SSD vs. HDD for new system O/S drive - are SSDs equal to HDD in reliability?

[Hulk]

Intel 320 for boot drive for 7 months. No issues, no problems, could never go back to stone knives and bearskins. And by that I mean a mechanical drive.

 

[bryanW1995]

Any enthusiast or power user simply has to have an SSD as their boot drive. Yes they are expensive, so thats why you need to size one accordingly. Most people can live with a 128GB drive reasonably well.

"I just want it to work" is a fair concern. My advice would be a Samsung 830. Top notch reliability, toolbox application, free copy of Norton Ghost 15 and current generation speed. The Intel 510 is far too expensive for what it is and the 830 would be a lot faster. The Intel 520 is there but thats a little more of a risk IMO. The 830 has been out a good 4 months and even with no reports of bugs in the wild Samsung still fixed a few things with it.

I do disagree with exdeath about HDDs. I have a 1TB HDD for all my music, videos, p0rn, and backup images for when I fix peoples PCs for them. There's certainly no way I would store >200GB of Acronis or Ghost images on an SSD when I access them once a year.

I thought that you knew what you were talking about until I read that sentence. The 830 is a "lot faster" than the 510? In artificial tests it looks pretty good, but according to Anandtech's Samsung 830 review, in the real world scenarios encompassed by the Anandtech storage bench both light and heavy workloads the intel 510 series is actually faster. Honestly looking at them side by side they're nearly the same speed, and both have trouble keeping up with the 520 series of course. And the 510 series IS far too expensive, so at least you were half right.

 

[bryanW1995]

I have an Intel 310 160GB SSD and think that the hype behind them is a bit overblown.

Maybe I am misremembering things but whenever I watch those comparison videos I swear to God that my HDD never took that long to load Windows or World of Warcraft.

Same, I have a 4 year old computer with HDD only, and it loads stuff faster than those HDD examples.

Use an ssd for a few months, then uninstall it and go back to using a regular hdd. Keep all other system components the same. You will literally think that the computer is broken. I laughed when I read that the first time, but I wasn't laughing 4 months ago when I yanked my x25m g2 out of my i7 920 rig and put it into the shiny new 2500k rig. Now when I do anything at all on the 920 rig it just feels...broken...slow...pathetic. And I'm not some crazy power user, I surf the web and play games. My wife is probably more of a power user than me, she at least uses elements and lightroom to edit her photos. And she absolutely loves her 320 series.

 

[Coup27]

I thought that you knew what you were talking about until I read that sentence. The 830 is a "lot faster" than the 510? In artificial tests it looks pretty good, but according to Anandtech's Samsung 830 review, in the real world scenarios encompassed by the Anandtech storage bench both light and heavy workloads the intel 510 series is actually faster. Honestly looking at them side by side they're nearly the same speed, and both have trouble keeping up with the 520 series of course. And the 510 series IS far too expensive, so at least you were half right.

If you compare the two on bench at the same capacity and both on 6Gbps then the 830 wins every single test apart from power consumption and 2KB or less sequential read. Everything else the 830 wins, and some by a huge margin. The 830 also spanks the 510 if you play top-trumps with the data sheets. It's also much cheaper.

 

[nine9s]

If I got a 128GB SSD, would that be enough for O/S and one or two games?

Right now my O/S drive uses 27 to 30GB with a 4Gb page file. Does the way SSD allocate make it allocate more space to small files than a HDD system would? If so, by what factor. For example, what would 25 to 30GB of O/S files on a HDD be on a SSD? Games usually have large bin files so I guess the factor is not as bad on them. And how much would 10 GB of games be on a SSD?

Also, what percentage of a SSD do you not want to go over in space used? For example, I am trying to figure out if 40GB to 50GB for O/S and games, or almost 50% of a 128GB SSD is okay or do you not want to exceed 50% of the drive?

 

[Coup27]

Yes.

For SSDs that do not use compression like the Crucial m4 or Samsung 830, whatever previously took up x space using a HDD will take up exactly the same amount of space on one of these SSDs. For SSDs which do use compression (ones that use Sandforce controllers), the SSD will compress what you try to write to it so it takes up less space, but unfortunately while it takes up less space on the NAND, the OS will still think it has wrote the full size of data. This means in reality, 10GB of data is 10GB of data, whether its on a HDD, or any SSD.

Overprovisioing is another sticky subject. It's agreed on by all that it is not wise to fill your SSD to the max. Leaving spare capacity helps ensure that there are free blocks of NAND available whenever needed which helps maintain the life and speed of your SSD. Most drives (all but Samsung I think) allow you to partition the entire space available to you and then whatever space does not have data wrote on it will automatically be used by the drives controller as spare area.

Samsung doesn't work like that and requires you to manually set aside a portion of space and leave it unallocated for that to be used as spare area. All SSDs have an amount of spare area by default due to the GiB to GB conversion.

 

[kbp]

Gb is a Gb on what-ever source you put it in....
Just try and keep it under 80%.

 

[exdeath]

Been lots of progress. I used to load programs from a cassette player ~30 years ago. Took 30 minutes to load a < 48 KB program.

Cassette tapes and floppies were reasonably fast in their day. They were slow in absolute terms but back in their day we were only loading a few bytes or kilobytes so it didn't really matter much. Their capacity and speed were proportional and matched reasonably. 10 KBps is pretty damned fast when your total capacity is only 100 KB. I wouldn't be whining all the time if it only took 10 seconds to fill or empty a 4 TB drive.

Today we are loading and working with 10s of gigabytes and terabytes at damn near the same speeds we used to only have to load bytes and kilobytes, relative to increases in capacity and processing power.

