I need to upgrade my storage solution and I am not sure what will be the best option so I thought I will post this here for all you experts to advise me on. I mainly use my computer for web development, gaming, cinema 4d etc and love having the best / fastest components so price is not such a big deal. I was thinking on buying an SSD, but at this time there seems to be a lot of negatives like price, longevity, GB / £ and write speed … and apparently I have been reading that they will be moving to a smaller NAND manufacturing size in the next few months which will lower the price… so do you think it may be a good idea to wait a month or two or to buy one now, I was thinking of getting the Intel x25-m 160gb. Also I was wondering if instead of getting an SSD I should buy four mechanical disks (4xSpinpoint f3) and use them in a raid 0 configuration, would there be a great performance gain over just using two and would this be a better option then the SSD at this time? Thanks
Well it depends what you want from a storage solution. 4 disks in RAID 0 is asking for a disk failiure if you ask me. SSDs will be faster probably and more reliable. Neither will keep your data very safe though.
I am more after speed then safety and I don’t want to spend £300+ on a SSD that will die in a year or two
you have been misinformed SSD has alot of hours in it these days more so after trim was added. Most users see 100-200k hrs as not alot. Its about 4-5 years at general usage. if you keep a hard disk for 5 years your asking for trouble 100/200 k hrs /shared 24 gives you the days ( 12 years + on a 24/7 server ) more like a lifetime in general usage. trim sorts all speed issues that used to effect them ( you need windows 7 though )( for most but not all depends on manuafacture)
So your saying 1x SSD is better than 4 x HDD's in Raid 0, cool looks like ill be buying an SSD next week
i've just got an SSD, and i can recommend it definatly for a boot drive, everythin is just so snappy! however, if you want mass storage go for some F3's in raid 1 or 5, or best of both worlds (what i've done) SSD boot disk and raid drives for storage i've got the 40gb intel V
Yep, what warejon9 said is the consensus these days. The preferable solution is to have a nice fast SSD as your main drive with your operating system on it, and a few of your favourite apps/games. And then for all your general storage, use the huge F1 and F3 samsung disks. 1 terrabyte or 2 terrabyte. (Or 1.5).
I've got the ssd you mentioned and its amazing but its not a storage solution. SSDs are really for boot a couple of programs or games imo. If your going the SSD route you need a hdd to go with it. But on the SSD question it is seriously quick. My pc boots in about half a minute and everything loads when you click it, like instant.
Asking for trouble ? Hummmm I have a Maxtor 90845d4 8GB Made in Singapore the 12 December 1999 and you know what ? The thing is alive and perfectly operational. In the Same way my Raptor 74Gb is in my Pc Since 2005, I never had a bit of trouble with it. About the SSD theorical lifes, like I say its only Theorical, in the real world its not as simple. If you want a Fast OS, got a SSD (who care if He die in 2 years) but in term of storage I entrust my life to a HD (especialy to a WD Black). You can revive a HD, Save your date but a SSD ? When its over.....Its OVER.
SSDs are not exactly better than 4xHDD in RAID 0. Raid 0 has a lot of sustained read/write, 4 drives would easily top an SSD, in fact 2 HDDs in RAID 0 can match an SSD in sustained read/write. However RAID 0 doesn't increase seek time and random read/write. SSDs on the otherhand has a lot of random read/write and absolutely no seek time. A SSD is probably times more responsive than any HDD. So applications would launch faster and windows would boot faster but large files like games and movies won't load as fast as 4xHDD RAID 0. On the agenda of longevity. SSDs tend to degrade in write performance as the drives becomes full or written. Since rewriting an old sector would require a delete cycle and a write cycle. Trim command can remove 90% of this effect. SSDs do have a limited lifetime and this is not something trim can help with. Unlike HDDs which has a mean time between failure rating. SSDs technically can survive indefinitely since there is no moving parts. However multi layer cells can only take about 20k write cycles before it becomes unusable. All SSDs would write to each cell in rotation to improve lifetime. 20k write cycles may not seem much but if you have a 128GB SSD, you can esentially write and delete 2.56 million GB of data before the drive fails. If you somehow written 400GB on data on a 128GB SSD every single day, you can still get about 10 years out of it. Don't defragment SSDs, that can eat up a lot of write cycles for no reason since SSDs can't get fragmented. When a HDD is qouted 200k hours between failure, doesn't mean all drives or even an average number of drives would last that long. 200k hours really represents 5% chance of drive failure within 3 years, assuming 10 hours of use a day. When manufacturers qoute 200k hours, it isn't all that much.
Thank you, you guys have answered my concerns excellently as I knew you would, I have decided that I am just going to get both, this month I am getting an Intel x-25m 160 to use as my main drive and next month I am going to get 4 x Spinpoint f3s for storage / performance. Once again thanks and you guys rock
Good post Rofl_Waffle. Summarises things nicely. To add to that: NEVER rely on a single device for data storage! This has been mentioned before but should always be reinforced. SSDs are small so can easily be backed up onto an HDD. Everything fails some time. RAID 0 of good HDDs will outperform an SSD but is less reliable and also should be backed up. RAID 5, RAID 6 or ideally RAID 1 (ascending order) are the best for redundancy. The nested RAID levels (10, 50, 60) are even better performance-wise but are only supported on some hardware RAID controllers.
