Reliability of PC Flash SSDs?

An anonymous reader writes "SATA and IDE flash solid-state disks are all the rage these days — faster and, allegedly, more reliable than traditional spinning-rust disks. My organization dipped its toe in the flash-disk waters, buying a handful for some PC and Linux boxes. Out of 8 drives from various manufacturers, 3 have failed in the space of four months! Some are reporting bad blocks, others just crapped out and stopped responding entirely. (And no, this isn't a wear-leveling issue, nor were these machines in particularly harsh environmental conditions, nor were all failed drives from the same manufacturer.) So I ask you, the readers of Slashdot: what has your experience been like with basic, consumer-grade SATA or IDE flash drives? Are they failing for you too, or are we just unlucky? It's starting to remind me of the claims about long-lifetime compact fluorescent light bulbs that, in reality, have turned out to be BS!"

Comments

Same type of experience here

[HermMunster]

I have avoided investing any money into those types of drives for that very reason. As a small business owner I see customer units come in that make use of those types of devices and I see a lot of failure. I'm still being patient.

Re:Same type of experience here

[commodore64_love]

We've not being seeing widespread failure of Ipods or other keydrives, even though they use the same F-RAM technology. I'm kinda surprised to hear any reports of failure in the new solid state PC drives, unless it's an issue of making the cells too small to be reliable.

Aside - I have two traditional hard drives in my PC. They've been spinning almost-nonstop since 2003. Any idea how much longer I have until they crash?

Aside #2 from the Summary -

- The savings on CFLs is trivial. I might switch my bulb from 40 to 10 watts, but I still have a 10,000 watt heat pump running. I'm not seeing smaller monthly bills.

- CFLs hate temperature extremes. CFLs hate dimmers. In practical terms this means CFLs can not be used in 80-90% of present fixtures, like those that are enclosed (heat kills CFL electronics) or outside (too cold to light) And I bought a so-called "dimmable CFL" which died 5 minutes after I installed it in my living room dimmer switch.

- CFLs hate being turned on and off. Rapid cycling makes them die even faster than an incandescent bulb (as stated in the summary). So you've spent 5 times as much for a bulb than doesn't last any longer.

- CFLs have a warm-up time. The 60-watt-equivalent bulb hanging upside-down in my kitchen is sometimes so dim, it looks like a brown dwarf star... barely any light at all. It takes 3-4 minutes to finally reach full brightness.

Re:Same type of experience here

[cellurl]

Until I see a graph from consumer reports, I don't believe anything.

Donate time, not money

Re:Same type of experience here

[jggimi]

Any idea how much longer I have until they crash?

While nothing is ever a certaintly -- a tool for your OS that inspects SMART data from your drives' electronics would answer that question, at least from a trend perspective. I like smartmontools, but you may prefer something else, or it may not be applicable for your OS.

See Wikipedia for some background information on SMART, and what it can tell you.

Re:Same type of experience here

[commodore64_love]

Reminds me of some religious types. "If it ain't in the book, I don't believe it."

Re:Same type of experience here

[sh00z]

- CFLs hate temperature extremes.
- CFLs hate being turned on and off.
- CFLs have a warm-up time.

CFLs are also sensitive to vibration. Don't install one in a ceiling fan or garage door opener, at risk of drastically reduced lifespan.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you're going on a few anecdotal cases. That's the religious way..
Produce the evidence...

Re:Same type of experience here

[Anonymous Coward]

>- The savings on CFLs is trivial. I might switch my bulb from 40 to 10 watts, but I still have a 10,000 watt heat pump running. I'm not seeing smaller monthly bills.

Indeed, one bulb dropping 30 watts is pretty much hard to notice. Don't know why you'd replace a single bulb anyway, buy a pack of six or twelve. Surely you use more than one light socket in your house???

>- CFLs hate temperature extremes. CFLs hate dimmers. In practical terms this means CFLs can not be used in 80-90% of present fixtures, like those that are enclosed (heat kills CFL electronics) or outside (too cold to light) And I bought a so-called "dimmable CFL" which died 5 minutes after I installed it in my living room dimmer switch.

Yay for made-up statistics. And maybe you have a bad dimmer, or a bad bulb. Who knows? Your single experience is not meaningful on its own.

>- CFLs hate being turned on and off. Rapid cycling makes them die even faster than an incandescent bulb (as stated in the summary). So you've spent 5 times as much for a bulb than doesn't last any longer.

Use CFL's in applications where you are going to have the light on for hours and hours. Use incandescents in places where you switch on and off. Choosing the right tool for the job is a good thing.

>- CFLs have a warm-up time. The 60-watt-equivalent bulb hanging upside-down in my kitchen is sometimes so dim, it looks like a brown dwarf star... barely any light at all. It takes 3-4 minutes to finally reach full brightness.

Get a better bulb then. Me, I just bought a house, and I'm replacing the incandescent bulbs over the kitchen sink post-haste. Why? Because I don't want to cook with them. Damn things radiate so much heat it's hard to bear. Ideally, I'll replace the fixture with one sensibly placed, but right now, a CFL is the easier choice.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Leynos]

Your CFLs are rubbish.

Mine turn on instantly. I've also had two 40w equivalents running in an enclosed fitting for 2.5 years without having to change them once. In fact, of the ten fittings in my house, I've only had to change two bulbs in the 2.5 years since I moved in. They're a mixture of GE, Philips and Megaman CFLs in case you wonder, and they cost around a dollar each (49p) with the exception of the Megaman spotlights which cost quite a bit more.

Re:Same type of experience here

[LinuxIsGarbage]

- CFLs hate temperature extremes. - CFLs hate being turned on and off. - CFLs have a warm-up time.

CFLs are also sensitive to vibration. Don't install one in a ceiling fan or garage door opener, at risk of drastically reduced lifespan.

CFLs are also sensitive to price. Don't hold high hopes for a cheap no-name bulb. I still have some Phillips CFLs running on 9 years.

Re:Same type of experience here

[gad_zuki!]

Im not buying one anytime soon either. Hopefully people will stop saying "OMG SSD ONLY FAILS ONE WAY: READ ONLY." Im sick of hearing that psuedowisdom on slashdot. SSD drives have many fail modes. 'Read only' is just one. Most likely the thing just wont turn on or you'll have massive corruption. Its fast but its not more reliable than a mechanical hard disk. Perhaps less so.

Re:Same type of experience here

[RoverDaddy]

Worth echoing that comment. Early on I bought some Sylvania OSRAM bulbs that were being subsidized by the local electric company at the time. Those lights lasted an incredibly long time (near 9 or 10 years if I recall correctly). Some cheaper bulbs purchased later dropped like flies. My recent purchases of Phillips CFLs seem to be going strong, and the bulbs are finally reasonably sized, unlike the early models with massive ballast bases.

Also worth mentioning that recent bulbs have much better warm-up times than the early models. If they really are dimmer at startup, the delay must be a second or less these days because I don't notice it at all.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Znork]

- The savings on CFLs is trivial.

You're missing the really good part of using CFLs; they make it practical to quadruple indoors lighting. Go from 1 60W bulb to 3 20W CFL's and you get significantly more light, making for a nice change in darker climates. And compared to using 400W, 60W actually becomes a significant saving. Of course, it doesn't actually reduce electricity use...

The warm up time is also less of a problem if you use multiple CFL's. With enough powerful ones you quickly get more light than the 60W would give you anyway.

The quality issue seems to be mostly with the ultracheap ones. The cheapest useful ones I've found (brand Flair) come with a 5 year warranty and cost about $3, and this far most of them have at least survived 3-4 years.

And yes, any dimmable ones are crap. Even the quality dimmable ones can't be 'dimmed'. They might not break immediately, and they might sortof just go weak and maybe flicker a bit, but they're certainly not happy with the dimming and I can't imagine the person doing the dimming being happy either. As is, I'd go with (again) either multiple CFLs, or a combination of CFLs and LEDs if you can find a reasonable fixture or combination of fixtures that would give you the effect you're after.

Re:Same type of experience here

[compro01]

And I bought a so-called "dimmable CFL" which died 5 minutes after I installed it in my living room dimmer switch.

Have a look at that dimmer switch and the wiring. Had the same problem myself, the problem turned out to be a bad ground wire. Incandescents had no problem in that fixture.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Anonymous Coward]

We've not being seeing widespread failure of Ipods or other keydrives...

I didn't realize we had common flash devices (iPods, in your example) capable of 210MB/s reads and 170MB/s writes with enough room for page files that are 1.5 to 3 times the size of the RAM in the average computer. You analogy is like comparing a lawnmower to a car in every respect simply because they both may have combustion engines. Thus your statement is a poor attempt at answering whatever it is you thought you could provide anecdotal evidence for.

Aside - I have two traditional hard drives in my PC. They've been spinning almost-nonstop since 2003. Any idea how much longer I have until they crash?

Despite your sardonic tone, you can expect your hard drives to fair more comparably to the MTTF/MTBF stated on the respective devices, less the amount of unusual wear. But if you are looking for an accurate prediction, you would be better off asking a psychic. Good luck with that.

The savings on CFLs is trivial. I might switch my bulb from 40 to 10 watts, but I still have a 10,000 watt heat pump running. I'm not seeing smaller monthly bills.

The savings is stated on the box as compared to the conventional light bulb it replaces. You only have yourself to blame if you expected that replacing light bulbs in your home would dramatically affect your electricity usage. For reference, I recently purchased some 23.5W CFLs to replace standard 100W bulbs. Because these lights are not on 24/7 I can expect my energy savings to be 100W-23.5= 76.5 watts of savings ONLY WHEN THE BULBS ARE BEING USED. This is not magic, but if you believe it to be so, I have a bridge to sell you. Also, I have a pair of free tickets aboard Northwest airlines for you. I hope they overshoot into the pacific ocean.

Indeed, if you really want to save some money, I hope you have some storm windows, or highly-insulated windows, to keep all 10,000 watts of your hot-air in. Have you considered living in a balloon? I hear Oz is nice this time of year.

And I bought a so-called "dimmable CFL" which died 5 minutes after I installed it in my living room dimmer switch.

I would wager that if you went back and read the fine print that came with the CFLs you would find you misused or misapplied them. At any rate, early adopters, while the first to complain, are the ones that should NOT be complaining.

CFLs hate being turned on and off.

As does anything electronic as you've proven with your above snark regarding the hard drives. Your anecdotal evidence continues to fail you.

CFLs have a warm-up time.

Are you one of those people that hates a boot time of >3 seconds? Do you always require immediate satisfaction with everything you do, especially new products? There is undoubtedly a statement on the package regarding this exact concern.

The 60-watt-equivalent bulb hanging upside-down in my kitchen is sometimes so dim, it looks like a brown dwarf star... barely any light at all.

Consider the color of the bulb you purchased; "daylight" versus "white" or "fluorescent" can appear dramatically different regardless of their equivalent power rating. As well, a 60W equivalent seems rather small for the kitchen area. Try a 100W or greater in the same fixture for more light (and a large bulb for greater coverage).

Re:Same type of experience here

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome troll. Have you considered that you are just buying cheap trash? Wait a second. Even my cheap trash works fine. I have 18, 9W ikea bulbs from 2002 still going strong. Only 2 burned out and I suspect it was due to shitty sockets. And uhh I suggest you learn how your heat pump works before comparing a 10kW compressor to commodity light bulbs. In most homes 0.1 of residential electricity is for lighting. CFLs use 25% the power of incandescents. The average home uses 30kWh/day.

30kwh*0.1*0.75*365d/yr*0.06c/kWh = $50/yr savings (820kWh)

36 13W GE bulbs cost about 50 bucks and they drop to less than 1.00 on sale. I have 3 GE 100W equivalents that are 4 years old. The problem is not the performance, cost, or reliability of CFLs. The problem is idiots basing their decisions on anecdotes instead of data....

Re:Same type of experience here

[zippthorne]

- The savings on CFLs is trivial. I might switch my bulb from 40 to 10 watts, but I still have a 10,000 watt heat pump running. I'm not seeing smaller monthly bills

That's odd. You must be running a crappy heat pump with a COP of unity.

Ditch that sucka. You should have a COP of 5 or more if you're in a region where heat pumps make sense, which translates to 24 watts of savings for each of those 10W bulbs. (although.. a 10W bulb isn't really quite enough to replace a 40W.) If the unit is ok, maybe you've got it behind a hedge or something blocking air flow or there's a pinhole in the ground return (are you using a ground-source heat pump or air?).

There shouldn't be any circumstance where electric resistance heating makes sense from an efficiency point of view.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Z1NG]

Get a better bulb then. Me, I just bought a house, and I'm replacing the incandescent bulbs over the kitchen sink post-haste. Why? Because I don't want to cook with them. Damn things radiate so much heat it's hard to bear.

If the heat off of light bulbs makes you uncomfortable in the kitchen then what do you cook on?

Re:Same type of experience here

[vtcodger]

All the claims are true. ... Sort of. ... Sometimes.

