OCZ Toshiba Breaks 40 Cent Per GB Barrier With New Trion 100 Series SSD 144
MojoKid writes: OCZ is launching a brand new series of solid state drives today, dubbed the Trion 100. Not only are they the first drives from the company to use TLC NAND, but they're also the first to use all in-house Toshiba technology with the drive's Flash memory and controller both designed and built by Toshiba. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba TLC NAND Flash memory and a Nanya DDR3 DRAM cache. Details are scarce on the Toshiba TC58 controller but it does support Toshiba's QSBC (Quadruple Swing-By Correction — a Toshiba proprietary error correction technology) and the drives have a bit of SLC cache to boost write performance in bursts and increase endurance. The OCZ Trion 100 series is targeted at budget conscious consumers and users still contemplating the upgrade from a standard hard drive. As such, they're not barn-burners in the benchmarking department, but performance is still good overall and a huge upgrade over any HDD. Pricing is going to be very competitive as well, at under .40 per GiB for capacities of 240GB, 480GB and 960GB and .50 per GiB for the smallest 120GB drive.
Wear leveling (Score:1)
I trust the name Toshiba. But I can't help but think any company aiming at the budged SSD market will skimp on wear leveling in favor of other attributes. Yes I saw the 7% overprovisioning note, but that was the whole of the attention given to a rather complex topic.
I wouldn't mind the somewhat slower access noted but in recommending an SSD for general system use I would be wary if a drive couldn't handle large volumes of throughput over its lifetime. Modern applications, not even Windows 8, are careful wit
Re:Wear leveling (Score:5, Informative)
..."this over there is my browser cache. In a pinch, you may throw out all of this...
The OS has no need to know about wear-leveling. It's fine as a black box. Write data, store it, read it back. That's it. Do it fast and do it reliably. Wear-leveling is NOT about occasionally throwing out valid data. It's about shuffling physical writes around to different sectors, even if the same few files are being written to all the time. The idea is that they all wear out evenly, which extends the life of the entire SSD.
Make the OS/user determine which files are "important" or not? Good lord... you're going to add a huge amount of additional complexity onto an already complex system. It's not worth it. Unless you're in some pathological case (in which case just use a spinning rust disk), it's going to be many, many years before your drive wears out. When it wears out in a decade or two, SMART monitoring will warn you, and you can go buy a new drive that's five times bigger at half the cost.
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I don't know about other OSs, but with Windows, the OS actually already knows some of this information. The appdata\roaming folder is important stuff that should go with you. The appdata\local can be lost, and just stays with the machine. appdata\locallow is even less important. The folders above appdata are user's files and are extremely important. Also, there are hints in the Windows CreateFile API where you can specify access patterns, including one which means "delete upon close."
Unfortunately, mos
Nah. They had the price broken FOR them already. (Score:5, Informative)
Currently drives that outperform it, like the Samsung 850 Evo, match it on a cents-per-gig level.
This sort of forces one to ask the question, who does Toshiba think it's selling to?
Also, while people are touting Toshiba's "no hassle" warranty, my experience with Toshiba urges me to wait and see how much of a hassle it really is.
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Yep. I did a cursory search on Amazon and found Samsung 850 EVO 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD for $97.99, which is 39 cents per GB. This is just another MojoKid advert for his shit site.
Re:Nah. They had the price broken FOR them already (Score:5, Informative)
Correcting some falsehoods (Score:5, Informative)
This drive is not the first to break the 40 cents/GB mark. OCZ's own ARC series is cheaper than these drives while performing better; Crucial's BX series is roughly the same price while performing much better. Around the 500GB mark, Samsung's 850 EVO is the cheapest and best performer.
The controller has Toshiba's name stamped on it, but is almost certainly a Phison S10. Furthermore the firmware has obvious problems with sustained writes.
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This drive is not the first to break the 40 cents/GB mark.
Aren't you comparing street prices to list?
I wish I could give a damn (Score:2)
When I read news like this I get excited and think I could buy X to improve my life, only to find out soon thereafter that X is not available where I currently live (Portugal) and when X comes to my place about a year later (if at all), I realize that it costs around twice as much as in the US and additionally requires VAT and delivery fees. :(
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portugal is in the eurozone. just buy your stuff from german mail order services if the locals don't have them.
