back to article Why solid-state disks are winning the argument

Perhaps the most perplexing question I have been posed this year is: "Why should I use SSDs?" On the face of it, it is a reasonable question. When it was put to me, however, I just sat there staring at the wall, trying to form a coherent thought. Where to begin? As it was late at night, I decided that starting with a brief …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "As you can see, there aren't many reasons to buy traditional magnetic disk"

    Hmm, you give a list of arguments for buying traditional hard disks and then say there aren't many reasons?

    "SSDs are faster. They have way lower latency. They consume less power. They take up less space.

    Most importantly, so long as you follow the instructions on the tin when selecting the right SSD for the job, there is absolutely no reason not to buy one"

    Apart from the main one of price and/or price per GB? If I want a 48TB SAN then filling it with enterprise SSDs is going to cost me significantly more than HDDs!

    1. Nigel 11

      Reasons for traditional HD

      1. Cost per Terabyte is still much lower for HDs.

      2. I have more faith in mirroring applied to hard disks than to SSDs.

      In my experience, a majority of HD problems show up in the SMART statistics well before the drive fails. Then I replace the drive pro-actively. I also try to pair drives from different manufacturers to reduce the risk of a common-mode dual-drive failure.

      Will SSDs warn in advance of failure? CAN SSDs warn in advance of failure? They're a new technology (more accurately, several new technologies), and I think it'll be a few years before we know. I'm not even certain that running a mirrored pair of SSDs is useful (but given that I'm talking about multiple TB of data, it'll be a few years before I can afford to find out! )

      Will multi-TB SSDs compete with multi-TB HDs? If 3D flash can expand further into the 3rd dimension, that may happen sooner than we think.

      BTW why is putting Flash memory (a SSD) on the PCI bus still regarded as exotic expensive server technology? 6Gbit SATA is now the bottleneck for even consumer-grade 240Gb SSDs. Give us a small and cheap but very fast PCI card to boot and run our O/Ses from!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Reasons for traditional HD

        SSD for OS and Applications.

        Mechanical drive for big data storage.

        Win win.

        1. JEDIDIAH
          Linux

          Re: Reasons for traditional HD

          It's funny you should mention that because enterprise storage vendors have had "tiered storage" for many years now. This is not a new problem. These dynamics exist even within the same disk technology (namely magnetic HDD). There's pretty much always been a cost versus speed tradeoff.

          Just add various "grades" of SSD into the mix using the tech that's already there.

          ...again: not news.

      2. richardcox13

        Re: Reasons for traditional HD

        > Give us a small and cheap but very fast PCI card to boot and run our O/Ses from!

        Have you looked at M.2 flash cards (on motherboards with the appropriate support)?

        Of course they have capacities that mean you can skip a SATA flash disk and just back it up with the large spinning rust for bulk storage if required.

        1. Sgt. Pinback

          Re: Reasons for traditional HD

          yup, m.2 is the current answer

          Samsung have a ~$500 512GB m.2 SSD out that does 1000MBps read and write, you will need a 15-30 dollar adaptor to fit in a regular PCIe slot though (needs v2 4 lanes).

          More are coming, wait until the end of next year and you'll get your economical PCIe blazing storage fix.

      3. Boothy
        Thumb Up

        Re: Reasons for traditional HD

        Quote: 'Give us a small and cheap but very fast PCI card to boot and run our O/Ses from!'

        Ah-men to that.

        1. Mikel

          Re: Reasons for traditional HD

          http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Description=mini%20pcie%20ssd&Submit=ENE

      4. Uncle Ron

        Re: Reasons for traditional HD

        Anything on a traditional I/O bus is bottlenecked. The traditional, legacy I/O subsystem, dating back 40 years, is such a kludge of wiring and instructions as to be, IMHO, the most backward, outdated thing we can see in current information processing.

        No, the sooner we can implement Storage Class Memory, and Storage Class Memory Controllers directly into the fabric of the processor silicone, and thence into the OS's and even into the apps themselves, will any of the article's points really matter. The minor distinctions between HDD's and SDD's are only marginally interesting.

      5. Tom 13

        Re: Will SSDs warn in advance of failure?

        The answer to that is definitely Yes. In fact it is built into the SSD to achieve a usable lifespan. IIRC the standard is that they build the SSD with 4 times the memory of its rated capacity and as potential failures are detected it shunts data to a new location and marks off the suspect block so it isn't accessed again.