1. Typical suburban house - 24 bulbs - half of them 100 watt, half 60 watt - typical ON time about 3 hours a day - (purported) savings vs incandescent about 75% - Monthly savings = right around 100kwH. That's about 15% of our electric consumption.

2. Don't like temperature extremes. I have two bulbs in outside fixtures -- in Vermont. They are a bit dim on cold Winter nights, but overall they work a lot better than I was told they would. And they don't have short lifetimes which is good because changing them isn't much fun

3. Not dimmable. I've had a low wattage dimmable CFL in the living room for years. Not only does it dim, but so do the other normal CFLs on the same circuit. They're on every night for 2-6 hours. Lifetime is about what I've come to expect from a CFL. Not the claimed 10000 hours. Mostly only get that from the circular fluorescents in table lamps and the shoplights in the garage. Maybe 5000-6000 hours.

4. Start up time. We have five (identical) CFLs in the family room that do indeed take several minutes to come to full intensity. (But no complaint about lifetime there. They've been there since we redid the room four years ago). But the rest of the CFLs in the house act like incandescents. I think we had one other bulb years ago that was a bit slow to come to full intensity in its golden years. Go figure.

5. Yes, some of the new, cheap, CFLs die almost immediately. I think I was happier when the bulbs were more expensive, but had some quality control

Over all, I'm reasonably happy with CFLs. Now that expensive white LED reading lamp "bulb" that failed last night after only six months ... THAT, I'm a bit irked about.

Re:Same type of experience here

[glop]

How do you handle the lack of dimming? I have a bunch of sockets with a dimmer and am afraid to put a CFL in there. Can I disable the dimmer easily? Or is it OK to just push the button all the way every time?

    Thanks a lot,

Re:Same type of experience here

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you might save a few dollars (or euros) by using CFLs, but think of all the environmental damage you doing. You are poisoning the ground water for hundreds of years by encouraging the manufacture of CFLs.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Xiterion]

... even though they use the same NAND flash technology

Not a lame FTFY joke I promise. FRAM does exist and is around, but it can't compete with NAND flash in cost per bit yet. Pretty much all consumer nonvolatile storage lives on flash.

FRAM
NAND flash

Re:Same type of experience here

[nomadic]

I know you Americans are so in love with your wasteful lifestyle that you can rationalise to the most extreme not using innovations to cut down on consumption, like hybrid cars are gay and all the religious issues with CFLs.

Oh spare us the smug patronizing; you're western european I'm assuming, it's the only area where everyone thinks they are experts on American culture. Not expert enough to know that the CFL was invented by Americans (as was the modern hybrid car) though.

The rest of the lamps are CFLs, they have worked perfectly for 7 years and I've never had any problem with them, either with the less used ones or the ones under extreme usage. I even have CFLs outdoors and I never replaced them, they withstand temperatures from -2C to 40C along the year.

So your basis for claiming that CFLs are relilable, is that the ones you've personally happened to buy haven't gone out. Brilliant.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Anonymous Coward]

It was about american consumers, not where these things were invented.

Re:Same type of experience here

[default luser]

Right, and all the claims from people about how we already use flash in millions of iPods - stop. SSD is a totally different application from an iPod, despite using the same flash memory:

1. The controllers used are cutting-edge, high-performance clocked, and thus more prone to defects as time goes by.

2. The workload presented to an SSD is completely different from that of your average mp3 player: the write cycles SSDs are subjected to are astronomical. This is bound to wear them out faster.

I think we're going to see over the next few years that the rates of failure are high, and the industry will take that data and re-evaluate reliabilutyt metrics to something more realistic.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Consumer reports - what do they know about computer stuff?

Re:Same type of experience here

[bradley13]

Absolutely: we have good experience with both Phillips and Osram!

Re:Same type of experience here

[LordVader717]

Actually I found the same problem with a house I stayed at. The roof was relatively low, and the lights were tripple-fittings, which made it worse. The heat they give off is unbearable, even compared to the gas cooker.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Obfuscant]

Have a look at that dimmer switch and the wiring. Had the same problem myself, the problem turned out to be a bad ground wire. Incandescents had no problem in that fixture.

There's a reason incandescents didn't have a problem there: they operate using hot and neutral. They pay no attention to ground. Neither does the dimmer switch deal with ground. Ground is a safety issue for humans.

And CFLs operate exactly the same way. There is no ground connection on a CFL, just hot and neutral. They can't break due to a "bad ground" because they never touch ground.

It's like saying your car gets bad gas milage because the diesel fuel in the truck parked next to it was contaminated.

CFL fail miserably when using X10 controllers. They seem to have some current pulse that occurs after turnoff that makes the X10 controller think you are trying to turn the light back on using the local switch. Press X10 off -- click -- light off -- click -- light on! Press off again -- click off -- click on! It's like a video game, how many times do you have to press "off" to get them to stay off, and how short can you get the 'on' times to be?

That, and the extremely short lives they have compared to simple incandescents, make them a pain in the ass and poor replacements. I like the european guy who talks about us americans and our "extravagant lifestyles" because we use incandescents. Using a 50 cent light bulb for ten years compared to ten (mercury containing) CFLs in the same place is extravagant?

Re:Same type of experience here

[SDF-7]

I'm guessing his kitchen is a big Easy-Bake Oven (or at least the classic one [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_bake_oven] indicates they use heating elements now).

Re:Same type of experience here

[hairyfeet]

Actually I have found that the "cheapo" Walmart brand tends to last around five years, which for an average $3 a bulb I think is pretty damned good. I think it is more about trying the different 'el cheapos" and finding what is good and what isn't. For example NEVER touch Staples brand CDs. Those POS will be about half coasters if you are lucky, whereas the el cheapo Ritek seem to be about the same good burn/coaster ratio as the name brands. Since I'm always trying to find the best deals for my family i don't mind a little experimenting, but YMMV of course.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Z1NG]

Actually I found the same problem with a house I stayed at. The roof was relatively low, and the lights were tripple-fittings, which made it worse. The heat they give off is unbearable, even compared to the gas cooker.

LordVader717 can live through a bath in molten lava, and horrible love scene dialogue but is defeated by the light.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Kagato]

CFL is a good short term solution, but the real brass ring is LED.

Re:Same type of experience here

[lupine]

Using electricity from coal fired power plants to power a 90% inefficient incandescent light bulb releases more mercury and radioactive particles into the air and water than the mercury used to make a CFL and you can safely dispose of a CFL.

Re:Same type of experience here

[camperdave]

CFLs have a warm-up time. The 60-watt-equivalent bulb hanging upside-down in my kitchen is sometimes so dim, it looks like a brown dwarf star... barely any light at all. It takes 3-4 minutes to finally reach full brightness.

For the longest time I kept hearing that. I thought it was nonsense. Every CF bulb I'd ever seen was instant on, full brightness. Then I went to a friend's place where it happened...

Basically, you've got yourself some antique CF bulbs there. Get some new Philips bulbs and they'll turn on lickety-split.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Adriax]

3 ceiling fans in my house, each sporting 3 or 4 100watt CFL bulbs. In the 8 years of use so far, two have burned out and one played dead (wasn't screwed in tight, surprisingly).
We purchased them from walmart for something like $2.50 each, GE brand.

Like other have stated, stay away from the $1 generics and they last a long time.

Re:Same type of experience here

[EvilBudMan]

--It's starting to remind me of the claims about long-lifetime compact fluorescent light bulbs that, in reality, have turned out to be BS!"--

I don't know about the drives but have been using CFL's for years. Only one ever went bad after bout two solid years of continuous use.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Admiral_Grinder]

Simple, dump the dimming part. Light switches are around a dollar a piece and it takes about 5 minutes to swap them.

Re:Same type of experience here

[phoenix321]

I think the problem is that most people have much more chances to try out new CD recordables than CFLs - and the price-performance response is more direct - and their use cases are completely identical. But even cheapo CFL last one or two years and after that period, environmental issues like temperatures, usage patterns and so on are hard to compare. Comparing them to quality CFLs is even harder because the quality models last for half a decade or even more and people probably have only a few of them.

Anecdotal evidence anyway: I've bought CFLs exclusively now for a little over 10 years now whenever a regular bulb burned out. I've yet replaced two of them, a cheapo IKEA brand CFL that went out after "only" six years and a desk lamp whose tube was fried when its external power brick/ballast failed. All other CFLs are in service for so long I cannot remember even the year I installed them.

We probably should write the date of installation on the socket or it's hard to judge whether they lasted "only" three years or six.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Idiomatick]

In the summer time you don't need to heat your house. If you lived in alaska fine. CFLs do hate dimmers, don't use them there. Enclosed is a good spot for cfls. Infact it would be dangerous to put an incandescent in an enclosed space. I've no idea about temperatures, looking outside it seems fine and its 2degrees atm. I don't have any warm-up time issues. Maybe you just bought shitty shitty bulbs? Also, since I switched I think I've changed 2 CFLs in my life. So 2 have died and there are maybe 20 in my house.

Re:Same type of experience here

[phoenix321]

I can only tell you that a relative had a pendant light fixture with three bulbs arranged symmectrically where the lamp in one specific socket would always burn out long before all others. The bulbs in that socket always failed spectacularly, popping out, making some noise in their final seconds or even dying out in a bright flash. The socket soon had visible burn marks so we could easily identify it. No matter how we turned the fixture, it was always that socket killing the bulbs, incandescents and CFLs alike until the whole unit was disposed of because of that.

Burn marks aside, all sockets looked identical. I can only guess what was the reason, maybe a broken wire that unintentionally switched the bulb on and off whenever air currents moved the fixture, I don't know. A faulty socket can kill a light bulb, trust me.

Re:Same type of experience here

[commodore64_love]

I know you Americans are so in love with your wasteful lifestyle that you can rationalise to the most extreme not using innovations to cut down on consumption, like hybrid cars are gay and all the religious issues with CFLs.

Over the last five years or so, I've noticed more-and-more Europeans are acting like the so-called "rude Americans" they despise. Congratulations.

Anyway to address your point, a lot of the CFL complaints aren't coming from the U.S. but from the EU - due to the sudden requirement that any bulb over 60 must be a CFL. Europeans are discovering the inherent CFL flaws for themselves.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Lorens]

Aside - I have two traditional hard drives in my PC. They've been spinning almost-nonstop since 2003. Any idea how much longer I have until they crash?

Until you stop them. They continue spinning well past the point where the wear will stop them from spinning up after stopping.

Corollary: always make sure you have up-to-date backups before shutting off a long-running machine.

Re:Same type of experience here

[ThinkDifferently]

The article in question specifically names Feit Electric bulbs.

My experience with that brand resulted in nearly an 80% failure rate within the first year of use, involving a pool of about 4 dozen bulbs, used in 4 different light fixtures, totaling 32 individual light sockets. At first, I took them up on their warranty, mailed back about half a dozen failed bulbs in exchange for new ones. However, I could see it would become cost prohibitive in the long run to continue paying for postage, if the same rate of failure continued (which it did). Other brands are far, far more reliable, and simply replacing the failed Feit bulbs makes more economic sense than continuing to pay postage for Feit warranty replacements.

I consider Feit bulbs to be the bottom of the barrel.

Re:Same type of experience here

[commodore64_love]

+1 informative.

I gave it a try but it said my RAID 2+0 (stripe) configuration won't let me access the SMART data. Oh well. I'll just off load everything onto an external USB drive so when this PC dies in 2010 or 2011, I can immediately hop to my laptop without loss.

Re:Same type of experience here

[AaronW]

Feit is the sound of the bulbs frying their electronics, that Fffft sound. I've had nothing but trouble with Feit bulbs. I've bought other bulb brands and had no problems whatsoever. I even have dimmable CFL bulbs in some places that work quite well.

Re:Same type of experience here

[oddtom]

You should be able to access the drives with smartctl even though they're behind a RAID controller. For example, to access information about the drive in the first port of a 3ware controller:

smartctl -a -d 3ware,0

Check out the manpage for more example devices.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Anonymous Coward]

We both know that when he said ground, he should have said neutral. You don't win arguments by playing dumb.

Re:Same type of experience here

[DiLLeMaN]

I recently got a LED bulb, which is supposed to use even less energy for a comparable amount of light. Looks good so far, and it's "instantly on", there's no warm-up. Dunno how long it's gonna last, of course, it's only been there for a week.

CFLs... well, they don't seem to make 'em like they used to, as others have said as well. I remember my dad one day installing some weird socket-mounted ones, which worked for YEARS. The incandescent-replacements tend to live a lot shorter.

As an aside, they're running a test program with LED street lighting. In a "forrest-y" part of the city, they have these greenish (but there's some red as well, it's really weird to look at the light source) that are supposed to use less energy, and have a narrower beam too, so it doesn't shine into the forest as much. Critters rejoiced.

If I have to go by what I've heard so far, LED is teh r0xx0r compared to CFLs. Wish they'd come down in price, though.

Re:Same type of experience here

[drinkypoo]

It takes notably more energy to make a CFL than it does to make an incandescent as well. If you live someplace with shitty power (*raises hand*) then the CFLs sometimes die an early death. Some seem to be able to weather the storms but alas, it's not at all apparent which; I've had cheapies and nice ones take it, and not take it. You can safely dispose of a CFL, but recycling it takes still more energy.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Lord Byron II]

The brown dwarf effect is why I like to use them. In the morning, before my coffee, they are noticeably easier on my eyes than the quick-start incandescents are.

