Replaced 4 mechanical drives with 4 SSD, bad idea?

Bleek

Bleek

Bleek

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This might be an odd question but I'm a new adopter of SSD and to say my Hitachi drives have been fast and flawless would be an understatement, I've had a mixture of Hitachi drives over the past ~7 years with not a single problem - compare to the decade before, drive technology is very mature.

I had around 2TB on conventional Hitachi Deskstar 7,2k drives, all swapped out and for 1TB Crucial SSDs (3x256GB 1x64GB). I didn't even use a quarter of my 2TB so didn't waste silly money on 2TB of SSD.

In terms of long term reliability was it a bad idea to replace all 4 of my mechanical HDDs with SSDs?

I Keep reading of people losing drives after a year, some only lasting a few months!
 
if you're using the drives mainly for data storage, then yes as the SSD will give minumum performance gain for the money you've spent, however if you have enough programs to fill the space, I would say its a very good idea, but either way, i would still have at least 1 mechanical drive in or at least nearby for backup
 
s452 said:
if you're using the drives mainly for data storage, then yes as the SSD will give minumum performance gain for the money you've spent, however if you have enough programs to fill the space, I would say its a very good idea, but either way, i would still have at least 1 mechanical drive in or at least nearby for backup
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Well, everything is loading like grease lightning, which is great!

You're right though, it'd be a good idea to keep a mechanical to backup to.
 
Hard question to answer

No long term reliability studies have really been done yet ( I can just feel the Google fanatics tapping away now ...LOL )

It's just down to economics for the rest of us poor souls ie Gb per £. Even though the gap is slowly closing, the large mechanical drives are still the best data storage solution at present
 
I'm getting rid of the only HDD I have left in my system when SSD prices come down just a little more. For me it's more about making use of the modern technology that we have, regardless of whether or not it's actually beneficial for data storage and such.
 
SeeKified said:
I'm getting rid of the only HDD I have left in my system when SSD prices come down just a little more. For me it's more about making use of the modern technology that we have, regardless of whether or not it's actually beneficial for data storage and such.
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Horses for courses really

If your only running a over specced, overclocked, gaming rig with a couple of hundred gigs of games on... sure go ahead.

On the other hand if your running a system with loads of large files for media encoding or 3D design etc you'll be waiting a long time for SSD's to equal or surpass mechanicals in cost or volume at present.

speaking of modern tech... with this disk caching tech about at present... you'll achieve pretty much the same thing surely ?
:)
 
SSDs are still so young though, I'd be wary of keeping any really important data on one with no mechanical backup.

Bleek, I'd say keep your 2TB drive and use it as a backup/system image of your SSDs.
 
M4s are a pretty solid drive for reliability. Make sure you've upgraded the firmware though.

TBH if you have important data you need some backup system anyway. Whether it's reliable flash or HDD is irrelevant.

I'm also in the process of removing my HDDs atm. Like you I need very little storage. My uni work is all in word docs and .jars etc, so takes up little space, the rest is programs and games.

Your system must be much quieter now!
 
To be honest only one of the Hitachi drives was ever noisy and that was the OS drive, but I have noticed the front fan creates a bit less noise as it doesn't have to push past four drives! :)

I've just ordered and external caddy/shuttle which I'll use for data backups. I'll keep the Hitachi drives in the cupboard as 'operational' backups, after all they still have a fully functional OS and many, many Apps.

Fingers crossed Crucial M4 are as good as their famed to be.
 
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