        Oh wait, you meant will it warn you as the admin of the system in advance of a failure? Erm, ah, ... Yeah, they really should do that.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: Will SSDs warn in advance of failure?

          "Oh wait, you meant will it warn you as the admin of the system in advance of a failure? Erm, ah, ... Yeah, they really should do that."

          Correct me if I'm wrong, but is the most frequent point of failure in a SSD less the memory chips and more the controller that herds them all (which makes any redundant chips moot)?

          1. Tom 13

            Re: more the controller that herds them all

            Probably.

            But the same is probably also true of spinning metal disks so it's sort of moot to the warning question. In fact, if you're talking about absolute best of class systems, based on my experience if you don't have a tape drive* in the mix somewhere you aren't fully covered. I once had the privilege of working with a group of people who had mirrored desktop drives. Of the six systems in two years that we had to replace for drive failures, I think the mirrors helped with two. I think we actually only had one drive failure. Each of the other instances was a case of data corruption on the drive. So the mirror just dutifully copied the corruption to the second drive and both drives were useless from a data recovery perspective. After we put fresh images on them, everything worked fine.

            *There are some over the wire systems that work sufficiently like tape to qualify as a tape drive, but if you can't go back at least a full year in the archive to restore a file, I wouldn't count it. That's the bit that most drive redundancy systems (whether SSD or spinning metal) don't address.

        2. bdg2

          Re: Will SSDs warn in advance of failure?

          They do NOT put anywhere near 4 times the rated capacity of Flash memory in an SSD.

          A 240GB drive probably has 256GB of flash in it, a 256GB drive maybe 272 or 288GB.

          Certain hotspots in the drive get written to very often (directories, allocation tables etc.) and most other parts are rarely written to. The drive will move the hotspots around to even out the wear but it will move them before any damage is done.

          1. Vic

            Re: Will SSDs warn in advance of failure?

            Certain hotspots in the drive get written to very often (directories, allocation tables etc.)

            They shouldn't do - the wear-levelling system on the controller is supposed to prevent that.

            And this is why it is essential to use an OS that properly implements TRIM; the alternative is to watch the SSD eating itself trying to reallocate data that you've already thrown away...

            Vic.

      6. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @Nigel 11

        Why in the world do you have more faith in mirroring for hard drives? Both hard drives and SSDs can have two types of failures: controller failure and media failure. Mirroring protects you well against both.

        SSDs add a new wrinkle in that they have a limited number of erase cycles, thus a limited write lifetime, but this isn't a problem iin practice. SMART tells you about the write lifetime, and knows when you're starting to hit it. But if you ignore it, and keep writing, it isn't a bad thing. The controller will get errors trying to erase a block to be able to write a new block, and thus won't be able to write anymore, so the OS will get write errors thrown back at it. You will still be able to read your data just fine, so you don't lose anything. If downtime is your primary concern, well, make sure your OS knows how to interpret the SMART data so it warns you in advance so you can replace that drive before it reaches the point where it can't write any more data!

        BTW, both drives in a mirror won't hit their write lifetime at the same point, even if they've been mirrored since they were new. There isn't a counter in the flash chips that, when reached, causes writes to stop working. It is reached when erases fail, and two drives won't have the exact same number of erase cycles before failure....there will always be a little variation between chips.

        1. bdg2

          Re: @Nigel 11

          I believe there is a third type of failure for SSDs, it seems to be rare now but I'm pretty sure that in the early years of SSDs it used to happen and was responsible for the stories of SSDs suddenly totally and completely catastrophically failing with virtually no possibility of any data recovery. Let me explain. While in use an SSD keeps the mapping of of logical to physical addresses and some usage counts in RAM -- in order to allow wear levelling. When the power goes off the controller in the SSD has to rapidly save that RAM into flash. However if something goes wrong and the RAM gets corrupt it effectively scrambles large sections of the drive.

  2. Shrimpling

    Why I use SSD

    It means I don't break the Hard Disk when I drop my laptop which happens more than it should do!

    1. silent_count

      Why I use SSD #2

      A SSD equipped laptop doesn't have any issues when I carry it around on my motorbike.

      1. John Arthur

        Re: Why I use SSD #2

        And I have a Lenovo X60 laptop that has survived several tens of thousands of miles in my motorcycle panniers without a spinning rust disk failure so SSD and traditional are equal on that.