I think like many new products, SSDs and CFLs are getting unfairly compared to the products they are replacing. SSDs are not HDDs and CFLs are not incandescent lightbulbs.

Re:Same type of experience here

[gd2shoe]

And maybe you have a bad dimmer, or a bad bulb.

A bad dimmer? Say what? A vast majority of dimmers are very simple pot switches (basically a single resistor). The thing either works or it doesn't.

And he's not the only one having issues with the so-called dimmable CFLs. 5 minutes suggests a bad bulb. 5 days suggests a bad brand. (We can no longer use the dimmer with these CFLs. They just die too quickly.)

Re:Same type of experience here

[Techman83]

The thing with CDRs that was explained to me, was that the difference between the expensive brands and the cheap brands are the amount of presses the plates make (can't recall the exact terminology, but the plate imprints the recordable material onto the round disc), for an expensive brand they'll replace the plate after 500,000, where as the cheaper brands will run them from around 800,000 to 1,000,000 impressions. Which means the first 500,000 will be exactly the same as an expensive brand and as you get higher, the reliability will drop off rapidly. Hence why you can buy a spindle that will be perfect, but another time most of them will croak. Don't have any evidence to back this up, but it seems rather plausible to me.

Re:Same type of experience here

[cheesewire]

Sure dimmers used to just use a variable resistor, but a good while ago nearly all moved onto a bit more of a complex (and efficient) solution: turning the bulb on and off real fast - varying how long the 'on' period is for the dimness factor.

Enabling that lovely buzzing noise they sometimes make.
See here and here for more info

Re:Same type of experience here

[Anonymous Coward]

If the heat off of light bulbs makes you uncomfortable in the kitchen then what do you cook on?

Microwave, of course. ;P

But seriously, an oven? It doesn't radiate the heat as directly. Oh sure, I can feel its hot, but it's more gradual. Which is a good thing. Same with the stovetop. I can stand back from it, and I just don't get as much heat.

These lights? I can't even stand at the sink, it's too hot. Maybe the people who lived there were short or something, but for me, it's no good at all.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Anonymous Coward]

>A bad dimmer? Say what? A vast majority of dimmers are very simple pot switches (basically a single resistor). The thing either works or it doesn't.

Not all dimmers are that simple. Many are electronic now. Who knew??

Re:Same type of experience here

[gd2shoe]

Ok, now you've got my attention. (seeing how there's no ground wire connection to the bulb...) How was your socket wired wrong, and how do you think that affected the CFL? (I am curious if there is a good answer to this.)

Re:Same type of experience here

[hairyfeet]

Weird, I always heard it was the amount of dye, that the real garbage el cheapo brands used extremely thin amounts of dye, which of course leads to "thin spots" and is more likely to give you a bad burn. And if your theory is right, how do you explain Staples brand? I have yet to meet anyone who didn't end up chunking more of those in the trash than they kept.

Who knows, but either way after Black Friday several years back I learned my lesson. NEVER EVER mess with Staples brand CD/DVD media. They are the biggest pile of absolute garbage I have ever seen. Even the discs that did say they burned correctly soon after failed, and I don't think a single disc lasted over six months before it was in the trash do to read errors. Second worse I've found is a cheapo brand called "iLo" but thankfully I haven't seen those in awhile, maybe they went tits up.

The best of the 'el cheapo" brands I have found is Ritek/Ridata brand CD/DVD media. I have been using their brand for a couple of years now and found that spindle after spindle they seem to be pretty consistent, and at an average of $20 for a 100 pack of blank DVDs at Newegg they really can't be beat on price. So whether your theory or my theory or some other reason is to blame, I have learned that certain brands you just avoid like the clap. Frankly after dealing with them I wouldn't take Staples brand if it was given to me free.

Re:Same type of experience here

[LinuxIsGarbage]

We write the installation date on them. Right now we mainly use them in fixtures left on for long periods of time.

Re:Same type of experience here

[rew]

FYI, in my experience drives that fail rarely have SMART data indicating a problem.
The big google harddrive research paper had similar results.

On the other hand, if you get a hint of trouble from SMART, it's a good idea to retire the drive. It DOES sometimes work . :-)

Re:Same type of experience here

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason most fluorescents can't handle dimmers has nothing to do with hot, neutral and ground but rather how dimmers typically work being fundamentally incapable with how the ballast and fluorescent tube work. The latter require (relatively) constant voltage and constant current to operate while most dimmer controls work by varying the effective voltage and/or current. This works OK for incandescent lights because they are largely resistive, passive loads. Fluorescents are neither.

CFLs that do work with conventional dimmers have special semiconductor switching power supplies that manage the dimming implied by the varying supply power as something the CFL can actually handle while still remaining "sparked".

Re:Same type of experience here

[TheRaven64]

How old are your bulbs? In my experience, the warm up time grows over the bulb's lifetime. I have some now that take five minutes or so to reach full brightness, but did so in a couple of seconds when they were new. Generally, whenever one blows I put the new one in a ceiling light and then move the older one to a lamp, where the warm up time is less important, to get around this.

Re:Same type of experience here

[EvilBudMan]

I really think that might have been the brand of the only one I had go bad. It was in the ballast and worked it's way through the bulb.

So, you may have the answer. I usually don't buy the very cheapest that I can find either.

Re:Same type of experience here

[newdsfornerds]

GAH! Stop using "investing" when you mean "spending!" They are not the same! You invest in stocks and bonds and gold and such.

Re:Same type of experience here

[fotbr]

I even have CFLs outdoors and I never replaced them, they withstand temperatures from -2C to 40C along the year.

That's nice. I regularly see temperatures about -18C during the winter. CFLs don't work so great outdoors then.

Indoors, they're great -- not for any energy or cost savings, but because I'm lazy.

Re:Same type of experience here

[ncc74656]

CFL fail miserably when using X10 controllers. They seem to have some current pulse that occurs after turnoff that makes the X10 controller think you are trying to turn the light back on using the local switch. Press X10 off -- click -- light off -- click -- light on! Press off again -- click off -- click on! It's like a video game, how many times do you have to press "off" to get them to stay off, and how short can you get the 'on' times to be?

They usually work by passing the signal through the filament in the bulb. The problem here is that CFLs don't have a filament.

Sometime back around 2000 or so, I modified some X10 light switches to work with fluorescent lights. IIRC, the modification involved a bit of rewiring and the addition of a resistor. This sounds about like what I did. The modified switches worked reliably every time.

Re:Same type of experience here

[Jesus_666]

Incendescents aren't that extravagant if you use decent halogen incendescents. Halogen lamps are more efficient (about 60% more light/Watt) and last much longer than regular ones. Since CFLs are too annoying and LEDs don't deliver yet, halogen incandescent is what I currently prefer. Works well.

eee ssd

[selfabuse]

The junky 4gb ssd that came with my eee 900 died inside of a month. The 16gb OCZ SSD that I replaced it with has been going strong for a year now though /me crosses fingers

Re:eee ssd

[sconeu]

So far I'm happy with the 32GB RIDATA that I upgraded my 900 with. I probably should have gone with the SATA version rather than the PATA version, but my wife resents every penny I spend on computer related stuff.

Re:eee ssd

[bzipitidoo]

Same problem here. The 4G SSD in my eee 901 went bad the 2nd month. I sent it to Asus and they replaced it. The new one has been working since, but I don't store any critical data on that PC.

I'd also like to see optical media go away. Burns take too long, are too likely not to work on another drive or even the same drive, have one little bad spot that spoils everything, and drives go bad all the time. I'll take SSDs over DVD-RWs. Wish more Linux distros were set up for easy installation onto and from flash memory drives.

I bought a dozen of those LED night lights. That's a much cheaper way of trying LED lighting than going for regular lights. 4 of them failed early. Their brightness varies hugely even between the same models. That's life for beta testers. Have had better luck with CFLs. Only one early failure so far, and it wasn't real early-- lasted 5 years. Manufacturers have done a very poor job of informing people that most CFLs do not work with dimmer switches. Last time I went looking for a CFL for dimmers, I couldn't find one. Took a while to go through the fine print on all the models and confirm that none could hack a dimmer switch.

Re:eee ssd

[Zerth]

For once I don't feel bad about buying early and getting a 7** eee, as I haven't had any problems with its SSD, although I do most of my writes to SD cards.

Re:eee ssd

[BrokenHalo]

This reminds me of the old advice we used to get, to the effect of that solid-state drives have a more or less finite number of read/write operations possible on them. This used to be given as a reason not to use journalling file systems.

I've never explored this idea, so I have no idea whether this is bullshit or not. However, I have had enough flash drives fail to leave me regarding them as unreliable media for any kind of long-term or critical storage. On the other hand, I still have a few of the aforementioned "spinning rust" drives that are now almost 20 years old but which still work. (Though, in the interests of saving physical space in my safe, I have now transferred their contents to more modern media.)

Re:eee ssd

[Ant P.]

Same here, my 701's 2 years old now and running fine despite going through a dozen kernel compiles.

I was thinking of getting the newer model but it seems there's a complaint about almost every component inside it. I can live with the small screen and short battery life, at least until ARM netbooks take off.

Re:eee ssd

[that IT girl]

My solution to this is more of a mix--rather than choosing one over another, I have several copies of my important data on different types of media. No SSDs yet, but I have an external hard drive, a handful of USB drives, and a DVD-RW with the data. If I were really paranoid, or if the information was very, very important (such as for business) I could have multiple copies on each media and store them in different locations. Check them regularly, replace any of them that are getting old or have gotten corrupt, and transfer to new media as it gets invented.

Obviously nothing is impossible, but with this kind of redundancy + checking on it regularly, it's hard for it all to fail at once.

Re:eee ssd

[Disgruntled Goats]

Burns take too long,

Unless you're using some ancient 2x burner, you can burn full CDs in like 2 minutes and a full DVD-9 at around 10 minutes.

are too likely not to work on another drive or even the same drive,

Then you have a defective drive or you buy shit quality optical media. Never had any such issue in the 1000s of CDs and DVDs I've burned in the last 5 years. One might have had issues with this when CD and DVD burners first came out, but such an issue has long since passed.

have one little bad spot that spoils everything,

Unless that "one little bad spot" is a deep scratch this is also bullshit. DVD and CD error correction is far more robust than that unless you just have disks that were manufactured defectively.

Re:eee ssd

[WinterSolstice]

I have an Aspire One 110 with the SSD that's been smooth so far, and I just followed the suggestions for optimizing it for Linux. I also made sure that everything in /home points to the left hand SD card (the right hand one is crazy unreliable on my BIOS version). This has stood up to a year of heavy use under Mint and Ubuntu NBR.

Not fast - but stable.

Re:eee ssd

[zaivala]

I bought two Eee PC 701s and later two Eee PC 901s for various homeless people in Asheville. Of the four, two have reported issues, and one has reported issues with the SSD... it's a 901 with the 20 Gb drive, which they partition into a 4 Gb and a 16 Gb drive. The one with issues can't find the 4 Gb (Primary, Boot) partition, but boots fine if you hold F9 down while booting and then reports the other drive is there and working fine. No clue if it's the drive or the OS is messed up, but I've done Restore a couple times so I suspect the drive.

Re:eee ssd

[vtcodger]

When I need a dimmable CFL and wanted some daylight CFLs (My wife prefers them to regular CFLs/incandescents for quilting and knitting) I had to mail order them. But I noticed a couple of months ago that the local Ace Hardware now carries both dimmable CFLs and daylight CFLs. Only need to read the labels on the bulbs that seem kind of expensive. I found that I only needed one dimmable CFL on the circuit. With it installed, the other CFLs on the circuit dimmed smoothly as well, and they seem to be lasting fine. Maybe just luck.

Re:eee ssd

[hairyfeet]

What you need to do with her is start talking ROI, or as I like to call it "blinded with a combo of tech speak and BS". If she isn't a techhead start throwing "mean time between failure" and lots of tech speak in there and watch her eyes glaze over. Trust me, girls love to "save" money, which is why a sale at the clothing store can break you. Make it sound like you are "saving" a larger amount in the long run and all is golden.

Re:eee ssd

[hairyfeet]

I would add use either SDC or DataDawn to find you data after burning and all is golden. After my last disc cataloger crapped out on x64 I switched to these two and all is good. SDC is easy to run from flash, and DataDawn uses xml which makes it easy to edit after the fact, but either one is a great way to instantly find what you are looking for when you literally have 100s or 1000s of discs to search. Both are free and easy.

But as someone who has been burning since the days of 1x burners I have to agree, he is buying some totally shit media. NEVER EVER buy Staples brand! If you want cheap and reliable go Ritek/Ridata, but if you go with the absolute garbage like Staples brand you have no-one but yourself to blame. Keep discs in a cool dry place away from sunlight and they will last for years, maybe even decades (I have some Cds from the mid 90s that still read perfectly) but if you treat them like hockey pucks or set them up in a window...well what did you expect?