Storage has fallen WAY behind in progress next to faster CPUs, RAM, and buses.

Our memory bus in a basic desktop has surpassed 50 GB/sec, but first we still have to load programs and data into it at <= 1 MB/sec random access...

Personally I think all progress on CPUs, RAM, and bus speeds should be halted and all attention diverted to storage until there is an unprecedented breakthrough in material physics and a radically new way to store and retrieve non volatile data that surpasses current CPU/RAM/bus speeds for the foreseeable future. Storage is the Achilles Heel holding back our technological progress in a major way. We have been shot in the kneecaps and handicapped by storage I/O speed from the invention of the first abacus.

Computer vision and AI? Sorry not happening at 1 MB/sec random access speeds. How much data can a human brain recall and process instantly in the blink of an eye from long term memory (eg: non volatile permanent stores)? It's not storage bandwidth limited like our crappy computers are that's for sure. I WANT to be CPU limited for a change.

 

[bryanW1995]

If you compare the two on bench at the same capacity and both on 6Gbps then the 830 wins every single test apart from power consumption and 2KB or less sequential read. Everything else the 830 wins, and some by a huge margin. The 830 also spanks the 510 if you play top-trumps with the data sheets. It's also much cheaper.

I didn't say that the theoreticals don't seem to favor samsung, all I said was that in the real world situations presented by Anandtech Storage Bench, the 510 series is faster in both light and heavy usage. And the samsung drive is actually larger, so I can't imagine that the 510 series somehow has an unfair advantage in this test. Also, I already mentioned that the 510 series is too expensive, I'm not sure why you brought it up again.

 

[Coup27]

I didn't say that the theoreticals don't seem to favor samsung, all I said was that in the real world situations presented by Anandtech Storage Bench, the 510 series is faster in both light and heavy usage. And the samsung drive is actually larger, so I can't imagine that the 510 series somehow has an unfair advantage in this test. Also, I already mentioned that the 510 series is too expensive, I'm not sure why you brought it up again.

Open up the AT Bench and compare the 510 120GB 6Gbps vs 830 128GB 6Gbps. There are 12 tests which cover AT Bench 2011 heavy and light. The 830 wins every single one by a clear margin. However if you change the 830 to the 512GB version, the gap becomes a lot closer, which is what is reflected in the review figures. Why the 512GB version is coming out slower than the 128GB version I haven't a clue. So going off the bench comparison, my original comment is correct. Whether AT has some figures wrong somewhere, seems possible now.

 

[exdeath]

Open up the AT Bench and compare the 510 120GB 6Gbps vs 830 128GB 6Gbps. There are 12 tests which cover AT Bench 2011 heavy and light. The 830 wins every single one by a clear margin. However if you change the 830 to the 512GB version, the gap becomes a lot closer, which is what is reflected in the review figures. Why the 512GB version is coming out slower than the 128GB version I haven't a clue. So going off the bench comparison, my original comment is correct. Whether AT has some figures wrong somewhere, seems possible now.

256GB is the sweet spot. It has to do with NAND channel saturation and controller cache and workload.

256GB improves on 128GB because more channels, more parallelism, but the added overhead of caching and looking things up in 256GB hasn't brought the controller to it's knees yet. Performance increases.

When you get to 512GB, the channels and physical bandwidth were already maxed out at 256GB, so now you are just adding bigger lookup tables flooding caches and more complexity for the controller to process without adding any more physical performance to the table. Performance drops.

Faster controllers with more cores and more cache and more NAND channels will eventually make 512 GB drives twice as fast as 256GB units just like currently 256GB units are twice as fast as 128GB units.

This generally holds true for the most part, but there are variations of this of course; depends on the type of NAND, how many dies per chip, 8 NAND chips vs 16 NAND chips, etc. Some vendors do have 128GB class drives that are just as fast as 256GB models because they purposely chose a higher end 256GB capable controller with more channels and a NAND layout to allow for maximum physical saturation but at the lower capacities such as 128GB.

 

[Coup27]

Thanks for that explanation exdeath, makes sense.

So the end result is up to 512GB, the 830 is faster than the 510 across all but 2KB or less seq read, which does make it an overall faster drive. AT have used the 512GB version in their reviews which is actually slower, and if you run bench on that vs the 240GB 510, the Intel wins.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Ignore the people saying you don't need an SSD. If you're asking about it, you're going to like having one. Ignorance is bliss. You're not ignorant. (At least one person in this thread is obviously *willfully* ignorant, but his loss...)

If you can afford it, get a 256GB Crucial M4. They're $300. If you can't afford it, buy a lesser CPU and afford it. I'm more than half serious there.

Go read up on the theory of constraints and think about what is the bottleneck in your computer. Anand has said it, tons of others have said it, I will say it:

An SSD is the single most noticeable upgrade you can make to your computer. It will make old computers feel like new. It will make new computers feel like you actually got your money's worth. Make the move to a good SSD and you will never look back.

 

[bryanW1995]

Thanks for that explanation exdeath, makes sense.

So the end result is up to 512GB, the 830 is faster than the 510 across all but 2KB or less seq read, which does make it an overall faster drive. AT have used the 512GB version in their reviews which is actually slower, and if you run bench on that vs the 240GB 510, the Intel wins.

Sorry, I was unaware that 512gb was actually slower. Thanks exdeath for the explanation as well.

 

[groberts101]

although there is a trend in changing the internal configs between 128 and 256GB drives(for the amount of channels used) due to larger dies coming into the market these days .. many are still using all available channels to begin with.

Only the amount of dies per channel config's change. Which therefor allows greater performance through increased interleaving of all the available die stacks.