Tests show modern SSDs can handle a thousand years of use

[Raduque]

I just upgraded to an SSD. Swapped the WD Black hybrid drive in my laptop for a 232gb Samsung Evo 840. Cost me $100. When 500gb ones go around $150 I'll buy one.

 

[ultimatebob]

Who said CFLs would last a thousand years?

I heard a lot of people saying that they would last 5 years.

Sometimes they do, but I've had a lot of them fail within 6 months.

That Tech Report test was amazing, though. Some of those drives have survived 2 Petabytes of writes on them so far, and they're still going!

 

[Sonikku]

Really? Usually I see sub-10min install times.

SSDs have really come down in price. 120Gb is ~$50. 240Gb is ~$80-120. 1TB has been ~$320 in the last few weeks.

That's Black Friday/Holiday rush sales. Come Jan it'll be back to $100 a 120gb.

 

[rh71]

Would you guys NOT recommend using the clone software (ie. Samsung Data Migration) to do the SSD upgrade?

 

[Fritzo]

Would you guys NOT recommend using the clone software (ie. Samsung Data Migration) to do the SSD upgrade?

Interested in this myself. Looking to install one in my laptop shortly.

 

[mnewsham]

Would you guys NOT recommend using the clone software (ie. Samsung Data Migration) to do the SSD upgrade?

I have used drive cloning tools 3-4 times now, as long as you are keeping everything else the same (motherboard, etc) it works just fine from my experiences and I have never had to do a reinstall because it messed up or anything.

So from my own personal use, 0 issues.

 

[DesiPower]

That's Black Friday/Holiday rush sales. Come Jan it'll be back to $100 a 120gb.

No it wont, prices have pretty much gone down way before BF. i remember the 240GBs selling around 100 - 120 range for a while now.

 

[Scarpozzi]

I just had an 80GB SAS SSD on my desk. It's literally the size of a PCMCIA card from 15 years ago....they're amazing.

 

[mnewsham]

No it wont, prices have pretty much gone down way before BF. i remember the 240GBs selling around 100 - 120 range for a while now.

Yeah, just looking at the price history on some modern SSDs will show you that they have been steadily going down for years, you might have saved $10-20 on black friday, but overall, they will be just as cheap and will likely continue to drop in price.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Cloning is fine. As far as the OS is concerned, it's just another storage device. We got SSDs at work and we just used ghost to clone to the SSD and it worked fine. I only learned this AFTER we did it, but supposedly if you leave 1MB or so before it will increase performance. Something about aligning the partition so that logical clusters match up with physical ones and 1MB happens to be a good spot to do it at. Something like that.

Just remember to disable defrag, page file, and other stuff that will generate lot of excessive writes. Just general OS functions or downloading files is not enough to worry about though. The one in my Linux system is still showing 0% used life, so at this rate I'll upgrade the PC well before the drive dies.

Now in a high IO mass storage situation that's another story. I still would not use them for raid arrays full of VMs or other high IO stuff at least not till they drop in price where it wont hurt as bad to replace them every couple years.

 

[lakedude]

seriously? its the best freaking system upgrade in the last 15 years, in day to day performance

you can get a 120GB for the OS and main programs for like 80$...

Yeah, this...

The SSD is the thing that makes Windows tolerable.

 

[MrPickins]

Would you guys NOT recommend using the clone software (ie. Samsung Data Migration) to do the SSD upgrade?

I've used both Samsung and Crucial's migration tools with great success.

These were Win7 system drives as well.

 

[inachu]

Who said CFLs would last a thousand years?

I agree.

Many things are sold on the basis of planned obsolescence.
Which is why everything dies early with helps to earn the companies cash which in turn spurns research and development.

If nothing broke then nobody would fix it or replace it and no research done or technology in general would lag behind.

Just think if todays computers were still using 1970's style transistors.
I love and hate the idea of M.T.B.F. (mean time before failure) but in the long run it benefits society as a whole.

 

[Merad]

I have 740 GB of SSD storage in my newly built desktop. It's beautiful. Also, watching SSD to SSD copies scream at 450 MB/s is just :awe:

 

[Red Squirrel]

The best is how fast stuff opens and how fast the PC boots up.

Before we had SSDs at work it would take about 45 minutes to an hour to do a cold boot and have all our stuff open. Now it's like 15 minutes.