I'll just be glad when holodiscs or truly huge flash drives become cheap enough we will be able to replace DVD for long term backups. Tape is too high, so is BD, and USB drives have the same risks of failure as the drives you are backing up. But until something better comes along a DVD burner and disc cataloger will take care of most of your important items if you just put a little care and forethought into it. Just don't buy Staples brand!

Re:eee ssd

[P-Nuts]

The junky 4gb ssd that came with my eee 900 died inside of a month. The 16gb OCZ SSD that I replaced it with has been going strong for a year now though /me crosses fingers

My EEE's 4GB SSD just died a couple of days ago; the 16GB secondary SSD is still working, but it's much slower, especially at writing. I think the 4GB one is soldered directly onto the main board, but can I replace the secondary one with something faster?

Re:eee ssd

[SoTerrified]

The "high quality" 4gb SSD that came with my first generation EEE 900 has been in nearly daily use since I obtained it and it's still working great. However, one of the first things I did was ensure there was no defragging, I removed the swap space and did a handful of other SSD friendly tweaks and of course it's been running Linux since day one. Not sure if that matters...

Re:eee ssd

[Idiomatick]

Wish more Linux distros were set up for easy installation onto and from flash memory drives.

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
Check the distro you want and it will download it and set it up on the usb stick. Reboot on the machine and it works. If you want to use a custom ISO that works too. You can even build your own setup with it from a kernel. Its a 4.2MB no install download. You've got no excuse.

Re:eee ssd

[commodore64_love]

The DVD-R is probably the first to fail, as the dye on the disc fades and becomes unreadable.

.

Re:eee ssd

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have lousy unreliable media, just try burning at 2x speed. Your problems will go away.

Re:eee ssd

[stereoroid]

Opposite experience here: eeePC 1000, with 8GB and 32GB SSDs. Not a hiccup in over a year of daily use under Ubuntu Linux, though I should note that I've avoided a lot of wear by not using any swapfile as standard. (I have the SwapSpace package installed in case an app really needs the memory, though that rarely happens.) I expect to stay with SSDs for OS on my next PC, but for bulk storage I'll still use HDDs.

Re:eee ssd

[Unmanifest]

I lost my (musical)life's work the way you said, optical media not working. I burned the most significant work I ever did as multitrack master files zipped onto dvd. Being "smart" and "cautious". Then I had a lightning strike.

No prob, right? Wrong. Nothing will open the .zip file. No DVD +/- R/RW, no zip recovery tools, nothing. All gone. To make matters much, much worse, the sound card I was using had some quirky excess presence, which deceived me into mixing everything way too bassy, like "who put a pillow over the speakers" bassy mud if you play it on anything other than the card I was mixing with. Just putting some EQ on the finished mixes doesn't work right, the bass guitar is just too damn loud, and the cymbals way too quiet, among other problems. I need to get at the masters and remix it. So, even though I have finished mixes for most of my better music, I can't fix them. Years of work lost.

And I ALWAYS verify after burning. Anymore, USB flash and/or redundant networked backup seems like the only way to be safe.

Re:eee ssd

[bzipitidoo]

I back data up on other hard drives. Perhaps I've been lucky. Never had a hard drive fail on me yet.

It's not just the optical media, it's the drives. I had a Toshiba DVD-RW that worked for a while, but it wasn't long before it would no longer complete a burn. Would stop with an error partway through, leaving me with another coaster if the disk was an R, not an RW. Checking on line, I discovered others had the same problems with that model. The drive was junk. An old Ricoh 4X CD-RW drive I have became unable to read disks, for no reason I could fathom. We've probably all encountered the unbalanced drive that buzzes loudly and chokes on a read error when it spins up. Takes forever to read a disk when it has to try reading over and over at slower and slower speeds until it works. I usually burn at 4X speed, because I have often encountered drives that cannot read disks burned at a faster rate. My employer purchased an HP branded external USB DVD-RW drive for us to install OSes on servers, but it can't do a complete install. The sustained use of a full install causes overheating and it starts throwing data errors before the install finishes. I have to use a network install with that drive. Then there are all the coasters I've made because I was foolish enough to use the crap software bundled with the drive to do burns. Finally, and this is not really the fault of optical media, my newest computer came with Windows Vista, which I replaced with a dual boot XP and Linux setup. XP couldn't see any of the optical drives I tried. None of the drivers would work. Curiously, the drivers I had to slipstream in did work for getting XP installed, but would not work afterwards. Linux had no such problems. All that is a lot of trouble for the relatively few drives I've worked with.

Re:eee ssd

[hairyfeet]

I've actually run into the XP drive problem, it usually results from a bad slipstream, or occasionally an IRQ error. I know in this day and age most folks don't expect to run into IRQ errors, but they do happen from time to time. Do you have more than 1 video card, like say an IGP and a real graphics card? because that sometimes causes an IRQ with the CD/DVD drives in XP, don't ask me why. I have also seen it happen with capture cards.

I've never had a problem with burning at a faster rate, but then again I stick to LG and Sony drives, and rarely keep them in service as burners more than a year or so. The speeds keep increasing so they get relegated to player status on another machine. Are you using shitty media? I've found house brands like Staples and best buy are pretty much shit. if you want cheap Ritek/Ridata is the way to go, and Taiyo Yuden if you don't mind spending the bucks. I've had enough hard drives fail that I wouldn't trust them for long term storage, as I have data backed up going back nearly a decade and a half. For long term I use discs, as tape is just too damned high for home backups.

As for USB drives it is the case, which isn't letting in enough airflow to cool the drive. If there is no way to mount a fan in the case you can go "white trash cooling" using a box fan blowing over the drive. Finally as for using crap software I suggest Nero all the way, although if you want free Starburn is a good choice as well, but I've been a Nero man since V4 and have never regretted the choice. A lot of time they will give you the shitty B's Gold or Sonic software, especially if you buy really cheapo burners, and I've found it is usually craptastic. Stick with Nero or Starburn and you should be good to go.

Well good luck, I'm off to back up 20+ Gb of data to make room for another partition to install my new Win7 HP x64 on. I've decided to triple boot XP32/64/Win7, that way if I don't like Win7 I won't be having to do a reinstall of my dual boot. Good Luck!

Re:eee ssd

[Anonymous Coward]

" ... Last time I went looking for a CFL for dimmers, I couldn't find one. Took a while to go through the fine print on all the models and confirm that none could hack a dimmer switch. ..."

Whoa, there! "Fine Print"? To replace something that illiterates from the 19th century can mass-manufacture? To replace something that Stalinist Russia were really good at manufacturing? We tore down the Berlin Wall for this?

I don't see any "progress" here ;-)

Re:eee ssd

[Jesus_666]

Good thing he doesn't use one, then.

A DVD-R uses a dye that fades over time.
A DVD-RW has a metallic layer that lasts longer.

DVD-RWs are still not terribly good long-term storage media (we haven't yet developed those for home users storing appreciable amounts of data), but they're definitely superior to DVD-Rs.

Re:eee ssd

[Anonymous Coward]

Why dim it? You switch to CFL, use less power than a dimmed Edison lite, then want to dim it? What is to gain?

Re:eee ssd

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd also like to see optical media go away. Burns take too long, are too likely not to work on another drive or even the same drive, have one little bad spot that spoils everything, and drives go bad all the time. I'll take SSDs over DVD-RWs. Wish more Linux distros were set up for easy installation onto and from flash memory drives.

I generally don't use optical media unless I absolutely have to, as I have a pocketfull of 4, 8 and 16GB SanDisk SDHC cards. I use them almost every single day, and burn an optical disc maybe twice a month. I have only had one ever go bad once in my life, and it was a 2GB non-HC that saw a lot of use. A 4GB seemed to have died as well but once I reformatted it in a card reader (instead of its USB adapter) in my laptop it worked fine again. Note: Do not pull these things out until you have "safely removed" from or shut off a Winblows machine.

Wish more Linux distros were set up for easy installation onto and from flash memory drives.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

none could hack a dimmer switch.

Fluorescent lighting simply is not compatible with operating at reduced functionality like incandescent, it's just the way the technology works. You can go down to a point, but then it just poofs.

I hear, though, that you can get ones that work with those triple-mode lighting fixtures. I know my Verilux S.A.D. lamp works that way but it is a special bulb (tube really).

I have gone through well over 50 CFLs in several locations and three have failed, two of them nearly new and one after a year. That's a 6% failure rate, which I find acceptable for bulbs that last me 10 years+ and reduce my electric bills significantly.

chipset inside and utilization?

[A little Frenchie]

your not saying what chipset and what kind of usage you did.

if you are going to put a MLC drive for a gentoo distribution which is compiling 24/7, you will kill it in no time

if you got first gen micron chipset... you will have bad experience too

try again with indilinx or intel drive with SLC and come again

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I was the guy that posted the original question. Thanks for your response. I didn't give details simply due to space constraints. The drives were:

1. FHM16GF25H = Super Talent MasterDrive 16GB under linux
2. Transcend TS32GSSD25-M under Windows/XP
3. Patriot Warp v2 32GB under Ubuntu 8.04 with ext3

The machines were not super heavily loaded (i.e., no compiles 24/7), and we did the "obvious" things like turning off atime updates to the filesystems, etc.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[initdeep]

I'd be more looking at the fact that all of those are JMicron based controller drives and are shitty examples of SSD's in the first place.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=17

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[NixieBunny]

Patriot? Transcend? Super Talent? Those are not household names. Perhaps you have the all-too-common problem of shoddy workmanship by second-tier factories in Taiwan or China.

When you buy Intel or Seagate or Maxtor SSDs and they fail, then I'll take note.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[TheKidWho]

Those are all bad SSDs, get an intel or OCZ drive instead.

That's what happens when you try to go cheap.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, all 3 drives are with the Jmicron-controller.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=736

You got junked out by one bad make, that has been rebranded alot :/ It was stupid of Jmicron to even release such a controller, and it has put it's taint on SSDs by those who got burned, but SSDs are coming.

Buy an Intel G2 SSD and tell us your new experiences.. Those Jmicrons not only fail often, they also have slower performance than HDs and stutter.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[NeutronCowboy]

Apparently, the JMicron controller that's been faulted for at least two of the drives in questions is also found in 3 OCZ SSDs. At least, that's what anandtech reports, and they've been very good with these kinds of investigations in the past.

I'd suggest to apply the same technique that should be applied to all new technologies: get a thorough understanding of the technology and the involved manufacturers before buying one. And any price that's too good to be true probably is - cutting edge technology never is cheap, and SSDs are still cutting edge technology.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[dumbfounder]

Yeah, those are just junky drives. We have used Intel and OCZ drives for about 4 months using very heavy read/write databases and search engines and we have had no problems.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Anonymous Coward]

Super Talent sounds like a Japanese game show.

I'd like to see the original poster's report on the Super Happy Fun line of SSDs.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Ruie]

When flash drives became available I talked my company into buying Supertalent 256 GB drive for $3000 for one of our database servers. The first thing I did was to run an md5sum check to verify that the drive functions ok. And, of course, I find that for each 200GB file copied I would find a few errors. They would occur in different places each time, so it is not a matter of a bad flash chip. Sent it back. Got back a new drive, tried the same test, again a few errors. Tried to return it - no luck.

By now there were cheaper OCZ 128 GB drives. Got two, RAID0, worked fine for several months until the database filled up the disk space. The company bought one more drive and after a few more months discovered databases corruption.

For comparison, regular TB sized drives invariably give identical md5sums, even if the files are copied around the network and have to pass through all kinds of hardware.

Thus - if you buy a solid state drive make sure to personally check that its error rate is what you can live with.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Anonymous Coward]

Patriot? Transcend? Super Talent? Those are not household names.

This point is really important when making a business decision involving a low volume market. Patriot isn't going to cost themselves much if they ship crap. If Intel shipped SSDs that failed in a few months, they would be sacrificing the reputation of a $100+ billion company. That's the type of guarantee you want on your products.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[geekoid]

I noticed you ahd enough space to post the crappy IFL dig. Perhaps if you focused on the item at hand and not your political agenda you would have enough space?

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[agnosticnixie]

Yeah, although somehow even OCZ's JMicron drives have better reliability than most, however, for the better relialibility/safety option, the Vertex and Agility lines use Indilinx controllers, which should be perfect to use, although of course they still tend toward 2.5-3$ for the GB, not very useful unless you have a lot of budget and these requirements, or your laptop is ubiquitous (my case, I've had at least one dead hard drive for every laptop I've had, except this one, but I'm crossing my fingers as it's only on its first year and the fan already had to be replaced).

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[SectoidRandom]

I have to agree with all the other posts; Super Talent, Transcend? Who? I bought an Intel X-25, and after 4 months it's still going strong, though we'll see how it holds up in the next year.

Regardless I was not at all surprised by your statistic, and considering the relatively new age of SSD drive technology not at all surprised by your failure rate! I remember back in my days (many many days ago) of being a PC builder we would be surprised if we got less than a quarter of the IDE drives back within the first three months of sale! And these were not all the cheapest drives, we were using; Maxtor, Seagate, Fujitsu and the like (standard consumer drives).