        1. cons piracy

          Re: Why I use SSD #2

          Much like your crotch rocket, the disks head is parked up nice and safe whilst not in use, which means it can withstand more G's in that state.....i wouldnt advise defragging the drive or allowing updates to finish whilst on the move though ;)

        2. Nick Pettefar

          Re: Why I use SSD #2

          My missus strapped her work's laptop to the rack of her (non-suspension) bicycle and rode to work and back for at least a week before it failed.

    2. JEDIDIAH
      Devil

      Re: Why I use SSD

      My kid has been abusing my spinny disk based Archos for years. The thing refuses to die. If anything, it's the battery that's the problem.

      Hard drive tech moved beyond the 80s style fragility you are talking about a long time ago.

  3. Sykobee

    So it depends on use case, if you're an enterprise you should assess these as part of any expensive procurement.

    The business case for fast writes depends on the business user. Developers need SSDs so speed up build times - saving developer downtime. I guess the same goes for graphic designers, video editors, and so on.

    Home users can probably survive with a hybrid drive, although current drives seem to offer a tiny amount of SSD, whereas Apple's Fusion drive has 128GB on a PCIe link and thus speeds up most operations. SSDs can be stupidly faster, and incredibly amazingly better at seeks, IOPS, etc.

    HD is great for rarely accessed stuff, or stuff that doesn't need high speeds (media, for example). But it's getting more painful to deal with a system that only has a HDD these days, especially once you've experienced a system running off a decent SSD.

    The guy who wants a 48TB SAN, that's going to be limited by the network anyway. Spinning media is obviously the solution here.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Developers need what now?

      "Developers need SSDs so speed up build times"

      No no no NO. Developers, like management should be given the crappiest POS you can find. The world would be a better place if developers were not given faster hardware. If a developer is building often enough that it becomes a bottleneck then sack the incompetent so and so because they are probably iteratively trying to work out how to make the code work and are therefore not really a developer. If the code they produce needs faster hardware then sack the incompetent so and so (unless the application is genuinely heavy on hardware of course) and hire someone who can write efficient code.

      Management get the crap because they control the budget, so it flows more freely if they feel the pain :)

      1. Infernoz Bronze badge
        Devil

        Re: Developers need what now?

        AN,

        I hope you always get crappy code from developers, very, very late, because that's what your moronic attitude will lead too.

        I've been a Software Developer for decades, so am competent to tell you to STFU!

        Developer tools, especially IDEs, can be surprisingly heavy users of disks, as can other software we use like database servers!

        Developers /always/ need well better specified machines with ample CPU and RAM because we are not just running the end product, we also run IDEs (which all proper developers use), other debugging and monitoring tools, database tools, source control clients, servers, Virtual Machines etc., often concurrently, and we damned well need to be able do lots of build cycles, including automated testing, to release usable code! Modern development is often not Waterfall, it is often deliberately iterative to reduce total development time for a /useable/ product.

        1. Nigel 11

          Re: Developers need what now?

          Depends what sort of developers.

          People who are coding and building, should have machines that can do it fast. Some sorts of debugging, likewise.

          But people who are testing for release, should at least some of the time be testing using the crappiest PC that a customer might still be using.

          My favorite peeve is websites that were never tested other than on a Gigabit internal net. You do NOT need a gigabit link to develop HTML and Javascripts. You should be exiting the building on a crappy ADSL service from a crappy ISP, and looping back in via the big bad internet. That's what some of your customers are seeing, stuck on the end of too many miles of corroded aluminium POTS cable that's somehow managing to support ADSL at a few Mbit/s (when it's not raining).

          1. Charles 9

            Re: Developers need what now?

            "You should be exiting the building on a crappy ADSL service from a crappy ISP, and looping back in via the big bad internet."

            It would be better still to set up a small intranet backed by a modem. Some people are LUCKY to have dialup access (it can happen: middle of nowhere with view of the south sky blocked somehow--no satellite), so they still need to be considered.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Middle of nowhere?

              Try down-town regional service centre, pop 20 000, Australia.

              ADSL - we've heard of it.

          2. Vic

            Re: Developers need what now?

            My favorite peeve is websites that were never tested other than on a Gigabit internal net.

