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Top Solid State Disks and TB Drives Reviewed
Lucas123 writes "Computerworld has reviewed six of the latest hard disk drives, including 32GB and 64GB solid state disks, a low-energy consumption 'green' drive and several terabyte-size drives. With the exception of capacity, the solid state disk drives appear to beat spinning disk in every category, from CPU utilization, energy consumption and read/writes. The Samsung SSD drive was the most impressive, with a read speed of 100MB/sec and write speed of 80 MB/sec, compared to an average 59MB/sec and 60MB/sec read/write speed for a traditional hard drive."
Or does the linked article say nothing about TB sized drives, only the flash drive?
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
Will this ever die? The write cycle counts in modern flash is in the millions now. Doing the math you very easily get 20+ years before write cycle wear is a concern: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html
How many heavily used spinning drives do you know that last even 10+ years?
If you want, buy an HDD and a Flash-Drive of the same cost, hook them up to a program that runs each at equal data-transfer rates, and see how much data you can read and write to each before they fail. Report back to us in the six months it'll take you.
Oh, and you need to do the trial over a wide sample, so get, oh, at least ten of each.
Actually the endurance on NAND has been going lower over the years as they switched to smaller cell geometry, larger capacity and MLC technology. Some are as low as 5000 cycle endurance. These MLC(multi-level cell) NAND tend also to be much slower than SLC(single-level cell) NAND. Most SLC NAND have around 50K or 100K endurance.
No, but the wear-leveling routines in the drive will happily move around your existing data so that rarely written sectors are available for heavy writing operations.
Seriously, this "issue" comes up in every discussion about SSDs, and it seems like people are just unwilling or unable to accept that what was once a huge problem with the technology is now not even remotely an issue. Any SSD you buy today should outlive a spinning disk, regardless of the operating conditions or use pattern. It is no longer 1989, engineers have solved these problems.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Do traditional drives fail if the same sector is written to over and over again as well?
No, but they'll fail either reading or writing over time regardless if you are writing or just reading just because the drive is moving. Even if you cool your standard drive, eventually it could just fail because it was left on for 10 years (since an active drive is constantly spinning).
Now its not guaranteed to fail, but the chances of a standard HDD failing that you only read from and don't write it is far greater than a SSD that you put files on it one time and don't write further.
I think SSD shine in archival types of things that you don't plan on trashing and rewriting that often such as image collections, movies, and MP3s. That said, swap disks, scratch disk, and cache file directories would logically still have better performance on your spinning platter drives and if that drive goes belly up you haven't lost much.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Just remember to mount these drives noatime to avoid a write every time you read a file.
For that matter, noatime is a sensible default for any desktop OS. When was the last time you actually searched for files you hadn't accessed in six months?