You may find it also surprising that in my later years as a server engineer we expected roughly similar statistics from our server drives! To get a HP or Dell server with a 4-8 drives and not have at least one or two failures in the first few months was a BIG surprise!

SSD doesn't have to go very far to improve on those stats..

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[BikeHelmet]

Did you try out any Mtron drives?

Also, to whoever modded me troll a few days back for saying "HDDs are currently more reliable than SSDs" - LOLOL!

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[dangitman]

"Super Talent MasterDrive"
"Transcend"
"Patriot Warp"

That might be your problem right there. If these companies can't even think of a decent product name, what makes you think they'll be able to make a decent product?

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[dangitman]

When flash drives became available I talked my company into buying Supertalent 256 GB drive

Who the hell buys a product from a company named "Super Talent"?? I guess I have my answer now, but why they let you buy it is another mystery.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Ruie]

Who the hell buys a product from a company named "Super Talent"?? I guess I have my answer now, but why they let you buy it is another mystery.

A person who looked at their website, noticed that it is US based and has several high-end products. Back then it was the *ONLY* solid state drive in that capacity that did not cost more than $10K. And since when is it too much to expect for any disk drive to retain data for a few minutes ?

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Anonymous Coward]

Got a 32GB Super Talent MasterDrive for my Lenovo S10 - crapped out inside a month - sent back to Super Talent (to US from New Zealand) and they replaced quickly, but the new one crapped out inside 10 minutes, so got that replaced and sold the replacement. Don't know if it's an incompatibility with the S10 or what, but the S10 is fine with standard drives.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[dangitman]

A person who looked at their website, noticed that it is US based and has several high-end products.

Doesn't that make it worse? Asian companies are known for having terrible English-language brand names, but there must be some kind of super-incompetence for a US-based company to make the same mistake.

Back then it was the *ONLY* solid state drive in that capacity that did not cost more than $10K.

Didn't that raise any alarm bells for you? Did you not for one moment think that "lack of quality" might be the reason behind this massive price discrepancy? I mean, do you buy watches from street vendors claiming to have genuine Rolex watches, or what?

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Ruie]

Didn't that raise any alarm bells for you? Did you not for one moment think that "lack of quality" might be the reason behind this massive price discrepancy? I mean, do you buy watches from street vendors claiming to have genuine Rolex watches, or what?

First, there is a difference between a street vendor and a company that sell military grade products and has presence in the retail chain.

Secondly, it was still a rather high price - more than $2k when comparable disks of half the size went for $600. It is quite reasonable to assume that they just packed twice as many flash chips.

Lastly, I have generally good experience with US based companies, so it was surprising to find out that SuperTalent does not stand by their products, especially expensive ones. If they fixed the issue we would have ended up buying a lot more disks.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[dangitman]

Were you not suspicious of the "military grade" claims? Frankly, you're digging yourself further into a hole. It doesn't sound like you did any due diligence whatsoever - you just bought a product because it was cheaper without doing any research. To anybody with any experience, this scenario would have raised serious questions.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[tokul]

we did the "obvious" things like turning off atime updates

Does it include installing linux without swap partition and turning off paging file in WinXP?

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[jmcghie]

I have an Intel X-25-E that has been in use as the "System" drive on my Mac Pro since I bought it about March.

It holds the OS, the Applications, and the Page file (which is rarely troubled on this box).

So far: dramatically faster boot time and app launch times, and SMART currently tells me there is still nothing wrong with the SSD.

Whadda ya mean it's a sample of one? So you buy me some more, then... :-)

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Svartalf]

Okay...the aforementioned vendors I would trust to be able to do an "okay" job making SD or CF cards. Those are somewhat simpler with less need for precise timings, etc.

For RAM, for example, I'd consider Patriot dead last- it's the brand of last resort. The only Patriot memory that hasn't caused me problems is the "gamer" edition stuff I ended up getting stuck with a while back that got put into my GF's computer. It works and works well, much to my surprise.

The others...heh...I'd buy them for a hobby project at best. They're all strictly bottom tier for things like SSD's right at the moment.

Based upon your choices, it looks like you're trying to sell up the "cost" factor as well as the reliability. Do yourself an immense favor and get yourself a solid deal on an Intel, OCZ, or Samsung SSD instead of this stuff you're messing with right now. Seriously. There is, to the best of my and my employer's knowledge, no serious reliability issues with those brands in our evaluation of drives. They're just too costly, especially with SLC drives that we can get our modules NEBS certified with, for us to field in our product lineup right at the moment. The speed and reliability are amazing and the prices have just about hit where we can justify the expense and start slowly in-field replacing the drives and ship them in new systems as they go out the door.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Svartalf]

It's not so much that they're using a JMicron controller and more due to the vendors that use the controller tending to cut corners elsewhere as well.

All three of his vendor choices cut corners wherever they can to maximize their profits.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[Ruie]

Were you not suspicious of the "military grade" claims? Frankly, you're digging yourself further into a hole. It doesn't sound like you did any due diligence whatsoever - you just bought a product because it was cheaper without doing any research. To anybody with any experience, this scenario would have raised serious questions.

Anybody with experience would know that the best way to judge a product is to acquire a sample and test it. Which is exactly what we did. $2-3K is not that much money for a (claimed) working drive (compare with high-end fiber channel ones with much slower speeds), it is the refusal of the company to support their product that made sure we will never buy anything from them again.

And we did talk with the representatives (which seemed to know what they were doing) and looked at the more detailed benchmarks before buying the drive.

Interestingly enough, the reason for acquiring the large disk in the first place was that it was meant for a proprietary database full of legacy code that was Windows only. Apparently Windows has a tough time scaling up transactions per second over network protocols so one could not just get a Linux SAMBA server with enough RAM to store the entire working set - it had to be a standalone disk.

Re:chipset inside and utilization?

[newdsfornerds]

s/your/you're SLC? Salt Lake City?

Don't Defrag

[Anonymous Coward]

Make sure you turn of the scheduler for defragging in Windows or whatever OS you are using. Defragging those types of drives will effectively kill them.

Re:Don't Defrag

[NoYob]

Why?

Re:Don't Defrag

[golfbum]

defrag benefits hdd due to their long latency to retrieve widely separated block of info. ssds have essentially no latency therefore don't benefit by such reorganization. gb

Re:Don't Defrag

[Reece400]

Lots and lots of extra reads and writes, which are unnecessary as SSDs do not benefit from defragmentation.

Re:Don't Defrag

[gregthebunny]

Wow... Google much? http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/246283-32-defrag

Re:Don't Defrag

[Joce640k]

Ok, there's no speed advantage, but...

Is there a lifespan advantage to be had from moving all your files around the SSD once in a while?

eg. You could move the least-used cells to the most-used cells to even out the wear.

Re:Don't Defrag

[Zerth]

Is there a lifespan advantage to be had from moving all your files around the SSD once in a while?

eg. You could move the least-used cells to the most-used cells to even out the wear

Any {dr}ecent controller does wear leveling

Re:Don't Defrag

[TheRaven64]

There is, but that's why the controller does it for you. It does this based on how long it's been since a given block was written to, and it tries to consolidate infrequently-written blocks into the same cell. Running defrag messes up this heuristic.

Re:Don't Defrag

[daid303]

SSD can benefit from defragmentation. This because of the READ/WRITE MULTIPLE ATA commands, which transfer X blocks in a row. Of course the blocks need to be in a row then, hench the defrag.

The final speed increase will be pretty limited, but it could help. I would still recommend against it tough.

Re:Don't Defrag

[ballpoint]

[dr]ecent. Fixed that regex for you.

Re:Don't Defrag

[Anonymous Coward]

There is the smashing of ata commands (if your driver does it) also data recovery can be MUCH easier if you loose a drive. As the data is contiguous. That has saved my butt a few times over the years...

Another thing to keep in mind though is the ata commands are a layer upon the real drive commands. Then at that level the data may still be crazy fragmented. So it may not matter much at all.

I am on the fence with it though. My one half of me being obsessive compulsive and everything having to be 'in order'. With my practical side saying dont bother.

Defrag though with an SSD is much more of a 'oh once every other month' thing now.

Re:Don't Defrag

[Chris Mattern]

Because SSD memory elements have a limited number of times they can be written/erased to before they fail. Defrag programs generate lots and lots and LOTS of writes. And they're pointless on an SSD because fragmentation doesn't matter as you're not using a mechanical process to retrieve the data that would benefit from the data being all together.

Re:Don't Defrag

[eulernet]

Uh ? Did you read what a SSD does ?

To reduce wear levelling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling , the firmware remaps all the sectors with its own algorithm.
Logically, the sectors may appear consecutive, but physically, they are probably not.

Suppose that you have a log file, where a new line is appended every second.
The SSD will probably change its place at every write, to avoid rewriting at the same place, and this will be transparent for the OS.

So there is no 'contiguous' block, and defragmentation is simply useless.

Re:Don't Defrag

[Animaether]

Another reason defrag -can- help is that when a write operation is performed and chunks have to be stored, the drive will write to empty blocks first, which is fast, and to non-empty (but non-full, obviously) blocks second. This later mode is a bit slower because it has to read the entire block, insert the new data, then write out the new block, rather than just writing away directly.

I don't know if there's any really noticeable performance increase from this beyond benchmarks, though.

Re:Don't Defrag

[Abcd1234]

Uh ? Did you read what a SSD does ?

Did you actually read his post? Regardless of what the drive does underneath the covers, from the OS and disk controller standpoint, the disk is organized into contiguous blocks. If a file is fragmented at a logical level, multiple read/write commands need to be issued to controller in order to manipulate the data on the disk, whereas if the blocks are laid out linearly (again, from the disk controller's perspective), those operations can be done as single commands.

Really, what you want is an ATA command to say "take these two blocks and swap them" (or some sort of equivalent mechanism). On an SSD, this operation would only affect the logical representation, while on a real disk it would actually change the physical representation. You could then use those operations to "defrag" the disk, but in the case of an SSD, all you'd really do is end up reorganizing the logical layout... the physical blocks would never get touched.

Re:Don't Defrag

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps he was going for shell expansion with both terms at once?

Any {d,r}ecent controller...

Re:Don't Defrag

[Valdrax]

Except that "[]" is commonly used in writing to denote a change from the original word (whatever it was was) to "drecent," not "decent or recent". Using {} makes more sense because it denotes that you're doing something unusual that's not supported in normal English writing. Personally, I would've gone with "{d,r}" as the AC suggests or "(d|r)."

Re:Don't Defrag

[Anonymous Coward]

{dr}ecent. Fixed that set for you.

Re:Don't Defrag

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that's not entirely true - sequential read and write are still faster than random read and write on SSDs, most likely due to caching and block access. There's not nearly the perf hit as on physical drives, but it's still there.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=3

Re:Don't Defrag

[feepness]

tl;{dr}

Re:Don't Defrag

[amRadioHed]

On /. normal English is more unusual than regexps.

Re:Don't Defrag

[brantondaveperson]

the physical blocks would never get touched.

...Well apart from whatever physical block is used to store the logical mappings of course :)

Re:Don't Defrag

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote to GRC (Steve Gibson) support about using SpinRite on SSD in a blog post ( Solid state drive do's and dont's) and this is what they said:

        SpinRite was never designed for solid state media. So, we would not recommend running SpinRite on any solid state or flash drives.

        SpinRite will be of *no* help or benefit with non-magnetic drives. In fact, since the total number of writes to Solid State Drives is somewhat limited, you should neither run SpinRite *nor* defrag these drives. You *MUST* also not run a swap file on these drives since that will tend to burn them out quickly.

        Thank you for your cooperation, time and patience.

        Sincerely,

        Gibson Research
        Technical Support

Re:Don't Defrag

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a non issue for SSDs as seek latency is basically non-existent. There is near instant access to any page of the drive. That is why fragmentation on an SSD doesn't matter. Not to mention actively de-fragging one would help kill it quicker by throwing lots of unnecessary write cycles at the cells.

Re:Don't Defrag

[blackraven14250]

....which, with each change, would be written to a different block...

Re:Don't Defrag

[Anonymous Coward]

But, in that case, how does it know where to find the logical mappings block? Is it turtles all the way down?

The 60 and 120GB drives

[rolfwind]

in my everyday desktop are working fine since January, and they are the most used drives of the system, the smaller one being used to boot the system and store programs, the other storing program data and some DBs.

Re:The 60 and 120GB drives

[BikeHelmet]

Manufacturer, Model, and Controller(if you know it) please!

Early days for consumer SSDs

[Anonymous Coward]

When they've been making the damn things for as long as the spinning-rust disks, we will see. I suspect when they get the flash right and the manufacturing processes and the real-world support with TRIM and such things will get better than they could be with spinning rust. But consumer SSDs are currently behind and if you're actually buying for reliability SSDs are NOT there in the consumer space.