            I once had a customer whose (third party) developers told them that the new site was slow because it was running on a server on the internal LAN, and all would be well once it was in the datacentre. And kept a straight face whilst saying it...

            Needless to say, the entire project was so slow and laggy, it was effectively unusable, The developers blamed the hardware, the nextwork, the colour of the sky. Two of us re-wrote the slowest bit[1] in a couple of hours[2], demonstrating that is was indeed their crap "design"[3].

            Vic.

            [1] They were passing the entire dataset to the client in XML, then parsing that XML in the worst piece of javascript you have ever seen. Some users were giving up after 10 minutes...

            [2] I had to teach the other guy the rudiments of Javascript. Over the phone.

            [3] I use the word quite wrongly...

        2. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Hans 1

        Re: Developers need what now?

        Dear anon, I regret to write that I downvoted you ... then I thought, anon ? Must be a window cleaner, so yes, when you develop Windows software (clock.exe, calc.exe, browser extension, toobar, adware, or malware) then you should not be allowed to have an SSD ... but, when you build ENTERPRISE software, you ought to have an SSD.

        As for wear ... I believe in the theory of this and after 5 years must say ... it is utter bullshit. There is no wear, I build every workday, multiple times, a multiple Gb code base, the doc alone is 2000+ pages PDF, hundreds of files per build, many < 4kb ... you get it ... I used to build just the doc on spinning laptop rust ... 45 minutes, 15 on Samsung F1's, back in the day on Core2Quad ... now on SSD ? More like 5. Everybody in our team has SSD's, none have worn out, even after 5 years of builds ... AND I am the only one who has toggled swapping, hybernating etc ...

        Besides, say the SSD breaks after 7 years, could happen, how big were spinning rust drives 7 years ago ? Just about 1Tb, iirc ... now, imagine ... forget spinning rust, SSD's will very shortly kill spinning rust price wise and capacity wise ... easy - not even comptetition ... first multi teras out already ....

      3. JeffyPoooh
        Pint

        Re: Developers need what now?

        AC - you are so exactly correct.

        Coder drones with high end PCs results in bloatware that barely runs for the rest of us with normal hardware. They should be assigned normal mainstream hardware at least two days a week. And dog food for lunch if they whine.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The exception that proved the rule

    I bought 15 OCZ SSD of various types (Vertex 4,Vertex 3.20, Agility 3) & capacity 18 months or so ago for Windoze PC & Linux laptop builds. Not long before their take over by Toshiba.

    I had to return one after a few months, been fine since.

    In the same time period, I had to return 2 sets of RAM that had failed in those PCs.

    Now Tosh in charge, I'd like to think their QA more in line with the rest of industry.

    1. Tom 38

      Re: The exception that proved the rule

      Right before OCZ went bust and were bought by Toshiba, and after they garnered the worst reputation in the business, they started flogging off factory refurbs of their most problematic drives - Vertex 3 and 4 - for basically nothing. I think I paid £30 for a 128GB Vertex 3 and £60 for a 240GB Vertex 4.

      The Vertex 3 I use as an adaptive read cache for a ZFS array - if it fails, the system doesn't care one jot; I can even un-plug it and plug it back in without applications noticing. This one has never failed.

      The Vertex 4 I used as the OS drive on my desktop. It worked fine for three months, and then the firmware wedged if you tried to do random access - sequential access was fine, so I could move all my data off there with a simple "dd". By this point, OCZ no longer existed, and besides which, the 3 month warranty was up. I asked Toshiba if I could RMA it, they said yes, and they sent me a brand new Tosiba branded Vertex 460, which thankfully has not failed even once.

      SSDs are much more complex beasties than mechanical disks, their firmware does a lot more work than the firmware in a HDD. I have no evidence, but I think the OCZ problems were mainly down to crappy firmware. Hopefully now Toshiba are on board, things are a little better.

  5. Fenwick

    "it is a really dumb idea to take the cheapest desktop hard drives you can find"

    Loads of people say this, and often have anecdotes about a life being destroyed, business failing, etc.

    But the only actual evidence I have managed to find says the opposite (Backblaze, Google, https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bianca/fast07.pdf).

    Of course no study is perfect. I'm sure that many people think that all of this "research" is wrong. So can anyone please come up with a logical or evidence based counter argument for why "it is a really dumb idea to take the cheapest desktop hard drives you can find".

