Blogs The downside to cheap storage

Do these comonly fail? I bought a 128GB Patriot Torqx back in 2010 and run it at least 8-12 hours a day in my work laptop. It's never missed a beat, and I don't need any more storage, so I don't plan on chaning it any time soon!

 

Well, first of all they had a whole bad series, called "Lot 6" :
http://geekwith.com/profiles/blogs/patriot-solid-state-drives-far

And then many of the "Lot 2" died as well, probably due some design oversight. My Patriot Torqx 128GB died 1,5 years after i bought it, and got replaced by a Corsair Force F120 (which grandfathered the 10 year warranty of Torqx, at least something good ).

There is a reason why Torqx drives pretty much disappeared once the first SandForce controller reached market; Patriot jumped from Torqx to Pyro at the first possible moment and never looked back to their Indilinx design.

If your SSD works for you, then it is good for you, but i would keep backups, like with any SSD. They can die in a moment (not because of the writes exhausting the write count, but usually due other technical reasons) and in that case there is no way to save your data.

PS: I know Newegg reviews are not a good metric, but there is a reason why half of the Patriot Torqx reviews have 1 star :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220390
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220389
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220388

PS2: Keep in mind, i talk about Patriot Torqx, not Torqx M28 or Torqx 2.

 

Mechanical HD's are often the noisiest component in air-cooled rigs too. Certainly you'd have to be running some pretty noisy/shonky fans for it to be otherwise. Even when the HD is not the outright loudest component, the intermittent nature of the sound it generates can make it far more obvious/annoying than even foolish-child fans like Deltas.

Most of the noise from mechanical HD's is just vibrations transmitted and amplified by your case. If you need a spinny HD in your case and don't like the noise, suspend it with knicker elastic.

 

I've got a terabyte full hard drive, have to wait till they get larger and cheaper i'm not downgrading to smaller space.

Years ago I remember looking at 100gb external hard drives and they were not cheap, just like ssd's are not at the moment.

 

Good blog post, but I haven't gone SSD yet, it's all waiting for the next full build. Still had a similar weekend of zapping duplicate and Vista-era backups which meant burning half a pack of blank DVDs and two CDs to make sure everything essential was malware-free following a hack.

That's why I couldn't just rely on another HDD of any type before the PC was cleaned, and I'm just downloading less in general and not having so many games installed unless I'm playing them. Went with USB sticks as they were cheaper and faster than HDDs that were still pricey after the second Filipino floods. I wouldn't go as far as a 64GB USB3 key but I would understand anyone else choosing them over a hard drive at the moment.

 

I've made this suggestion in other forums and people try to cut you throat because they're stuck in "the old ways". Thanks for bringing this up.

 

Moving away from my parents' place and into a studio flat with my fiancee has been an experience - I've dismantled and sold my triple-24" Obsidian 800D i7 rig with 16GB RAM, 120GB Vertex 3 and 2x1TB RAID0 and have been using an 11" MacBook Air with 4GB RAM and 256GB SSD for over a year as my main PC.

And I have to admit, it's been a mosty-good experience. I've migrated my 500GB movie collection to my Lacie 1TB RAID1 NAS, and like Anthony I've had to make sacrifices with the data I keep on my MacBook - managed to chop things down to 34GB of music, 11GB of photos and just under 1GB of documents.

I think everyone should have a spring-clean once in a while, people tend to just think "I've got 2TB of disk space, let's just keep everything" but most of the time you don't actually need a lot of space.

 

I have two 40GB Intel X25-M SSD's for 'OS' and everyday programs and four 150GB Velociraptors for the rest including Steam, Impulse (Gamestop/Origin) and anything else. All my pics, videos, DVDs and such will go on my WHS running 4TB of storage when its completed. Ill never go full platterless no matter what. A nearly 99% damaged platted can still get info taken off it it, but a fried SSD has no chance at all if the chips are fubar'd.

 

I was very skeptical about SSD before tried some. And after I tried I'm even MORE skeptical

I bought few because I working with very big directories, thinking they will be much faster. Throw at those SSD few directories with 100, 200 or more thousands of files and they choke the same as plate driven HDDs..Recovery time from "choke" is marginally better, but that's about it.

Yes there is burst of performance, but failure ratio is far too high to consider (reluctantly) them for something more than boot drive. I prefer classic plate HDDs plugged into RAID card in R 10 or 60 setup. Linking SSD into anything else than RAID0 is murder because NAND will wear down almost instantly. Running RAID0 for serious jobs (excluding e.g. temp drives for video editing) is suicidal endeavor.

Long live HDDs, SSDs will be roting in dustbin of history sooner than later. Biggest irony of SSD idea is that they are perfect for storing rarely accessed and not very mobile data (e.g. movies). But you can't store 10000 episodes of your favourite series on it, because it will cost more than building Large Hadron Collider. Pathetic ratio of failures/cost/size will kill SSD as it is road to nowhere from the start - similar to electric cars powered by battery packs.

 

I haven't heard of SSDs failing from corruption in a long time. What controller do you use? Is the firmware updated? What filesystem do you use?

 

I've been using SSDs for four years and haven't had one fail. I accept that my experience alone cannot be taken as a representative sample, but neither can yours.

In the context of Antony's article, if data safety is your thing, why not use an SSD for boot/OS and have everything else on a RAID1 NAS?

Why would you use RAID0 for serious jobs anyway? A single SSD wil outstrip a mechanical striped array. RAID10 requires four drives as a minimum, and would still be slower and no safer than a couple of SSDs in RAID1, closing the value gap somewhat, although I don't think people are suggesting SSDs should replace HDDs for all storage needs.

You were doing ok until that last paragraph - complete nonsense.

 

but hard disks are amazingly cheap for backups. SSDs are too expensive for everyone to have if we wanted to backup say the 400gb of space that we take up with our stuff.
Gaming aside (which can re - installed, music, videos, photos, documents and other things sometimes to be backed up (specially if you have a large music collection [converted from other audiable sources if your 25+ years of age]) and SSDs dont cut it or feel too expensive to buy an SSD to simply lie dormant.

I have a larger than normal tower. I love big towers, makes for messing around or upgrading inside so much easier.
The harddrive isnt going out anytime soon, but admittily it is in decline