Re:Early days for consumer SSDs

[initdeep]

you mean the real world support for TRIM in Windows 7 and supported in Indilinx and Intel controllers?

the one that has been recently tested out on Anandtech and shown to have very positive results?

oh yeah, that one.

Re:Early days for consumer SSDs

[tolan-b]

There's no public trim on the Intel controllers yet.

Do you mean the experimental trim support in the beta Indilinx firmwares that caused data corruption when your computer went into sleep? Great! Those drivers got pulled for obvious reasons.

The offline 'trim' doesn't count btw, it's not using the trim command and you have to run it manually periodically rather than it running automatically when the disk's idle.

Trim will be great but don't pretend it's available.

Re:Early days for consumer SSDs

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he means the public TRIM on Intel controllers. Can we stop pretending now?

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=17485

Re:Early days for consumer SSDs

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no public trim on the Intel controllers yet.

Do you mean the experimental trim support in the beta Indilinx firmwares that caused data corruption when your computer went into sleep? Great! Those drivers got pulled for obvious reasons.

The offline 'trim' doesn't count btw, it's not using the trim command and you have to run it manually periodically rather than it running automatically when the disk's idle.

Trim will be great but don't pretend it's available.

Well according to the release notes, the Intel X25-M supports the ATA trim command. "offline" trim is only for windows xp and vista

See for your self:
http://downloadmirror.intel.com/17485/eng/Release%20Notes%202.0.doc

Re:Early days for consumer SSDs

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no public trim on the Intel controllers yet.

Actually Intel released it yesterday as an firmware update for their G2 SSD's.

It allows native Trimming in non raid setup in Windows 7, and also offers a tool to manually run a Trim on XP & Vista.

Re:Early days for consumer SSDs

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably means the TRIM firmware updates discussed on Anandtech from:

• Intel*
• Crucial
• SuperTalent
• OCZ

* Admittedly, Intel's pulled theirs temporarily due to issues.

Re:Early days for consumer SSDs

[Anonymous Coward]

On the Intel? Yes, there is.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/10/27/1427209/Intel-Updates-SSDs-Supports-TRIM-Faster-Writes

Do you even read this site?

Re:Early days for consumer SSDs

[tolan-b]

I do apologise for being several hours out of date!

If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[joocemann]

then to say "Some are reporting bad blocks, others just crapped out and stopped responding entirely..." is misleading.

You know the numbers, so tell them. If the total is 3, then you can't use a plural for two separate types of failures "some this, others that". That is just logically impossible if the number of failures is 3. Think about it.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[NoYob]

then to say "Some are reporting bad blocks, others just crapped out and stopped responding entirely..." is misleading.

You know the numbers, so tell them. If the total is 3, then you can't use a plural for two separate types of failures "some this, others that". That is just logically impossible if the number of failures is 3. Think about it.

I think all of us understood what the poster meant.

Think about it.

That's a condescending thing to say. Whenever someone says "Think about it", it's always with the air of superiority - as if they have this insight that the lesser people haven't seen or unable to see.

My response to that order is "I'll spend every waking moment thinking about it." - then I forget about it.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[PaladinAlpha]

What if one of them reported bad blocks and then "crapped out" afterwards? Wouldn't that mean two of them reported two bad blocks, and then two crapped out entirely, resulting in a total of three? Set theory. Think about it.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[NeutronCowboy]

Off-topic comment: "Think about it" does not indicate insight that others can't see or don't have. On the contrary, it indicates that the insight is something derived from something that you already have, and that you can reach just like everyone else.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[wtbname]

Nah, he's right.

"Think about it." *is* condescending, and completely unnecessary to make your point. Think about it.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed. the lame part is people modded OP up as if he did have some "insight". yes its obvious one problem happened to 2 of the drives and the other to 1, but it changes just about nothing at all. we all make mistakes. and no, im not new here. and i started that sentence with and.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[geekoid]

A,B,C

A,B had bad blocks, and then a little while latter B,C failed.

You are assuming 1 problem per drive.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[joocemann]

The term 'others' used as a plural to describe the second case is a word that definitively excludes the prior. Thanks for trying.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[joocemann]

The word 'others' excludes the prior.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're reading something that isn't in the original message. Just because 3 of 8 failed within 4 months, doesn't mean that the other 5 are still alive and well.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[joocemann]

I can't help but think how spineless and insecure you and the original guy must be to actually think that is condescending.

You guys really should grow a pair and enter the world of manhood.

Yeah, now I'm kinda trolling, but I'm really just pointing out the obvious. If something that simple and clear is viewed as 'condescending' I'd hate to know how you cowards/insecure-bimbos take any real commentary or criticism in life Think about it.

I don't care how old you are, your response tells me your manhood rests around 14.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[wtbname]

I'd hate to know how you cowards/insecure-bimbos take any real commentary or criticism in life

Oh Hypocrisy, thy name is thee.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[joocemann]

I'd hate to know how you cowards/insecure-bimbos take any real commentary or criticism in life

Oh Hypocrisy, thy name is thee.

Oh insecurity, present thyself to me.

Stfu crybaby. You think "Think about it" is condescending. Are you hormonal?

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[wtbname]

Name calling threshold exceeded! Activating counter-measures! ...

You are consistently an arrogant condescending jerk.

If you don't know this already, you're not looking.

Welcome to the truth.

I'd spank you if you were my son, adult or not I'd make sure you learned RESPECT.

I'll first let you know that I have much education in cellular/molecular biology; I am qualified to explain this rather elementary biological concept.

I will try to keep this simple:

Let me know if this is clear enough. I can reword or dig up some literature for you if necessary.

Intuition and knowledge = answers.

Please don't tell me you're so naive you don't realize these things about business and politics.

Dude, cherry picking articles that are convenient to preserve ignorant opinion won't get you far with me.

And those are just from the first 10 results. I've informed you plenty; from here you can accept new information and begin to learn, or you can ignore it

Stfu crybaby.

lol.. boy are you blind and selfish.

There is an old term called 'think outside the box', though I doubt you've got the vision to truly do so in this case. I'm sorry.

Would it be wrong for me to think you may be insecure?

You are also a raging hypocrite.

The day we stop acknowledging race and sex is the day we will find equality.

Are you hormonal?

cowards/insecure-bimbos

enter the world of manhood.

your manhood rests around 14.

From here I assume you will become irrational so I will leave this conversation now.

What a copout. Quit, go ahead. That way you won't have to prove anything.

So, in closing:

Thanks for being a douche, I love it when you attack me and pretend I'm stupid.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[joocemann]

Will you not regard the posts that I am responding to in those quotes? Will you always be offended by plain stated facts? At what point are you NOT offended by things people say? Do I have to say pretty please with sugar on top before you think something is normal? Please...

Hate me if you like, but its your spine that makes you feel hurt. For lack of having walked barefoot, some people think it hurts to do so. For lack of experiencing true evil, some feel the trivial actions of others to be abhorring. I'm sorry you're hurt so easily, really. I can't change that --- only you have the power to change your perception.

Ciao.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[wtbname]

Does "Ciao." mean you give up?

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[joocemann]

Does "Ciao." mean you give up?

Did you want me to? I did give up on the thought that you would ever understand what I'm saying.

Re:If you are talking about 3 that failed...

[wtbname]

It must be so taxing, no one understanding you.

How do you get through your days? And nights?

Do you think about your mother? Your father?

Manufacturers / Drive Info

[adisakp]

Can you at least tell us which 3 of your 8 drives failed ? Perhaps there is some similarity in controller or Flash memory used?

FWIW, I have 2 of the Intel Drives and 1 OCZ drive and I haven't seen any problems.

Re:Manufacturers / Drive Info

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I was the guy that posted the original question. Thanks for your response. I didn't give details simply due to space constraints. The drives were:

1. FHM16GF25H = Super Talent MasterDrive 16GB under linux
2. Transcend TS32GSSD25-M under Windows/XP
3. Patriot Warp v2 32GB under Ubuntu 8.04 with ext3

The machines were not super heavily loaded (i.e., no compiles 24/7), and we did the "obvious" things like turning off atime updates to the filesystems, etc.

Re:Manufacturers / Drive Info

[jandrese]

Maybe the lesson should be: Don't buy crappy JMicron based SSD drives? In fact that's a good lesson for anybody who's looking to buy SSD drives.

Re:Manufacturers / Drive Info

[izomiac]

I think it's more a matter of what's important to you. I'm quite satisfied with my JMicron drive despite its faults. OTOH, I was well aware of what I was buying, and figured the random write performance and lack of capacity wasn't that big of an issue for me, whereas performance in all other areas and lowered power consumption were a great improvement for my laptop. So it was well worth the $50 I spent on it.

My anecdote: I've have a 30 GB OCZ Core V2 since December and haven't really had any serious problems with it. Partition alignment seems to be important since I did have some minor stutter on the one partition that was misaligned. OTOH, that was my Vista install so it might not have been the drive. I've installed Gentoo three or four times (everything compiled except for open office), Vista about five times, Win7 Beta, RC, then Retail, and maybe a dozen builds of Haiku. Performance has always been quite good except on the misaligned Vista install, and even then it was acceptable after tweaking. I have never noticed any data loss (or symptoms of it), but IMHO it's far better suited as a cost effective higher performance boot drive rather than long term storage.

There also is a firmware update available that apparently fixes a lot of the well known problems, and many people have reported success with it. Unfortunately, OCZ has announced that they will not release or support any updates for Core V2s, which kinda makes ya wonder why they advertised them as upgradable.

Re:Manufacturers / Drive Info

[Anonymous Coward]

You got what you paid for! Google is your friend next time. Do NOT buy JMicron based SSD drives. They are crap!

Go with Intel preferably. At the minimum, use Indilinx based drives.

Re:Manufacturers / Drive Info

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at those brand names, they are all ching-chong shit.

No problems here...

[thesameguy]

I've got a pair of Dell Mini 9s, one with a 4gb SSD and the other a 32gb. Neither have had problems, although they only see maybe 1-2 hours of use daily. We also run a pair of Dell XPS laptops - one 1340, one 1640, both with the 128gb Samsung (IIRC) SSDs. Those systems are on and working 6-10 hours a day every day, no problems. All four of these systems run XP; the 4gb Mini 9 runs a lightened version. I've also got a home-built HTPC made out of mostly ASUS components running Win7RC on a Patriot 64gb SSD. It's on 24x7, though never sees heavy use - just streaming movies from various places. It's been flawless as well. I've not heard of any SSD reliability grand conspiracy - maybe your users have personal magnetic fields that disrupt the traditional and proper flow of electrons?

Re:No problems here...

[jaavaaguru]

Similar story here... I have a Dell Mini 9 with a 16GB SSD (running Ubuntu). It's turned on all the time, and sees about 10 hours of heavy use per day. I've not had any problems with the SSD (yet).

Linus says...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html

He sorta knows what he's talking about more often than a random average slashdotter.

Re:Linus says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, that blog post is more than a year old at this point and the landscape has changed quite a bit since then..

Re:Linus says...

[commodore64_love]

All Linus did was provide *initial quality* of the gadget. That tells us nothing about long-term user. Perhaps his shiny new Intel drive will fail next year.

Aside -

I have two traditional hard drives in my PC. They've been running almost-nonstop since 2003. Any idea how much longer I have until they crash?

Re:Linus says...

[i.am.delf]

I also bought a 80gb Intel SSD. I agree that it absolutely lives up to the hype. I use it day in and day out on my desktop since March 2009. I have been running Windows 7 beta through release on it. I have had zero problems and zero performance degradation so far. I run games and I run normal productivity software. Nothing fancy, but it does see about 10 hours per day of use. With that in mind it only take a cursory review of SSD articles to find that not all SSDs are created equal. Many are really crap because of bad controllers or flash cells that were not designed for use in an SSD.

Re:Linus says...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, forgot about the passage of time. I couldn't find this more recent article from jeff atwood when I first posted it.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001304.html

With ssd right now, the manufacturer makes a big difference in quality and reliability.

Re:Linus says...

[skeeto]

Websense blocks that here,

Content blocked by your organization

Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Sex.
URL: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html

WTF?!

Re:Linus says...

[that IT girl]

Right about... -checks watch- ... now.

(I won't get a response, obviously, since he's too busy replacing his old hard drive with an Intel SSD.)

Re:Linus says...

[billtom]

Note that the Torvalds article referenced is one year old (2 Oct 2008). The SSD space has, of course, changed a lot in the past year.

Re:Linus says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... that post is from last year...
He did update it after 5 months of use http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/03/ssd-followup.html

Re:Linus says...

[Anonymous Coward]

blogspot has a fair amount of NSFW material.

Re:Linus says...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a random average slashdotter, you insensitive clod.

Re:Linus says...

[skeeto]

I can get to Blogspot, as well as other Blogspot blogs. It's just Linus's that's blocked under "sex".

Re:Linus says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably related to the massive amount of comment spam, which likely includes links to porn sites and/or viagra, etc.

Re:Linus says...

[Anonymous Coward]

The obvious next step is for kdawson to post an article about Microsoft secretly paying Websense to hate all over Linux

Re:Linus says...

