SSD Strategy

[easysurfer]

Peeking at the Amazon Day deals, I see that a 1 TB SSD is under $100.

I'm still on the sidelines and to this day don't own a SSD. I do have hybrid (SSHD) drives.

The main reason is I don't want have to fuss around and decide what goes on the SSD and what goes on a regular HDD, so I've let the SSHD hardware do all the thinking. Of course, that was probably more relevant when SSD were expensive with a capitol E.

So, in today's world, do you just get a SSD, like 1 TB in size, and just treat like like an old HDD and don't worry? Or do you still do the this goes on SSD, that goes on HDD approach?

[ShokWaveRider]

I have a 1tb SSD and a 2tb SSD. I would go for the 2tb if it were me.

[Qs Laptop]

Quote:

Originally Posted by easysurfer So, in today's world, do you just get a SSD, like 1 TB in size, and just treat like like an old HDD and don't worry?

^^ This ^^

Just use the SSD as if it were your one and only hard drive.

I've had a 120 GB SSD in my Windows 7 machine for 10 years now. I have a 1 TB hard drive for data storage. I used the SSD mostly for the OS and installation of programs but there is probably a dozen programs that regularly read/write to the SSD drive. I think the days of worrying about the reliability and longevity of an SSD drive are over.

Anybody with a decent laptop that is less than 5 years old probably has an SSD in it. I haven't heard any outcry over failing SSD's.

[Animorph]

A 1TB SSD makes a great main drive. I used a 2TB NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD for my desktop refresh. I retained my old hard disk drives for data storage, but when they start acting up I'll replace them with SSD's.

I do use disc drives for my NAS server, four 8TB drives. SSD's are still expensive at that size.

Pay attention to how many times your SSD can be written. Reading is no problem, but writing wears them out. Some technologies are longer lasting than others, and of course they will be more expensive. They'll all have some means of wear-leveling to avoid wearing out just a small section of the SSD. This also means that for a specific amount of writing activity, a larger capacity SSD will last longer than a smaller one.

[easysurfer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Animorph A 1TB SSD makes a great main drive. I used a 2TB NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD for my desktop refresh. I retained my old hard disk drives for data storage, but when they start acting up I'll replace them with SSD's. I do use disc drives for my NAS server, four 8TB drives. SSD's are still expensive at that size. Pay attention to how many times your SSD can be written. Reading is no problem, but writing wears them out. Some technologies are longer lasting than others, and of course they will be more expensive. They'll all have some means of wear-leveling to avoid wearing out just a small section of the SSD. This also means that for a specific amount of writing activity, a larger capacity SSD will last longer than a smaller one.

The how many times the SSD can be written is one reason I'm still on the fence (along with always waiting for price drops ). For example, needing to do a restore from an image, the restoring software may say the data on the drive getting restore to will be lost. Isn't that excessive writing? If the SSD needs more special care during restores, that's a reason for me to pause.

[Sunset]

Quote:

Originally Posted by easysurfer .... just get a SSD, like 1 TB in size, and just treat like like an old HDD and don't worry...

^^^

Currently running on the Crucial MX500 1TB drive.

I do have a regular 1TB drive for long term photo storage from when I had a 250 Gig SSD.

Prime deal right now for $91 + tax is a great price for the Crucial MX500 1TB

[retire-early]

I have 500 GB SSDs in both my desktop PCs.

I use two 750 GB traditional external hard drives to store image backups of the hard drives.

[jim584672]

The largest SSD I have is 256GB. When I backup it is easier if the OS is on a smaller drive and the data is on conventional drives.

[mountainsoft]

I have three SSD drives in my computer, and traditional external hard drives for backups.

My oldest SSD is a 250GB Samsung EVO 840. The only thing on this drive is my operating system and various applications. It is over six years old now and according to CrystalDiskInfo the wear level count is only down to 94 (counting down from 100).

My main data drive is a 1TB Samsung EVO 850. That's where I store all of my personal data, financial documents, music, video, etc. It's over five years old now and the wear level count is only down to 95. This is the drive I write the most data to.

My newest SSD is a 2TB Samsung EVO 860. I use it mainly for recording and editing video files. It is just under two years old with a wear level count of 99.

So at this rate I still have many years left on the SSD drives. I have not had any issues with any of them. They're fast, silent, and use little power. What's not to love?

For what it's worth, my traditional external 3TB Western Digital hard drives I use for backups are just over four years old now too. No problems with them either, except they are slow.

Personally, the only reason I would ever buy a traditional hard drive now is for the price. That's why I still use old school hard drives for my backups, 3TB SSD drives are still too expensive when I need to buy two of them to swap for backups.

[OldShooter]

I don't think there is a strong economic case for using mechanical drives in a personal computer, but they are IMO a more cost-effective choice for backup. I have about 18tb gross space in my two RAID mirrored NAS boxes.

In my computers I have, for years, partitioned one disk into C: SYSTEM and D: DATA. That makes partial backups easier because I just back up D: and C:\users\<me> That would work for someone with a mechanical C: and and SSD D: but it is kind of a PITA because M$ keeps defaulting to C:\users\<me>\documents and C:\ProgramData to store stuff. That might be an option, though, for a computer with a mechanical C:\ and an SSD which could be D:\

At times I have also added a mechanical hard drive inside a computer and used it strictly for backup of C:\ and D:\. That's kind of weak protection though, still vulnerable to acts of God like fire and flood and to acts of man like theft of the whole box.