    1. Nigel 11

      Re: "it is a really dumb idea to take the cheapest desktop hard drives you can find"

      It's in their interests to sell you "server grade" drives at twice the price. So of course they would say that.

      What they will never tell you is that it is very much in your interest to buy half your drives from one of their competitors. This is true even if it's provable that the competitor's drive is half as reliable

      That's because a drive from a different manufacturer is far less likely to contain one of the same batch of defective components. Two drives with near-identical serial numbers will likely contain the same faulty components and therefore are likely to fail at or near the same time. Mirroring won't save you if this happens.

      Give me a manufacturer X desktop drive and a manufacturer Y desktop drive any day, over any two identical Server grade drives with near-consecutive serial numbers.

    2. Matt_payne666

      Re: "it is a really dumb idea to take the cheapest desktop hard drives you can find"

      Cheap drives...

      This is only anecdotal , but here is my experience with cheap disks...

      Seagate st3000 3tb, I have 4 of those in my home array, 2 have died in 2 years, a third making some horrible noise... only after the second failure did I investigate and discover the lifespan is measured at 2000 hours, which is about 2 years in a server...

      Blackblaze can get away with colossal disk failure by using disks in such quantities that they are disposable

  6. Oliver Mayes

    I made the switch a few months ago, replaced my primary HDD with a Kingston HyperX 3k.

    It was fantastic, really fast and simple to install. It lasted 4 months before completely failing and taking my data with it.

    Now restored from backups I'm back to using a HDD. Think I'll wait another few years before risking it again.

    1. bdg2

      Re the Kingston HyperX 3K -- were you monitoring it with Kingston Toolbox?

  7. Fearitude

    I remember the pain of owning and OCZ SSD!

    Got myself a great looking, and cheap, OCZ Octane 128GB last time I rebuilt my gaming/development box.

    Disk 1, lasted 3 weeks. (got a replacement)

    Disk 2, lasted 5 weeks. (replaced again)

    Disk 3, lasted an impressive 2 weeks!

    This time I opted for a refund and upgraded to a 240GB Corsair which has worked flawlessly ever since.

    I wont be buying another OCZ product any time soon!

  8. GitMeMyShootinIrons

    Why solid-state disks are winning the argument?

    Well, for me, my battery life on my power-hungry monster Lenovo improved markedly when I switched out to an SSD, and it also ran quite a bit cooler too.

    And that's before I start looking at performance.

    For enterprise applications, there's a place for both. It's a bit like shiny 15K SAS/FC disks versus 7.2K SATA disks - performance quality balanced against capacity quantity, only with shinier SSDs at the performance end.

    1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

      SSD can increase power use of a laptop

      The CPU spends less time waiting for the disk to spin and more time doing something useful.

      1. AndrueC Silver badge

        Re: SSD can increase power use of a laptop

        The CPU spends less time waiting for the disk to spin and more time doing something useful.

        If the CPU is waiting for a peripheral there is something wrong with the hardware or the OS. It's true that at the highest level most applications still use synchronous I/O for disks but that's just laziness or ignorance on the part of the programmer.

        Here's how to do asynchronous reads using the Windows API.

        Underneath the covers Windows will be doing everything asynchronously regardless. If a thread asks for a synchronous read Windows just blocks it and gets on with other threads until the read actually completes. The ability to block a thread while waiting for I/O has been a cornerstone of multi-tasking on PCs since the 1990s.

        Now it might be that a given application has nothing better to do (eg;a text editor can't do anything until the disk has served up the text) but while that application is blocked the CPU will be doing work for other applications, services or whatever housekeeping tasks it's got queued up for just such moments. In fact it's possible for I/O to be too fast. If the OS never gets time to do the housekeeping because of short turnaround I/O the overall performance could suffer.

        1. Jaybus

          Re: SSD can increase power use of a laptop

          If ti uses more power because the CPU is idle less, then it is of course doing more work with the same amount of power. So that is a lame argument, comparing apples to oranges. If we are not going to compare power for the same work load, then switching off the power supply will reduce power consumption to zero.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @AndrueC

          What you say is only true if the CPU has something useful to do. If (as an example) I'm doing a text search on one million small files, it will be very slow on a hard drive because of all that seeking where the CPU sits around with nothing useful to do other than go into an idle state for a moment while it waits for the drive to seek to the right place and waits for the sector it needs to be under the read head. You might read a hundred files a second (or worse, if your disk is fragmented) That search will take probably three hours best case, so I may as well watch a long movie while I'm waiting. On a good SSD you can read tens of thousands of small files a second, and that search will be so quick I'll barely have time to switch to my browser window and read one Reg article.