[vsny]

The blog post does not mention a quantitative, rigorous reliability study. With regards to the topic in question, I don't think it is any more informative than feedback from the random average slashdotter.

I suppose it is interesting nonetheless.

Re:Linus says...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I do, because:

1) He has proof that he's not an idiot when it comes to low level systems.
2) His use case probably exceeds that of most people here ( lots of diffs, patches, small random io, git usage, ect). If it works for his desktop, it will work for yours.

Re:Linus says...

[Briareos]

The page has deteriorated with spam comments so it's now about 3% article, 7% on-topic comments and 90% SPAM, most of which is of the "undecipherable asian characters" variety...

np: The Beatles - A Day In The Life (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

Re:Linus says...

[Abreu]

It is blocked here too, but for a far more benign reason:

Content blocked by your organization

Reason:This Websense category is filtered: Social Networking and Personal Sites.

URL:http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html

Re:Linus says...

[BitZtream]

Yea, but he's Finnish, so being drunk all the time makes him about as reliable as any Windows user.

Next you'll start comparing hot girls to the Swedish Bikini team. /me ducks

Re:Linus says...

[Anonymous Coward]

I write and test defragmentation software, insensitive clod.

Re:Linus says...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

2) His use case probably exceeds that of most people here

I am neither insensitive, nor am I a clod. At very worst, I am a sensitive sophisticate. I'd explain myself in further detail, but I am too busy saving whales from greenpeace while wearing a top hat, monocle and blowing smoke rings with my cigarette holder.

Those bastards will just waste the opportunity to harvest precious ambergris!

Re:Linus says...

[vsny]

I'm sorry, this is not a very convincing argument.

This is not a statistically significant, rigorous accelerated life test. These are standard use conditions, over a short period of time, taken with a population of 1.

Re:Linus says...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

No, no no. I'm not saying one persons opinion is better than a rigorous study. I am saying that this one man's opinion is better than most other individual's opinions.

Re:My experience with Flash SSD?

[adisakp]

USB connected drives are painfully slow compared to SATA (or eSATA) connected drives. SATA HD's are quite a bit slower than a good SATA SSD.

However, I'm not sure how your post is on topic since your slow USB HD experience has very little to do with the longevity of SSD's ?!?

Why the CF bulb hate?

[sakdoctor]

I don't know where people have been getting their compact fluorescent bulbs, but I've never experienced one actually wear out since they came on the market.
I think they are mostly Philips.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Dunkirk]

Lowes. I can't stand the light they give off, so I only use them on the outside garage fixtures that our neighborhood covenant requires that I leave on all night. (They're on a light-sensing switch.) Despite the promises, they manage to only last about a year or two. While this is dreadfully short of their supposed life, it's a lot longer than the couple of months that conventials were lasting in the same fixtures, which is why I switched. I guess external applications don't count.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[scorp1us]

I had one catastrophic bulb failure - the glass actually burned up or something. Big brown stain on it and it ceased to function suddenly.

Aside from that every bulb I've had coming up on 3 years now is still in commission or was decommissioned for a higher intensity bulb. I am now up to using 120w equiv (30w) bulbs. in some places. 100w equiv in others, and 60w (13w) for outside nighttime lighting. Even exposed to the elements (in a housing) these bulbs still last a long time.

I was really surprised recently to pick up 2 100w for $4.56 combined.
I really like the "nvision" brand - they seem to fit better and last fine.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[NotQuiteReal]

I bought some flood-light type bulb replacements from a big box store (Lowes or Home Depot, I forget which). The bulb looked like a flood light, but you could see it was just a curly CFL inside.

The bulbs were purchased about 18 months ago, so I assume they were "modern".

I hated them. They were slow to start, and had a terrible pink cast to them until they warmed up over 5 to 10 minutes. I was both surprised and glad that they lasted less than a year (maybe 1500 hours on them).

To be fair, I do have some regular CFL bulbs behind a couch that come on fast, run cool and look fine.

I think the CFL Hate comes from a couple of directions, first, some may have had bad experiences like me (or just not like the quality of the light). The other reason for the hate is just the idea that they may be mandated, and the ensuing slippery slope arguments that follow.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I have yet to replace any of mine either, and there are some that I've turned on and off several times a day for years now. A lot of the evidence in that article sounds pretty circumstantial. The only thing I'd take at face value was the RPI testing, which found that 80% of the bulbs lived up to their advertising.

As far as SSDs go, I bought a very cheap 32GB drive off eBay from some Shanghai-based reseller. It was primarily an experiment, and a way to keep my old Thinkpad X40 relevant for another year or two. So far it's lasted half a year, so if it continues for another 6 months or longer I'll consider the experiment successful.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[PitaBred]

Depends a LOT on the quality of wiring and electricity that you have. CF bulbs have integrated electronics to get the power to what is needed to light up. If your house power is running out of spec, they can fail pretty quickly. Since an incandescent bulb has a large range of voltage that it'll respond and light up in, there's no problem with them in places with dirtier power.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[hamburgler007]

Definitely depends on the brand you get, the quality and lifespan of the bulb can vary dramatically. If you get the cheap ones from home despot, they last a good amount of time, but they take forever to reach their full brightness.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a dozen CF bulbs go out on me... each of them in a smokey, poofy death. Yep, I also see the brown burn stain inside the glass and sometimes goig down into the housing for the circuitry. I do not think I've saved much $$$ yet.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[tonyreadsnews]

Same here, that last comment made me think the question a bit trollish. This sort of thing happens with all products including incandescent bulbs, but I don't see any mention of that.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Brett Buck]

I have used Philips and GE - both have an average lifetime of around 9 months in my applications.

        Brett

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[commodore64_love]

I have 3 Lights of America CFLs laying right next to me. They started flickering only a few months after install, and died less than a year later. They should have lasted at least 5 years according to the warranty.

My GE CFLs come on nice-and-bright but they are limited in usage, because they are "swirls" and most of my lights don't accept swirls. They require traditional round bulbs.

My Philips CFLs provide that nice round bulb, but they are slow to reach full brightness, which is rather annoying. The 60-watt-equivalent bulb hanging upside-down in my kitchen is sometimes so dim, it looks like a brown dwarf star... barely any light at all.

In brief:
- CFLs hate temperature extremes. CFLs hate dimmers. CFLs hate being turned on and off.
- The savings on CFLs is trivial. I'm not seeing smaller monthly bills.
- In fact I'm actually *wasting* money because of failed experiments with the LOA and Philips bulbs.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[TheRaven64]

I've had about half of mine fail so far. Mind you, I bought them about ten years ago, so I'm quite happy with that failure rate. I generally have to replace one every 6-12 months. I'm not sure when the last failure was; the electricity company sent me two through the post about a year ago and I haven't used either of them yet, so it must be over a year, but that's quite unusual. This is in a house with wiring from the '50s (which is badly in need of replacing).

They do lose brightness over time, however. I generally combat this by moving the oldest ones into lamps and leaving the newest ones as room lights.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Leaving a CFL turned on for less than 15 minutes at a time lowers the life expectancy. It's something to do with the inverter not warming up completely, I don't remember exactly.
I had several CFLs die within 1-2 years, as opposed to their advertised long life. I did some research and then changed my usage patterns. I installed an incandescent in the bathroom for the quick in-and-out. In the rest of the rooms, I will leave the light on when I leave, then turn it off when I have re-entered and exited the room again. Since making these changes over 2 years ago, none of the CFLs have died.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[valhallaprime]

It really depends on the brand of the bulb. I've had a few Philips that were bought in the 90's, used every night dusk till dawn outside, and they lasted 10+ years. In our school dorms, I replaced a few spots in the common area with a few of the older looped (not squared-off) Ikea 11W'ers. Light's are on 24/7/365. 6 of the 8 are at 2+ years now, that's almost 20,000 hours, on -already used- bulbs.

We replaced all the hall lights in the dorms with 13 watt and 20 watt CFL's, for a total of about 45 bulbs. All GE brand....4 have failed after 18 months of 24/7/365. The rest are still going strong. That's still way above their spec of 8,000hrs IIRC.

I've used a few FEIT and Lights Across America. One LAA had a "bad failure", where the ballast base actually started smoking. The FEIT's had a pretty wide range of color temp, for being the same model.

For organizations such as ourselves where we have areas that need to be lit 24/7/365, the savings are very easily calculated. In the 24/7 sockets, with myself and a student worker volunteering our time to purchase and install the bulbs, the cost of the bulb payed for itself in electric savings (city industrial rate, $0.141/kwh) in less than 5 weeks, over the 65W incan floods they replaced. Crazy.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[guruevi]

Well, a lot of people get crap stuff from Wal-Mart or so. Philips actually makes good stuff. I have some Philips LED spotlights and although they are expensive ($30/bulb) they are great (about the same as a halogen) and they last while I have heard many stories about people getting $5-10 bulbs that are blue, don't give off any light and burn out in less than a year.

It's always the crappy companies that give new technology a bad rap. The same goes for smartphones, a lot of people I know don't like smartphones because their capabilities are grossly overstated (Blackberry, Symbian and other locked phones) and slow (Windows Mobile) while they don't have many of the apps that are touted by the carriers (unless you pay $10/app + over-the-top data charges like paying for individual e-mails received). However Android phones and the iPhone has changed a lot of that but people can't try the good ones out because they're locked to a crappy carrier with 2 year contracts.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have to agree.

I've been using CFLs for 8 years and have yet to replace a bulb.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[commodore64_love]

So how many billions of dollars will U.S. and EU citizens waste trying to get their wiring up to spec? Sounds like the typical "penny wise; dollar foolish" paradigm. Rather than helping save money or the environment, I predict CFLs will end-up being worse.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[GameMaster]

Actually, light bulb manufacturers are known for gaming their life-span specs by doing things like testing in carefully controlled conditions which don't represent reality (for example, they tend to test the bulbs well below standard room temperature because it, dramatically, extends the life-span). On the other hand, you are right that the even if the testing were 100% honest, it really doesn't take into account the variable temperatures and humidity of an outdoor environment (or, for that matter bathrooms with showers an over the stove hood fixtures).

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Mashiki]

Luminosity is terrible in a lot of them. They're too washed out even the 'ultra brights'. You can see the flicker, as well as the cycle pulse from the bulb. Which in my case leads to terrible earth shattering migraines. Anything smaller then a 4ft florescent tube does the same thing, and those are pushing it.

I could go on but most of it for me is either health/mental related. Take a head injury that messes up with your eyes and the world becomes a new and interesting place.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[jandrese]

In my experience, build quality matters a lot with CFLs. No-name dollar store (or Walmart!) CFLs are almost uniformly terrible with slow start times, inconsistent colors, and short lives. The ones that Home Depot sells appear to be quite good however, and I have been very happy with them, having replaced just about every light in my house and in my mother-in-laws house and only had 2 early deaths so far. Many of these bulbs are going on 5+ years old now and still come on just as fast and bright as ever.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Ksevio]

I'm with you there- I've had one in my desk lamp for several years now and it's still going fine.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[GameMaster]

If they're smart, and like all the standard electronic amenities that most people do, they'll spend the money. It isn't just CF bulbs that die early from poor power sources. TVs, DVD players, stereos, PCs, and any other electronic device can all meet early deaths because of dirty power. Many people don't even realize this and just think they're "cursed" when buying electronics. It'd be interesting to see someone do some research to see how much money is lost every year do to prematurely destroyed electronics equipment and whether fixing all the houses with poor power sources might be a major source of environmental improvement in it's own right.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[GameMaster]

It also depends on the quality of the power delivered to your house as well as the wiring in the house. Of course, if your electricity is dirty enough it can be killing all your electronics devices, not just your CF bulbs.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Guppy]

I bought some flood-light type bulb replacements from a big box store (Lowes or Home Depot, I forget which). The bulb looked like a flood light, but you could see it was just a curly CFL inside.

The bulbs were purchased about 18 months ago, so I assume they were "modern".

I hated them. They were slow to start, and had a terrible pink cast to them until they warmed up over 5 to 10 minutes. I was both surprised and glad that they lasted less than a year (maybe 1500 hours on them).

The nVision brand floodlights? Although their regular lamps are pretty good, I've had a similar problems with their 120w-equivalents floods, they start especially dimly and slowly compared to other CFLs. I bought 4 bulbs and one failed within a week. BTW, I believe the pink cast at start mostly comes from the Argon base gas in the bulb.

Anyway, I've found Phillips CFL floodlights work much, much better. I recently had one in a main Hallway ceiling, one of the old triple U-tube kind. It finally burned out, and I discovered the receipt when changing the bulb -- I had kept it as an experiment to see how long it lasted. Remember Hechinger's hardware stores, that went bankrupt in '99? I bought the bulb during their bankruptcy sale, that's how long it lasted.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've already "burned" through 3 mercury filled CFL's. I don't like the freq at which the lights operate at either as they conflict with the freq of my LCD. We know that they don't last forever, but if we could just get our ROI out of the damned things, I'd be happy. Hopefully LED lights will continue to come down in price, so that I can upgrade. :)

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[commodore64_love]

>>>We replaced all the hall lights in the dorms with 13 watt and 20 watt CFL's

CFLs? Or just standard fluorescent tubes? The halls in Penn State's dorms were all ~3 feet long tube-lights, not CFLs

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

And as you (and others) are telling these stories about Unsatisfactory CFLs, the environmentalists are going "La la la we can't hear you."