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I do that all the time but with delivery fees it's still much more expensive as in the US (even when discounting VAT).
How is this a barrier? (Score:1)
Seriously price per gb isn't a barrier. They could sell the 120GBs for a dollar, it would just be money losing and stupid. But, it would smash the "barrier". When there ain't nothin' in your way, that ain't a barrier.
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They could sell the 120GBs for a dollar, it would just be money losing and stupid. But, it would smash the "barrier".
The "barrier" isn't really about sale price. It's about production cost per GB, which I'd imagine ends up being the most significant factor in consumer pricing of SSDs. No one would consider the "barrier" smashed if drives were sold at a loss, because obviously that wouldn't be sustainable.
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Seriously price per gb isn't a barrier. They could sell the 120GBs for a dollar, it would just be money losing and stupid. But, it would smash the "barrier". When there ain't nothin' in your way, that ain't a barrier.
Facepalm. Making the product feasible for the maker is what affects the barrier.
I have an SSD in all of my home machines but 1 (Score:2)
for the OS. For storage they still need time. I just bought another 4 TB Hitachi Deskstar for my tower because I need the room. I can't wait until the capacity and prices of SSDs match mechanical. I just wish they had something better than a half-truth telling SMART built in.
11 times more expensive than rust (Score:2)
SSD cannot displace the nearline functionality of hard disk until it gets within a factor of two in price. BTW, nearline is still expanding exponentially with no end in sight.
Using myself as a predictive example... My workstations all have spinning disks in them, and each has at least one SSD for booting and serious work. The hds are normally spun down, which does wonders for noise and lifetime. The ssds are normally 90% full.
So what? (Score:2)
Why don't ssd have a backup read only controller? (Score:3)
Since SSD's have been known to have catastrophic failures why not market drives that for all intents and purposes can't fail or can easily be repaired by changing fuses or other simple components? If it's the controller that is failing why not have a second low performance backup controller that only works in read only mode? It just doesn't make sense to me that they can't make these things 100% read only reliable or that bad parts other than the flash can't be relapsed.
Re:Still don't trust SSDs (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet many other people have no problems running SSDs some people still using their originals.
Whenever I see someone say "had to replace them all" I can only think of device incompatibilities engineering screwups, or part selection screw-ups.
In short, there is no reliability issue, and the write limitation is a non issue for 99.999% of the computers out there. It just doesn't seem to be working for *you*
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This is my point - in an industrial environment, I can't afford a 3 month later failure. They may have improved things, but a spinning disk is a safer proposition.
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RAID arrays are a little tight in panel PCs. Speed was never a huge issue, it was a case of reliability in environments where we feared spinning disks would not do well.
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I have used Compact Flash to IDE adapters to replace old hard drives however apparently I have also been lucking in my choice of Compact Flash cards; like almost all Flash storage except for some SSDs, most are terribly unreliable.
Transcend among others makes IDE Flash drives intended for industrial applications:
http://www.transcend-info.com/... [transcend-info.com]
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That sounds like a vendor issue using cheap SSD components, not a fault of SSDs in general.
Samsung 840 EVOs are certainly a nightmare, everyone one I deployed has needed be replaced. Samsung 830 Pro and 840 Pros I have deployed are still running. Enterprise SSDs are the real place you should be looking for reliable performance over time.
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>Samsung 840 EVOs are certainly a nightmare
Since when. I've installed somewhere around 100 and have only had 2 DOA's and 0, as in zero in field failures over two years. I have even more Pros in the field without failure.
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Go google evo 840 write amplification bug? Within 90 days they slow down to a halt without a firmware update
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Yeah, that'll be the problem.
"industrial grade" is typically code for "industrial temp" and they just pick whatever crap meets that requirement. And knowing that you probably want that, the controllers are probably full of bugs.
I'd actually trust the good consumer version of the SSDs than the buggy industrial ones where the technology dates to before Intel SSDs made them good.
We've improved things a lot
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Define waste of money. Industrial panel PCs normally have a small fixed size storage requirements. Last time I checked any computer store the cheapest storage option was a SSD. The smallest HDD at 500GB cost more than the smallest SSD at 32GB. The same applies when scaled up to enterprise grade gear.
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TRIM is pointless as you need a consistent output/throughput in the worst case scenario Also, in most cases, your workload will be optimized against the hardware so you won't be doing any such small writes/updates where TRIM becomes useful (stripe size on an FS that requires frequent updates is already 4k or larger).
