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Solid State Hard Drive - The time has come...

1K views 15 replies 13 participants last post by  BC42 
#1 ·
Been waiting a while for the reliability of these SSD's to plateau.

About a week ago, I bought a couple Samsung 850 EVO 500gb drives for the i7. I got them for $149 each.
I used one for the OS and one for storage.
I went form a Microsoft "experience" rating of 5.5 to a 7.9 in the blink of an eye. With the old drives, the startup was taking a little over 2 minutes (power switch to desktop) Now, it boots in 45 seconds! This includes the POST!

If you've been waiting, I think it's time...
 
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#3 ·
I was a 'watcher' for many years.

Almost 2 years ago I converted my main workstation to SATA SSD, and man it's been great!

All my workstations - Mine, the backup, and the wife's have SSDs now... as do the HP Probooks.. (LOL)

The new Z170 / i7 workstation has NVMe in it, and it's wicked fast!

And every single SSD is Samsung - 850EVO and 951Pro on the NVMe

Backup drives are still spinning disk, but the OS drive backup takes only 12 minutes to complete, so it's done More Frequently!!! :)

SSD IS ready for Prime Time, and the pricing is much better than when I jumped in... Glad the trail blazers paid the *premium* price to get this fully vetted and adopted!

Enjoy the Speed!
 
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#5 ·
Been Solid State for several years. Actually solid state for the OS, applications and work in progress.
Data and completed images are still going to hard drives and the cloud.

My IT department (wife) informed me today that I have almost 1 million images on my website at this moment. I don't think I could afford enough SSDs to store all of those files.
 
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#7 ·
I've still not went SSD on my main laptop yet, but I've been considering it. I have an SSD on my NAS and my NUC (which acts as a media PC attached to my TV)... Neither are what I would call "High end" drives at all. I probably don't have to tell you both are running Linux.

The NAS has a 64gig Kinsgston SV300. It boots from power on to all services running, in about 20-25sec. It's a little over a year old.

The NUC is running an 64gig AData SP900. It boots from power on, to Kodi in full display, in about 20sec. I've only had it about 4mo.

When I bought them, I could have have went with as little as 16gigs on both, but the price difference between the 16 and 64's, was almost nothing, which made little sense to me.

I'll admit, I'm not really sold on it with the NAS, as with the only real difference I see is it boots much faster, than when I had a platter drive. Typically on a platter drive, it was up and running in about 1min. I guess maybe the webUI I use is maybe a bit faster as well, but it's minuscule at best.

The NUC, on the other hand, is quite a bit different and I'm not sure I'd like it as much w/o an SSD. I thought I was having an SSD issue about 2 weeks after I built the NUC (stability issues). I zombied an old laptop and put the platter drive in the NUC. Reinstalled everything... and had the same problem. Took some time, but I narrowed it down to some issues the linux kernel I was using having some trouble with the NUC SATA chipset. An upgraded kernel wasn't "automatically" available yet, but I could have manually upgraded the kernel had I so desired. Since I was putting the SSD back in, I decided to just move the NUC a different version of Linux that had the updated kernel I needed. Hasn't been a problem since.
 
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#8 ·
The only time I have seen SSD in RAID is for DBF purposes, and it's supposed to be *DaBomb* for high utilization DBFs.

Pretty sure the life span of those drives is significantly lower than the SSDs we use...

Regardless, they sure are FAST - With external drives disconnected the fasted boot time I got was right at 18 to 20 seconds with Window 10. :)
 
#9 ·
Went SSD a couple of years ago. It's been nothing but great.

Funny thing though. I had built an M-drive for my S-100 CP/M machine. Almost an 8" x11" board populated with memory chips. Had all of 512kb on it. I would run compiles off of that drive, and they would just scream.

Old stuff comes back around.
 
#10 ·
Any opinions of using a wipe program on SSD? Using CCleaner's wipe program it recommends not using wipe on SSD due to prematurely wearing out the drive.
 
#11 ·
This article may have been written a while ago. However, it says don't defrag, wipe because it all adds up and the drive has a limited number of "writes" before that segment doesn't work anymore.
https://www.howtogeek.com/165472/6-things-you-shouldnt-do-with-solid-state-drives/
New SSD drives recommend that you "over provision" a given percent to allow space for segments that have retired due to use. Here's a snapshot of the Samsung "magician" software that comes with the drive.
Blue Colorfulness Azure Aqua Software
Blue Colorfulness Line Font Azure
 
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#12 ·
In the last year or so I have gone to SSD's on all systems I have anything to do with. I have settled on Samsung and Intel as the best out there although the other main players like Crucial and OCZ are steadily improving. It is important to learn the various Windows processes to disable to extend the life of SSD's.
 
#16 ·
They just fail silently :p

I've had SSDs for over 6 yrs. I run 2 SSDs in Raid0 for my OS and apps and HDs for data (backed up to external HDs). The first pair of SSDs, Agility 3, had bios issues and OCZ was no help. I was able to reset the drive error via software and it would be good for a week or so. I did this for a few months until I upgraded to 2x SanDisk Extreme Pros 2+ years ago. At the time, they were 20% cheaper than Samsung and available. Samsung was out of stock everywhere. Performance was a tick slower on writes but I was running Raid0 so it wasn't really an issue for me.

I have 500gb for the OS and apps and 2x 4tb drives for data. My backup drive is a 2tb with about 1.2tb of data that I really need. Everything else is porn (or data I can easily recover elsewhere).

Set up SMART so you know if there's an issue with your SSDs because there's no tick when they fail but they do throw errors.
 
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