          With the hard drive, my CPU utilization will be well under 1%, because it has nothing do because it is spending all its time waiting on I/O. With the SSD, I'll have very high CPU utilization (ideally 100%, meaning the SSD would be delivering data faster than the CPU can search it)

          That's why upgrading to a SSD is such a massive performance improvement. If you gave me a choice of a laptop with a hard drive and a 4 GHz quad core CPU, or one with a SSD and a 1 GHz dual core CPU, I'll take the latter and run circles around the poor slob who is saddled with the other one in just about any task.

          1. AndrueC Silver badge
            Boffin

            Re: @AndrueC

            What you say is only true if the CPU has something useful to do.

            No, it's always true. You just have to read my reply more carefully. I said that a given application might be waiting for the HDD (the text editor blocked because the file hadn't loaded) which is what you're talking about. But the main thrust of my reply was that the CPU is never waiting for the HDD. And it never is - not in a modern computer with a modern OS. The CPU sends the I/O request then it 'forgets' about it and looks for something else to do.

            Quite often as you say there is nothing else to do but the CPU is not waiting for the HDD. It's not waiting for anything really. It's an important distinction. If you are waiting for the postman it implies that you are looking out of the window. It implies anticipation on your part. That doesn't apply in any sense for the CPU. It isn't checking up on the HDD. It isn't pacing the metaphorical floor wondering where the data is. It's kicking back on the patio with a cool beer and when the doorbell goes it has to put the beer down and go and find out who it is.

            That's a big deal in computing. The ability for the CPU to go idle and do nothing has a significant impact on power consumption. It can also mean that the machine as a whole can do much more if you can keep enough CPU intensive tasks queued up.

  9. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Too many words

    > "Why should I use SSDs?"

    Ans: because they're faster. Next question please.

    Seriously, the reason people buy SSDs is the need for speed. Since they passed the threshold price (which is different for everyone: and we're talking home users here) it became apparent that unless you have a burning desire to record and keep for posterior every single episode of East Enders or you have a porn collection of willy-withering proportions, then the need for terabytes of storage or home NAS's is largely driven by marketing (and the fact that the disk manufacturers have to keep the unit price high, hence increased capacities).

    And even if you do need the odd 50 Gig for some purpose, it's a trivial matter to whip out a 64GB thumb drive and put your big stuff on that. Who knows, some strange people might even use them for backups. That way you can lose your entire life's work by accidentally dropping a USB drive down the lav'.

    Even Windows 8.1 leaves oodles of free space, even on a 40GB SSD and with most people leaving their email in the cloud those loving missives from Aunty Flo, replete with humungous videos of her pu cat can be viewed with no hit on the home front. And if you do need more storeage: USB drives are frighteningly large, these days.

    1. Nigel 11

      Re: Too many words

      because they're faster. Next question please.

      Also more shockproof

      Also quieter (silent)

      Also less heavy

      Also longer battery life, or even less weight by using a smaller battery.

      edit:

      Also, with dense-packed equipment in a server farm, less electricity eaten and less expensive air-con needed.

      Don't know, but also suspect SSDs happier at high ambient temperatures than HDs (industrial/ embedded PCs)

      1. razorfishsl

        Re: Too many words

        ER no…

        Nand- flash start to act 'strangely' with temp variation or increase, as do all semiconductors.

        And you should consider more about what goes wrong, rather than what goes right.

        go read some of the forensic papers about what a nightmare these drives are to recover data from, then imagine something goes wrong with your setup.

    2. JEDIDIAH
      Mushroom

      Re: Too many words

      > it became apparent that unless you have a burning desire to record and keep for posterior every single episode of East Enders

      Even a machine that's used for light gaming and the occasional bit of web surfing is still going to need a significant amount of drive space. Significant meaning an amount that is EXPENSIVE if you are only considering SSDs. It really doesn't take much in terms of personal media files or just GAMES to fill up a smaller drive.

      Going strictly SSD only makes sense if you're made of money or the device is only intended to be a terminal connecting to some other machine with a decent amount of storage.

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