Most people simply do not know whether or not IOPS are important but they generally are. Given that spinning drives peak out at ~100IOPS, SSD's are generally a better investment (also in power a
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a spinning disk is a safer proposition
Tell that to my Seagate drives...
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I've also had HDD's failing in first 3 months of use, many more than SSD's. SLC SSD or RAM SSD's are necessary though to maintain throughput on modern systems. No way spinning rust is keeping up with a pair of SSD's, heck even USB Flash drives perform better as a boot drive than HDD's. HDD's only make sense if you need really large amounts of storage for cheap and even then you're still inserting SSD's and RAM as caches and accelerators.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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SSDs most often fail hard with no chance of data recovery.
I still recommend them to customers. With one caveat - I will not install one for you if you do not have a good (automated and preferably off-site) backup system.
Drive failure of any kind sucks ass (yes that is the technical term). If you are not heavily pushing backup sol
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It's hardly a works for me. It's a works for most line. I'll take the hard *data* that the vast majority of people who have SSDs don't have catastrophic failures over an anecdote that one guy had to replace something that sounded like a batch of poor parts any day. The mods aren't modding up an anecdote, they are modding up their own experiences.
Interesting you mention drive controllers. There are several vendors who have not had any issue with drive controllers. Have you been buying nothing but Samsung and
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Actually I was using the term the parent used when replying to the parent. in FACT!
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And I have 6 SSDs currently, none of which have failed. On the other hand, I also have 13 rust buckets (working), and I'm approaching a graveyard of about 11, all of which are less than 3 years old. Some of which just instantly died.. No SMART, no warning, just dead. Some died during a power cycle and didn't come back. Average time to death for the rust buckets is about 1 year. Some drives have been replaced twice already (The replacement was replaced). The SSDs are about 4 years old on average. I'
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Interesting? For a "works for me!" anecdote? Really mods, DaFuq? What is your experience with SSDs, 1? 2 maybe?
Well I have to have dealt with hundreds in the last couple years at the shop and its pretty damned obvious they still haven't fixed the driver controllers as they are still a complete and total CRAPSHOOT.
We have about 1100 of several brands and types deployed in our organization, and have seen a lower than hard disk failure rate, even on the cheap OEM Lite-On drives. How's that for an anecdote? (I do agree about the controller problems - we had to push out a firmware update for those Lite-Ons to fix a Deep Sleep issue.)
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I haven't had a single drive fail that didn't give SOME kind of warning before dying
Apparently you're just not old enough.
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SSD reliability issues include in rough order of importance:
1. Corruption on Power Loss
2. Trim Corruption
3. Unpowered Retention
4. Write Endurance
The problems with trim are annoying but no SSD should need to use trim for good performance. Those that do were designed poorly:
http://www.realworldtech.com/f... [realworldtech.com]
Corruption on power loss in this case is
Re:Still don't trust SSDs (Score:5, Funny)
Take your concerns up with the laws of physics. I'm sure they'll care about your opinion.
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He's right, though. Throughout the era of SSDs there has been concerns about Flash cell longevity. The medium of HDD does not degrade meaningfully.
And yet, hard drives can and do crash. They fail. I've replaced dozens over the years. What good is "no write limitation" on a hard drive when the head augers into the disk? When the platter bearings go south? When the media starts flaking off?
To me, the write limitation is moot. It's just a different failure mode. I haven't had enough experience with SSD's to make a definitive judgement, but I do like a lot about them so far.
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And yet, hard drives can and do crash. They fail.
Three rules of thumb:
A) Avoid heat
B) Avoid vibration
C) Avoid Seagate!
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C) Avoid Seagate!
Amen!
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I remember old Connors sucking balls... and getting an *entire batch* of Fujitsus that were bad (eighteen years ago)... IBM "Deathstars" were virtually guaranteed to go belly-up soon after purchase (fifteen years ago)... but I'm not aware of Western Digitals from a decade ago being likely to have problems disproportionate to their numbers... in fact, I've low-level-wiped and run diag on *so very many* WD's from that time period (easily in the thousands) that I feel sure I would have spotted a trend...
