Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
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Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
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Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#2One thing the article didn't address is performance over time. Even with TRIM support, SSDs get slower as they're used. Occasionally, cells die prematurely causing spare capacity to decrease. This won't affect read speeds much but it will hurt writes. These older SSDs will still be faster than hard drives but they won't be as fast as you'd expect them to be.
Now for some of my own data. Here's an Intel X25-M G2 after a lot of usage: http://abughrai.be/pics/ssd_erase/Screenshot-160%20GB%20Soli... and here it is after an ATA secure erase: http://abughrai.be/pics/ssd_erase/Screenshot-160%20GB%20Soli...
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The G2 has TRIM support and this drive was used on an ext4 filesystem with TRIM enabled. After the erase, performance was almost back to that of a pristine drive. There was a 6GB swap partition on the drive as well as the ext4 partition. I'm pretty sure swap partitions aren't trimmed, so that could have been the reason for the performance degradation.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#3One thing the article didn't address is performance over time. Even with TRIM support, SSDs get slower as they're used. Occasionally, cells die prematurely causing spare capacity to decrease. This won't affect read speeds much but it will hurt writes. These older SSDs will still be faster than hard drives but they won't be as fast as you'd expect them to be. Now for some of my own data. Here's an Intel X25-M G2 after…
What would you define as a lot of usage?
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#4At the moment, the reliability problem with SSDs stems entirely from firmware bugs, rather than the underlying flash technology. All the issues you hear about with regards to drives causing blue screens or simply failing to be recognized by the system at all after a while are issues with the firmware on the controller chip - the actual flash chips themselves are pretty dumb and rarely fail catastrophically.
This will get better with time, as SSD firmware accumulates the kind of run time (in terms of number of hours x number of units in use) over years that HDD firmware has had.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#5All these statistics come from server use, where drives are constantly spinning and kept at a relatively constant temperature. I'm curious if there's a bigger difference in laptop computers, where the drives see a lot more physical abuse, power cycles, temperature variations, etc.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#6Consider this: the hard drive is the least reliable component of almost any modern PC/laptop. Add to this that it likely contains the most valuable non-commodity asset: your data.
Anyone not backing up their system is really asking for trouble... which will happen. Given the ease of use of modern backup systems, and their cost (free only costing a modest amount of your time), everyone should be doing it. OSX and Win7 make you feel guilty for not doing it (though OSX's version is better, both deliver on basic backups).
All this said, the difference between an SSD and an HD is about zero when it comes to real reliability. Both will fail at odd times, and you should have a backup, preferably bootable, to get you back to good. An external drive with a system-imaged startup disk (free for all major desktop OSs) is quite cheap to maintain.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#7One thing the article didn't address is performance over time. Even with TRIM support, SSDs get slower as they're used. Occasionally, cells die prematurely causing spare capacity to decrease. This won't affect read speeds much but it will hurt writes. These older SSDs will still be faster than hard drives but they won't be as fast as you'd expect them to be. Now for some of my own data. Here's an Intel X25-M G2 after…
What would you define as a lot of usage?
I'd say it got about 5GB/day of mostly-sequential writes for a year, and I base that on absolutely no quantifiable data. It was used for lots of development; compiling stuff, running an IDE and browser in addition to the full stack of stuff in production. It had MySQL with a prod snapshot, RabbitMQ, a Django web app and a bunch of twisted services. The biggest writing culprits were restoring MySQL snapshots and ridiculously verbose logging from services.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#8The short summary is that nobody had used SSDs in any large scale for more than 2 years and the rates of failure for SSDs in that period of time is similar to regular hard drives.
Also apparently OCZ SSDs aren't as good as Intel SSDs (based on customer return rates).
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#9Consider this: the hard drive is the least reliable component of almost any modern PC/laptop. Add to this that it likely contains the most valuable non-commodity asset: your data. Anyone not backing up their system is really asking for trouble... which will happen. Given the ease of use of modern backup systems, and their cost (free only costing a modest amount of your time), everyone should be doing it. OSX and Win7…
I'm finding it hard to believe that the difference is about zero. I think it depends _a lot_ on the usage pattern, and while your statement might be true for the majority of users, some people _are_ experiencing reliability issues with SSDs: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid...
This is only reasonable to expect when one technology has a write cycle limit and the other does not. A hard drive will give better reliability in write intensive applications, while an SSD will beat a hard drive in mobile/portable applications.
Of course, for most people buying an SSD, the increased performance easily outweighs any reliability "cost".
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#10One thing the article didn't address is performance over time. Even with TRIM support, SSDs get slower as they're used. Occasionally, cells die prematurely causing spare capacity to decrease. This won't affect read speeds much but it will hurt writes. These older SSDs will still be faster than hard drives but they won't be as fast as you'd expect them to be. Now for some of my own data. Here's an Intel X25-M G2 after…
The kernel should really issue a large TRIM for most of the swap partition at swapon time.