Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

thought this was kind of interesting and potentially useful ...

http://techreport.com/review/26523/the- ... a-petabyte

looks good to me, provided one buys at least a mid-range model. those 840 pro's are quite affordable. however, even if SSD's had terrible longevity - the enormous speed boost compared to a spinning drive and the absence of noise/vibration are so noticeable, would still be worth it to just burn through and discard them i think.

with SSDs in all my machines i do a lot more backups now though considering that it seems impossible to retrieve anything from a dying/defective drive.

Fry's is selling a 60GB Patriot Blaze SSD for $34. At that price it was very hard to say no to at least try in the G5.

i never felt the need for an ssd. i simply don't need that speed neither want that kind of "reliability"

Video editing and compiling large projects are the two places I've seen SSDs shine. Had some code projects go from 45 minutes down to 5 minutes for clean builds.

foetz wrote: i never felt the need for an ssd. i simply don't need that speed neither want that kind of "reliability"

I'm not a fanboy either but this was interesting ... the hit on SDD's has been that they are not reliable and that they degrade with use. I don't think my disk drives hold up to a petabyte of writes, so ...

The lack of moving parts is nice. I can see these eventually putting disk drives into the paper tape closet.

Do they even make computers with spinning disks anymore? And can spinning disks handle that many read/writes, either? If they did, would they take 100 years to get there?

My mac pro has a spinning disk and while it's a beast of a machine graphics/cpu wise, the disk is unbearably slow. Since it isn't much of a bottleneck for what it does I have put off upgrading it thus far but oy vey! You get used to little things happening instantly very quickly, and then it is like coming back to the stone age. Up there with it's... uhhh... decidedly non -retina cinema lcd.

with SSDs in all my machines i do a lot more backups now though considering that it seems impossible to retrieve anything from a dying/defective drive.

my 4 year old mac air has it's original SSD, it was my first SSD and before that I typically killed a laptop's disk in less than a year on average. Even a toughbook. I have even gotten off the crazy religious back up train since then and just let time machine do it's thing.

Had some code projects go from 45 minutes down to 5 minutes for clean builds.

That doesn't shock me at all.

My wife has a sony VAIO and it has the best of both worlds, a large spinning disk with an (8 or 16GB-ish??) SSD that functions as a large cache. It works quite nicely. Since the only real complaint with an SSD equipped machine should be that for a decent amount of space it gets pricey, quickly, it is the best of both worlds.

foetz wrote: i never felt the need for an ssd. i simply don't need that speed neither want that kind of "reliability"

And let me guess, a carburetor is more "reliable" than fuel injection, because there are no electrical gremlins to worry about?

more frequent backups are just an insurance against sudden drive death really - which could happen with a brand new drive. i seem to have killed about four hard disks in my laptop over the course of three years but in all cases i was able to recover data or 'heard' it coming.
agreed that coming back to a solely hard disk based machine feels like going back to the stone age. unbearable.

guardian: sounds like your wife is running what apple calls a fusion drive. what happens with that if the SSD part fails? is the data from the big disk in such an event retrievable (and complete)?

vegac wrote: Had some code projects go from 45 minutes down to 5 minutes for clean builds.

ramdisk

'dead after 3k writes per cell' has been the standard practically since flash memory has been invented.

foetz wrote: ramdisk

Too easy. Not expensive enough

Still, nice to see that ssd's are apparently not as feeble as their reputations.

GIJoe wrote: guardian: sounds like your wife is running what apple calls a fusion drive. what happens with that if the SSD part fails? is the data from the big disk in such an event retrievable (and complete)?

Sony calls it a "Hybrid HDD" and I have no idea how it really works since we have a sort of "I don't touch yours and you don't touch mine" attitude although from what I can see it works well- for example when we play games together maps and etc take the same amount of time to load on her vaio and my "pure" SSD - equipped rMBP. Both machines are an order of magnitude faster than a spinning disk e.g. going from 20-30 second loading times to 3-5 seconds.

As for SSD failing I would be more concerned about the mechanical part failing. In any event, data recovery is a tricky and expensive exercise in the best of times and since it's not part of their warranty we just back it up like my laptop to the mac pro. We would either call sony to have them repair/replace the machine. Once the warranty expires just replace the drive myself, and re-install from the restore DVD like any other PC. Since she is not that hard on it I am not anticipating any failures barring an accident.

I know other PC makers offer similar setups; software-wise, I believe windows 8 knows what to do automatically and all that comes from Sony is the device drivers. Of course Apple offers the same thing and calls it something different.

I don't know if it is all one unit or if there is a separate pcie SSD and SATA hdd.

Seagate has been offering these for a while now - original as the Momentus XT line in 2010. Review at AnandTech .

They've cycled to newer models since then and upped their marketing game a bit: http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/laptop-solid-state-hybrid-drive/ ...

HDDs can fail suddenly too, so it's a bad idea to count on the HDD failing slowly enough for you to make a backup.

Any data that is important should be backed up regularly. If your system's HDD or SSD dies, just replace it and restore the backups.

Backups can be as simple as an external USB external drive and a shell script calling rsync. That's what I do.

Crucial actually gives the following lifespan for one of their ordinary SSDs:

Endurance: 72TB total bytes written (TBW), equal to 40GB per day for 5 years

serious backups shouldn't be running with the target machine. hook the medium up, run the backup, disconnect, put away. at least as far away so that any sort of accident of the box can't affect the backup.

smj wrote: Seagate has been offering these for a while now - original as the Momentus XT line in 2010. Review at AnandTech .

hey, that's the drive that keeps failing me quite consistently. about to send mine back to seagate for another round. decent speed but seems not really suitable for a laptop environment. a far cry from SSD speeds still.

And then this comes along.

A long-term endurance test has shown that after writing 2 petabytes to SSDs, two out of 6 were still running.

foetz wrote: serious backups shouldn't be running with the target machine. hook the medium up, run the backup, disconnect, put away. at least as far away so that any sort of accident of the box can't affect the backup.

Yeah, this is easy with external drives: (1) connect the drive, (2) run a shell script, (3) put it away for later. It's not completely automatic, but it's safe, cheap, and simple.

I have loads of SSDs, including several in my Fuel. Every time I have to use a rust spinner, I'm amazed
that I was able to put up with how slow they are.

See my post on the ' quiet SCSI drives ' thread for an example speedup with an SSD in an O2.

Samsung 850 Pro works ok in a Fuel btw. Ditto the Crucial M550, all OCZ models, Sandisk Extreme II, etc.

Ian.