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Yeah, and the first ones to avoid were the CMIs in the early 80s. They actually dumped an artificial reef of them in the ocean, they were so bad. Absolutely true you can't just apply statistics forever. But for the present, Seagates are absolute unmitigated disaster garbage, and WD isn't all that much better. HGST (Hitachi) is the only worthwhile one left in company-wide terms (knock on wood for the future); the GOOD Toshibas; the ones whose design came from HGST; are fine too. But there is no non-anecdotal
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Perhaps it would've been safe to assume that my comment was intended to be at least partially useful; i.e. I wasn't referring to drives that are so fucking old that they're of legal drinking age?? ;)
Re:Still don't trust SSDs (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. I'll happily take 10x the number of IOPS and limited writes (that are in most cases many years of regular service) over "infinite" writes and moving parts. I wouldn't want to keep spinning rust in service more than 3-5 years tops, and if all the SSDs I've used will survive this long, why should I use the slower solution?
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I put a SSD in front of my spinning rust RAID as a cache and use writethrough or writearound. Even if the SSD fails I won't lose data.
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Yep, nothing at all wrong with doing that. Massive increase in IPOS by using SSD and dump data to the platters for long term and redundant storage.
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I know it's not infinite. Defects, bit rot, failure of moving parts - there's a lot to go wrong in a hard drive, that's why I had "infinite" in inverted commas...
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And no, those machines are no all purpose computers, they are phone switches whi
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I have some old systems around (some of them running since more than 20 years) with old 2- and 4-GB-SCSI disks. While they read fine, you should not try to write onto them.
There's no reason not to try to write those, because SCSI disks have intelligent controllers. You shouldn't try to write your antique ST-506 interface drives, but how many of us are even in a position to hook any of those up? I guess I still have a PC with ISA slots, it's a Geode LX dev board...
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If you can figure out how to charge the gate capacitor without damaging the insulating layer, you'll be rich.
Until then, don't complain
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Right but these in particular, OCZ is kinda renowned for being unreliable across their entire product range.
Was. OCZ *was* renowned. OCZ was once it's own company. OCZ exists now in name only and any comparisons to the times of old make no sense anymore.
That said (touch wood) I still have a working OCZ Vertex 3. Now there was a drive with a horrendous failure rate.
Re:Still don't trust SSDs (Score:5, Informative)
First and second gen SSDs were garbage, people are reporting 2 petabyte write lifecycles on them. Samsung just announced 10 year warranties on their consumer models. Intel has been offering 10 year warranties on their enterprise models for a few years now.
That said, if you bought anything other than Samsung prior to about 2013, the "old" OCZ in particular (the "new" OCZ is using the corpse of their brand name for Toshiba manufactured drives now) had failure rates in the 15-20% real world return rate numbers reported by retailers. Failure/return rates for all brands are below 5% for all manufacturers now. There was a dark period from 2011-2013 where a ton of terrible drivers and bad hardware shipped, but they're generally very reliable now. Everyone I know has moved to SSD for their primary drive, and are only using rotational drives for medium length local archival purposes.
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Re:Still don't trust SSDs (Score:5, Informative)
Their website says 10 Years or 150TBW for the 256GB model and 10 Years or 300TBW for the 1TB model. TBW is "terabytes written". Which isn't the "2 petabytes to failure" marathon test that took 6 months to complete, but 0.3 petabytes written on a 1TB drive is still a lot and way beyond normal consumer usage. My unofficial opinion is that only about 128gb is "hot" and the rest of the storage on a 1TB drive is typically "cold". Even a professional video editor is going to have trouble topping out their warranty.
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/warranty.html [samsung.com]
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First and second gen SSDs were garbage, people are reporting 2 petabyte write lifecycles on them.
I've got a first gen and a couple of second gen SSD's still slugging away. I swapped my first gen 60GB drive into my laptop a year or so ago after I put a ATADA SX900 in, I have to agree that there were some serious problems with 1st gen drives, probably the biggest problem I ran into was windows not playing nice and occasionally 'locking' the drive because of a bad write cycle. Sometimes it was recoverable, sometimes it wasn't, sometimes it was really bad and you had to get an unlock tool from the manuf
Re:Still don't trust SSDs (Score:4, Interesting)
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Thanks for the non attacking and informative answer.
I had controller failures on the "industrial" models we used. They just seem like a bad proposition right now. 0 failures on the spinning disk, but I will give it a few years.