Now if only we could go back to regular BIOS on modern machines. UEFI adds about 15-30 seconds to the boot time so what you gain by having a SSD in a modern machine you lose with UEFI.

 

[Cerb]

Now if only we could go back to regular BIOS on modern machines. UEFI adds about 15-30 seconds to the boot time so what you gain by having a SSD in a modern machine you lose with UEFI.

That's your board or settings, not UEFI. With UEFI+CSM (BIOS) boot, booting Windows 7 via BIOS/MBR, I can almost have all my startup applications started by the 30 second mark, with me being the slowdown (password, then UAC prompts). Pure EUFI should be faster than that.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

I've upgraded all of my PCs and laptops to SSDs and won't look back. My wife was extremely impressed when I swapped her HD out to an SSD last year and I even put them in all 3 htpcs.

Edit: Still use HDDs for actual storage though on my machines.

 

[JulesMaximus]

uhm....yeah, that's what they said about CFL bulbs. From experience, I ain't worry about rewrites. It's one insignificant software glitch that will render the SSD inoperable and all data unrecoverable.

Which is why I have all my files stored on an internal hard drive and only the programs are loaded on the SSD.

 

[mikeymikec]

Did anyone else notice when looking at the recent posts list that this thread was posted by the user 'GoodEnough', so beneath the thread title, 'GoodEnough' is written beneath? "SSDs can handle a thousand years of use? Hmm, yeah, I guess, that's good enough..."

 

[sswingle]

Love my SSD although I wish it was a bit bigger than 120gb.

 

[Merad]

That's your board or settings, not UEFI. With UEFI+CSM (BIOS) boot, booting Windows 7 via BIOS/MBR, I can almost have all my startup applications started by the 30 second mark, with me being the slowdown (password, then UAC prompts). Pure EUFI should be faster than that.

Agreed. UEFI can be pretty pretty annoying from an IT perspective, but on my personal desktop it's pretty good. I haven't actually timed with a stopwatch but I would say typically windows is loading within 5 seconds of power on.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Agreed. UEFI can be pretty pretty annoying from an IT perspective, but on my personal desktop it's pretty good. I haven't actually timed with a stopwatch but I would say typically windows is loading within 5 seconds of power on.

Damn I wish my board was like that. Mine takes a good 30 seconds to POST alone. By the time it actually starts to boot the OS it's well over a minute in. The OS takes like 10 seconds to boot from that point. (Linux).

 

[skipsneeky2]

I have 740 GB of SSD storage in my newly built desktop. It's beautiful. Also, watching SSD to SSD copies scream at 450 MB/s is just :awe:

Have done this before with 2 ssd drives,its the biggest thrill ever for a nerd.About as much fun as when i saw the first boot up of a ssd for myself and having the iso on a thumb drive for installation.So fun and fast.

Thinking i need to figure out if my board allows usb 3.0 booting,can you imagine how fast windows 7 would install then?I would do it i think one day just for shits and giggles.

 

[ElFenix]

How many mice have you worn through and how many hours of sleep haven't you bothered to get?

Seriously though, I'm curious about what happened.

Just regular web browsing and video streaming. Leave chrome open and it will constantly write to its cache and history files. Leave it open a couple weeks and you'll get a lot of data read/writes in task manager.

 

[Bob the Coder]

I recently purchased a Dell M3800 to replace an aging Lenovo T510 that only had 4GB RAM. After receiving it, I noticed that it had a blemish on the touch screen and that it ran stupid hot. So I sent it back.

In a pinch (new gig), I decided to upgrade the T510 until I found a suitable laptop. I tossed in a 256GB SSD and a 4GB module. $150 out the door at Micro Center.

My T510 now runs circles around an absolute beast of a workstation that I build less than a year ago (i7 quad core, 16GB RAM, etc etc). So I retired the workstation (gave it to the kiddos) and now just use the laptop. I'm not not even considering a new laptop now, and know I can easily extract another 2 - 4 years out of this one.

To say that an SSD is the best upgrade you can perform is an obscene understate. It's not just a "hey this seems faster" change in performance; it's DRASTIC. And no more listening to the stupid HDD clunk its way through tasks. It's silent.

And hint: if you're looking at new laptops, don't even consider paying for the SSD upgrade... especially if the laptop takes a 2.5" drive that's user-accessible. Dell and Lenovo are charging $500+ for SSD upgrades, when they can be had for 20% of that.