[Sunset]

I do feel I made a tiny error when I moved from a 250 Gig SSD to a 1 Tb SSD.

As I'll never fill the the 1Tb SSD for years, a 500 Gig SSD would have been fine.

For about $20 more, I could have bought two 500 Gig SSD's instead of the 1Tb SSD.
This would have been the better choice as I could then clone the 500 SSD once every couple of months, in addition to doing my normal data backup.
This means no programs to reinstall or configure should the drive fail.

Cloning of a 500 Gig SSD would be about twice as fast as cloning the 1Tb SSD.

[Animorph]

Looking at the data on Amazon for my latest SSD purchase, the 1TB drive has a "TBW" (Terabytes written expected life) of 500. This is with the longer lasting TLC tech. So the SSD lifetime is expected to be about 500 complete writes of the drive.

Say you write 1GB every day. the drive will last 500TB/1GB = 500000 days = 1370 years. Keep in mind that reading the SSD does not affect it's lifetime.

On the other hand, if you are writing once a week to a 1TB SSD as a back up for an 80% full 1TB SSD, the drive being constantly written to will see 500TB written in about 500TB/0.8TB = 625 weeks = 12 years. Still probably longer than most of my hard drives have lasted, but something to think about.

There are worse lifetimes available and better. For normal laptop/desktop use I'd probably go by price. However my last SSD purchase was 256GB to be used for recording multiple streams of continuous video (while driving), which should stress the SSD lifetime more than usual. For that case I paid a little more for a longer lifetime.

[SecondCor521]

I used to work in SSD R&D for a memory company.

When I started there in about 2010, SSDs were better than traditional HDDs in every way except price. And they were dropping in price pretty fast.

Since then, the reliability has just gotten better. Y'all have no idea how many different tricks and clever ideas are inside those little things that make them rock solid. If you look at the UBER statistic, which is essentially how often the drive will give you the wrong bit (0 instead of 1 or 1 instead of 0), it's ridiculously small/rare.

One idea that they describe publicly is that on some drives they treat each flash chip in the drive as a mini drive and they stripe data across the chips, so you essentially have a RAID drive system inside a single drive, and the drive can and will automagically do a RAID recovery in the background if the other 50 clever tricks and ideas happen to fail.

I wouldn't worry about drive lifetimes either. mountainsoft's and Animorph's experiences and calculations are typical - for an average user the lifetime of the drive is actually in centuries or even eons. Of course if you're doing hourly backups or video editing or running a commercial website on it, or something else that is truly heavy usage, you'll need to care and figure that out.

One of the reasons drives have come down in price quite a bit is the underlying technology of the memory cell and the manufacturing process. There are three different aspects that all come into play.

First is the number of bits stored in each cell. They used to have (and maybe still do) SLC and MLC. SLC was one bit per cell; MLC was two bits per cell. SLC is faster and lasts longer and is more reliable, but is expensive. Eventually they got MLC reliable enough and fast enough (more tricks and cleverness) that MLC became the most common in the marketplace. They're now doing three and four bits per cell (TLC and QLC I think are the acronyms), which again are slower and less reliable, but with enough speed and other reliability tricks can be good enough for a customer and drop the prices dramatically.

The second thing is just the process size - they're making each cell physically smaller, which helps with speed and cost. (Speed improvement is marginal I think.)

The manufacturing technology improvements are mainly in layering cells vertically. Older flash chips were a single flat sheet of cells in basically a big XY grid. Now they're miniature high rises. Think of how many people you can stack into a square mile of a small Kansas farm town versus a square mile of Manhattan.

The technology is so good that when I left they were talking about only a handful (like less than two dozen - don't remember the exact number) of electrons needed to be moved into or out of the cell in order to store a bit (or four). Really amazing stuff.

Personally I use a single 1T MLC drive of a recent vintage from my former employer. TLC and QLC and 3D NAND all make me a bit nervous, but that's more my conservative personality rather than any legitimate quality concern about the technology.

Regardless of how reliable these drives are, having good backup hygiene is always recommended. I don't do as well as I could or should, but I'm still young at heart and therefore lazy and think it won't happen to me. I just copy a few of my most important files to my Google drive account every so often.

Oh, and I'd stick with one of the top several manufacturers. There are a lot of small SSD companies whose testing and quality strategies may not be up to snuff. When I left the big three were Samsung, Intel, and Micron/Crucial, and I think that's still the case. I'd be comfortable with a drive from any of those three manufacturers.

The other thing that's happening is that most consumer SSD drives are fast enough now to pretty much max out the data bus interface known as SATA-3 on read speeds and are almost that fast on write speeds. The next thing in the marketplace will be PCIe drives. I don't remember the specs on that interface offhand but I think you can get drives that go maybe five or ten times as fast or even faster. There are commercial PCIe drives now and they're migrating into the high end personal space now. If you're a real heavy user, need greater speed, or just like playing on the bleeding edge, they may be for you.