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You haven't used any recent Seagates then :D. When I look to my right I see two spinners being recovered with ddrescue :(.
And it's been like that for the last 2 years. These large spinning consumer drives are just crap.
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The 3TB seagates are terrible. For a panel pc, though we have had a lot of success with 2.5" 500Gb spinning disks (seagate mainly, but some western digital).
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I have exactly one of those disks left in a BSD box running ZFS. It is only a matter of time I suppose.... At least SMART gave me warning the others failed.
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I have/had a 11-drive NAS using those drives. I have 2 drives left. 2 were replaced twice. So I started with 11, have 11 dead, with 2 still working. That's some bad stuff.
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I also wonder if the newer ones are any more reliable.
Thanks
Not me (Score:1)
Ten machines here. Just one uses an SSD at all, and that only as a temp. drive for editing large audio files.
I simply don't need one for other purposes.
Machines here stay on. Not loading VMs or 60GB games. Apps used stay loaded.
And even on the machine with the SSD, I've only noticed a 3x speed improvement (3 month old Intel 530 series). Worth it to me, because
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What kind of software do you use? I ask because I recently got two machines with SSD primary drives and the performance increase is staggering. One is a laptop for work, mainly uses a text editor and the terminal for compilation. The other is a games machine. In both cases noticeable delays from loading have vanished.
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Well... I actually meant compilation / executing code, but as it turns out: I've been playing with the xml dump of the dblp database recently. It's 1.5GB and loading it in vim (from SSD) still takes about a minute. Annoying enough that I've been using less to find records in it.
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Been using a Samsung EVO 840 as the system drive in my desktop for about 18 months now. Fast as hell, and no hint of trouble so far.
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FYI: There's a read performance bug on the EVO series drives. [extremetech.com] So if you haven't updated the firmware you should probably do it.
Maybe they were very early SSDs? (Score:2)
I have only had one SSD fail on me, it was an early one. I have switched everything I have at work and at home to SSD (currently mostly Samsung 840/850, Crucial M500/MX100) and have never looked back, modern drives don't seem to have high failure rates and the speed difference is so great I would still use them even if they were unreliable and I had to back them up all the time.
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They were fairly small. They came with the panel pcs, and we had assumed they would be better due to vibrations that might occur in these environments. All failures were either the drive became unreliable (writes failed) or the controller failed, and the drive was not accessible.
These are not situations where such a low lifespan is acceptable. Maybe we got a bad batch, but there shouldn't be batches like this.
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You say that as if that never happens with spinning disks. A couple of years back we got a batch and were constantly swapping them out for months only to discover the replacements were also failing after a month or two of use.
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Not never, but we have had no comebacks so far - including systems that predate the SSD debacle. These are 2.5" disks if that makes any difference.
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They were solved years ago.
Just stick to Intel, Samsung, or Micron/Crucial, and avoid TLC.
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Either last year or the year before that.
I'm using some as scratch disks - huge number of reads and writes. I'm ready to replace them when they die but they keep on going.
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They have, don't buy cheap junk and look into over provisioning..
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Let me guess you figured if you plugged them in a 220 volt slot you can double the speed.
Normally for laptops I have found SSD to be much more relabel, as they get moved and bumped around. Actually I haven't experienced any issues with SSD at work as well?
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We sent out some panel pcs with SSDs in them, and so far we have had to replace them all with spinning disks... When is the reliability and write limitation issue going to be solved?
Just as soon as the idiots start looking at reliability reports instead of benchmark speeds
(ie. never).
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When is the reliability and write limitation issue going to be solved?
Perhaps you chose the wrong SSD's?
I was skeptical of SSD's - then I tried a computer with one.
Yeah I know, sample size of one.
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Perhaps, but it is not necessarily the case that I can gamble with tech that has let me down.
Platter hard drives are a very common failure item. I've replaced a lot of augers and singers in my day.
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2-3 years ago there were "growing pains" in the industry as everyone was new to it. I lost several drives in that time.
All of my drives of the last 2 years still work perfectly.
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Most things last longer if they aren't ever powered on. Stuff wears out.
Assuming an SSD has any sort of normal workload and isn't being thrashed by an enterprise database or chain-running disk benchmarks, they will be very obsolete by the time wearing out from writes might be an issue. The SSDs I've seen can even report how worn out they are so they can be replaced and retired.
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