YES!!!

Because there is so little space left the ssd has no choice but to overwrite the same sectors again.

Wear levelling is great in principal, but when the only space on the drive left available (because of it's small capacity), is that which is allocated to the pagefile, it's going to be overwritten again and again.

If I was going to put my os/pagefile on anything, it would be a ramdrive, infinite writes and much faster loading than nand. Rather than the current ssd's which won't last anywhere near as long.

PhillyDee · 24 Aug 2008 at 02:15

Aod said:
NO!!!

all flash-based drives have hardware-level wear levelling. the even a file being constantly re-written is NEVER being re-written to the same sectors!

Energize said:

YES!!!

Because there is so little space left the ssd has no choice but to overwrite the same sectors again.

Wear levelling is great in principal, but when the only space on the drive left available (because of it's small capacity), is that which is allocated to the pagefile, it's going to be overwritten again and again.

If I was going to put my os/pagefile on anything, it would be a ramdrive, infinite writes and much faster loading than nand. Rather than the current ssd's which won't last anywhere near as long.

Click to expand...

MAYBE!!!

The orange large writing seems a bit OTT?

Monkeynut · 24 Aug 2008 at 02:28

I CAN'T HEAR YOU

don't ban me please =p

WJA96 · 24 Aug 2008 at 08:31

Mud said:
I've been running a Samsung IDE 32GB SSD for 2 years now without a hiccup, and Vista is write-heavy. If you're buying a SSD as an OS drive it'll be long-outdated before dead.

edit: not sure if I'm going crazy, it's either 1 year or 2...

Yours is probably SLC, which pretty much will last forever, but the new cheap ones are MLC and they are not recommended for OS drives as both XP and Vista like to automatically defrag hard drives and that may well kill an MLC drive within 12 months. It may not, but then, do you want to take the chance?

I wouldn't use an MLC drive as an OS disk personally. I have 4 8Gb SLC drives in RAID 0 for my OS drive, and they are fast as #*!?, highly recommended!

ic0n · 24 Aug 2008 at 08:50

errr ok with the big text lol

yer i think ssd will b really go in about 6-12 months as prices will fall and sizes go up its still going to be a while till your buy new computer with most of them being ssd but it will start happening

i was really tempted by the 250gb to go in my laptop but i am leaving it for now as the price is a lot and tbh i wanna let the rest of the world test them out as a main drive first before i throw up my £700+

Mud · 24 Aug 2008 at 13:13

WJA96 said:
Yours is probably SLC, which pretty much will last forever, but the new cheap ones are MLC and they are not recommended for OS drives as both XP and Vista like to automatically defrag hard drives and that may well kill an MLC drive within 12 months. It may not, but then, do you want to take the chance?

I wouldn't use an MLC drive as an OS disk personally. I have 4 8Gb SLC drives in RAID 0 for my OS drive, and they are fast as #*!?, highly recommended!

I may have a change of heart some time in the future if everything goes wrong, but I do think the risk is overrated, even on the MLC drives. As you say, the speed bump is great and I reckon makes it worth the risk. As for the wear-levelling not having space, I've got Vista Ultimate installed on a 32GB (30.4GB formatted) disk and have 7GB free.

cpatain-chaos · 24 Aug 2008 at 13:24

that utube vid of vista booting is stunning.

Phil2008 · 24 Aug 2008 at 13:44

Surely vista cant load that fast, cos It needs a few secs to sort all the drivers out??

Energize · 24 Aug 2008 at 13:53

Phil2008 said:
Surely vista cant load that fast, cos It needs a few secs to sort all the drivers out??

It was probably booting from standby.

Tbh if you just want windows to boot faster, I would use standby mode.

Phil2008 · 24 Aug 2008 at 14:01

yeah I was thinking that, My system beats that if I use hybrid sleep, It comes on within 3secs, hybrid sleep bypasses all the bios boot screens and it dont use anymore power then if you just use the nomal shut down.

csmager · 24 Aug 2008 at 14:01

Energize said:
It was probably booting from standby.

It was booting properly. Neither standby nor hibernate have the windows boot screen.

Phil2008 said:
yeah I was thinking that, My system beats that if I use hybrid sleep, It comes on within 3secs, hybrid sleep bypasses all the bios boot screens too and it dont use anymore power then if you just use the nomal shut down.

It uses the stame as S3 Standby unless you yank the power out.