I bought a hybrid car are few years ago, and of course started hanging-out with our green-thinking people, and it amazes me how close-minded these types are. If I say something like, "my car's battery drained empty last week," or "Yeah my CFLs only lasted 6 months," they literally start insulting me and saying I'm at fault. They don't want to hear anything negative.

So "la la la" they go with their fingers stuck in their ears.

Sounds like Linux when I complain that my Wifi card or GPU don't work.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Kozz]

I don't know where people have been getting their compact fluorescent bulbs, but I've never experienced one actually wear out since they came on the market.
I think they are mostly Philips.

Purely anecdotal... back in 2005 my city was offering energy saving credits for taxpayers... you could choose from CFLs, blankets for your water heater, and other things I forget. We got a big handful of high-quality CFL bulbs (yes, Philips, I believe) and they've been great. I've taken them with me through two moves since then and have only replaced about half of them. Not bad for four years.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't stand the light they give off

Are you using the 2700k "soft white" bulbs? Those are the ones that will most closely emulate the light from an incandescant. It's also more pleasant when the bulb itself is hidden behind a lampshade or fixture.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Firethorn]

So how many billions of dollars will U.S. and EU citizens waste trying to get their wiring up to spec?

Another question would be how many billions of dollars of equipment replacement/repair will be saved? Incandescent bulbs are pretty tough; but what about the electronics in your computer, TV, microwave, refridgerator, etc?

I installed a water softener because by my calculations it'll save me money by increasing the lifespans of my water heater, dish and clothes washers. Not to mention the time and cleaning agents saved trying to clean up the deposits around my faucets.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[SoftwareArtist]

I began converting to CFLs about eight years ago, and have been using them almost exclusively for several years. I have never had a single one burn out, not even the ones I've been using every day for eight years. Maybe I've just been lucky. More likely, though, it means my electricity isn't too noisy, that I've been getting good quality bulbs (though most of them are from Costco and Home Depot, which are some of the very cheapest places I've found to get them), or that I actually follow the instructions about not using "non-dimmable" ones on circuits with dimmers or timers. I've also been impressed by the improvement in quality over that time. Modern CFLs truly come on instantly with no flicker (though it does take about a minute for them to reach full brightness), and I can't tell the difference between the light they produce and that from incandescents.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Ardipithecus]

They are not recommended for light sensor switches, I have tried to prove them wrong, but failed (within days) at my expense. Surprised they have lasted you that long.

All the others are on normal switches, not one failure in ~3 years.

All GE Daylight (6500K, Wally World), which is too blue, will try 5500Ks from HD; the regular ones are ~2500K and just too yellow.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[valhallaprime]

>>>CFLs? Or just standard fluorescent tubes? The halls in Penn State's dorms were all ~3 feet long tube-lights, not CFLs

Our dorms were almost entirely 65W incan floods. Crazy, right?

Every double and quad also has a 6.5 GPM (measured) YMCA style showerhead too, with electric waterheaters. Now that's ridiculous. Replaced one floor of 10 doubles with 2.2 GPM showerheads, $500-$650 lower powerbills PER MONTH for the floor (20 residents), depending on the inlet water temperature, which varies with the seasons. Showerheads paid for themselves in 3 weeks.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[RightSaidFred99]

Uhh, why do you need a wifi card? You probably brought the cheapest no-name brand you can find. And probably the company that sells it has crappy closed-source or non-existent drivers. Buy a better wifi card or just use wired Ethernet. Or why can't you use a USB wifi card? You probably just didn't get the right version of the module.

As for your GPU, it should work. You _do_ know that we Linux people don't have that shitty DirectX stuff, but you should be able to run OpenGL apps. Again, the drivers from the vendors are shitty but if you know what you're doing you can get it to work.

Haha. Yes, I'm joking.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Skweetis]

I live in an area that isn't serviced by an electric company, so I have a small solar array. My power is always a perfectly clean 117 volts at the wall (at least until my inverter fails, I guess). I still have all of the CF bulbs I bought 15 years ago at $30 each. A friend who has normal electrical service bought some of the same ones at the same time, and none of them lasted more than three years. So, yeah, electrical quality is important.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Lord Kano]

I too can see the flicker from low luminosity and early CF bulbs. I used to get horrible headaches from them. I was able to overcome this by getting brighter bulbs than I'd otherwise need.

One need not experience head trauma, all you need is a pair of sensitive eyes.

LK

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try halogen bulbs, they should last longer than incandescents (and apparently CFLs in this application). They make them with conventional screw sockets if you look hard enough. You don't get any power savings though, which sucks.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[serbanp]

Can anyone state with a straight face that the light CCFLs make is as good as the one out of halogens or even incandescents? Reading printed material (you know, books) under CCFL lighting is still straining the eyes, despite all the recent marketing gimmicks ("daylight-like", "natural", "warm" etc).

Good thing the gov. people came to their senses and, while banning the regular incandescents, will still allow better-efficiency versions.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[cheesybagel]

Sure, buy cheap and shitty CFLs and they will go out on you fast if you keep turning them on/off very frequently. Cheap CFLs also often have lousy color and are often purplish or pink. You get what you pay for. CFLs are not supposed to be used in these kinds of applications anyway: e.g. I use halogen bulbs in the bathroom and CFLs in the office. If you use an LCD screen you are most likely using a CFL and probably do not even realize it.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[thogard]

There is an ISO standard for testing bulbs. To get a 6000 hr rating, 1/2 the bulbs must last 6000 hours. The other half can die with in seconds of the start of the test and they can all be dead at 6001 hours. Also the lights only have to produce some light at 6000 hours but that can be 1/100th of their rated level and it would still pass.

Re:Why the CF bulb hate?

[GameMaster]

Yes, there are a number of standards including one by UL. The problem is in the details of those standards. If the standard calls for, or allows, a 60 degree F ambient temperature then it will artificially extend the life of the bulbs being tested by a significant amount. The devil is in the details.

I Don't think they have been proven yet.

[olddoc]

I LOVE my flash drives in my desktop (OCZ) and Thinkpad (Samsung) I'd hate to go back to legacy spinny storage, but I had 2 USB flash drives crap out recently. A 32GB OCZ and a 1GB no name recently failed without being abused. I would be hesitant to place consumer ssds where there is no backup in place or where replacement is an issue. The CFL reliability story is apropos: it is easy to slap a 10,000 hr rating on a bulb or a 1,000,000 hr MTBF rating on a SSD. In the real world, it might not work that way.

Like with the CF bulbs, cheap = not good.

[Kenja]

Cheap SSD drives fail more often then good, expensive ones. This is not shocking news. Or at least it shouldn't be. But the vast majority of consumers never look past the capacity and purchase price.

Re:Like with the CF bulbs, cheap = not good.

[RiotingPacifist]

When stuff has come down in price over time because of improved manufacturing et al, it will usually have a fairly good quality (see cheap ATA drives), when it starts cheap it will have a high failure rate because not enough was invested in manufacture/design/testing.

tl;dr Cheap new stuff, last less time than Cheap old stuff, news at 11

Re:Like with the CF bulbs, cheap = not good.

[QuantumRiff]

Cheap memory will fail more often than good, expensive memory. People seem to forget that SSD's are alot more like Memory, then Hard drives.

Re:Like with the CF bulbs, cheap = not good.

[Anonymous Coward]

I dislike the comments which generally say: "you get what you pay for"

Because the poster paid for new hard drives that should last longer then 4 months. To suggest that this is acceptable (on average) for new SSD drives at any cost is ridiculous.

I don't ask my buddy how much he paid for his car when it completely stops working while still under warranty. Instead I think that maybe there is something wrong with the way that company is putting together their car and/or how they preform quality control for their production.

For SSD you pay for things like larger size, faster speed, connection type and longer warranty, etc.

You don't have to pay for a product that will work. That is a given.
Also, you don't have to pay extra to expect a product to last as long as the warranty. This is also a given.
  * unless you happen to be selling the XBox from Microsoft.

This guy is getting broken drives over what he calls "normal usage". The cheapest of all SSD should offer that as a minimum.

Please stop suggesting that it is the consumers fault for not throwing more money at the problem before the problem was known.

Reminds me of...

[jeffmeden]

Sounds like you are unfamiliar with what a product warranty is for. Complex products (especially new ones) are going to fail at a pretty good rate. If it breaks, get it replaced. This serves you (you get a new, working one) and the vendor (they get to figure out why it broke and avoid it in the future.)

I could dig up a dozen recent "reviews" of traditional hard drives where the reviewer claimed an outrageous failure rate. Yep, magnetic platter disks just aren't ready for prime time, just like compact fluorescent light bulbs. Better go back to a gas lamp and a punch card, those sure are reliable.

Re:Reminds me of...

[TheSHAD0W]

Of course, it also means the vendor gets a copy of whatever is on the drive... Confidential company information, personal data, furry pr0n...

Re:Reminds me of...

[jeffmeden]

Of course, it also means the vendor gets a copy of whatever is on the drive... Confidential company information, personal data, furry pr0n...

Clever, in a completely unrelated way. What if a company (say they were operating out of a country not completely allied with the US) were to create a SSD device that had logic to "incapacitate" itself at some rate after it had been used to store enough information, before the warranty had expired, and not often enough (across the population) to raise suspicion. The disk could be a sort of new age Trojan horse, sneaking in, and back out with valuable, undetected all the while.

Re:Reminds me of...

[geekoid]

So? if they were to look at it or use it in any way they would shortly stop getting orders.

Re:Reminds me of...

[AzureDiamond]

It's an interesting idea, and I actually modded you up for it with another account. However I don't think it would actually work. Consider.

A Chinese company make SSDs designed to fail. They ship them to the US. Now most people have no data which is particularly useful so you get back stacks of failed disks and scan them and get nothing of value. A few people might have something you could use commercially perhaps - bank login details for example. Still if you use those someone is likely to report you to the FBI etc. Even worse you have a chain of distributors, some in the US and some who will act purely on commercial interest. A higher failure rate than the competition mean you get dropped quite quickly by these people.

Last but not least the CIA, NSA, etc presumably don't buy no name flash disks. My guess is they buy enterprise disks at vast expense. If those disks fail they probably have some deal where they can destroy them onsite rather than sending them back.

So the odds of getting useful information is rather low, and the capitalist system would probably weed out drives with a higher than average failure rate.

Re:Reminds me of...

[TheRaven64]

This is why you use filesystem encryption on any disk containing potentially sensitive information.

Re:Reminds me of...

[BrokenHalo]

I'm sure manufacturers also count on people like myself who might not find it worth the trouble of tracking down a receipt in order to claim under warranty. And, of course, it is perfectly possible for them to exaggerate claims for reliability, given that the maximum payout figure for which they are liable is for no more than the cost of the media.

Re:Reminds me of...

[TheRaven64]

There's an obvious reason why it won't work for classified stuff; if a disk on the classified network fails it doesn't go back for warranty repair, it gets smashed with a sledge hammer and then melted with thermite and the failure rate is taken into consideration when deciding to buy from that manufacturer again.

Most companies have less strict rules, however. You could quite easily write a disk controller that would scan for keywords in every block that was written and fail after a key phrase had been used a certain number of times. This would mean you'd only get failures on disks used for storing commercially sensitive information.

RE: Reminds me of...

[Anonymous Coward]

As somebody who works in an organization which deals with sensitive information, we can't replace them that way. We either replace the drive or retire the unit. Either way, the dead drive becomes slag.

Re:Reminds me of...

[Firethorn]

There's an obvious reason why it won't work for classified stuff; if a disk on the classified network fails it doesn't go back for warranty repair, it gets smashed with a sledge hammer and then melted with thermite and the failure rate is taken into consideration when deciding to buy from that manufacturer again.

Failure rate is considered for ALL equipment, especially if it's too bad, but believe it or not the feds get warranty replacements for failed drives on classified systems.

As an absolutely huge business purchasing LOTS of systems, they can bargain a bit on things like returning failed hard drives to the sellers. Consider, the reason for returning the failed drive is mostly to prevent fraud - it's not like they're going to recondition the HD and send it out again. Thus, when in a partnership with somebody like the Feds, they report a failed X, Dell(or whoever) sends them a replacement X, and if due to the sensative nature of their information they don't want to give back the failed device because it might still contain information, it's not like they can't simply track the failure rates to see that it's within tolerances with the rest of the product line.

Even with personal drives, I've heard of people getting authorization to destroy them before return. Just, like any 'contract', make sure you get the authorization in writing/recording beforehand.

Re:Reminds me of...

[TheLink]

Some manufacturers have a warranty option where you don't have to return the drive.

Even Dell: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/services/prosupport/en/us/Keep_Your_Hard_Drive.pdf

Re:Reminds me of...

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't even know...

One of 7 Transcends

[lcreech]

I have 7 Transcend SATA SSD's, 3 32GB and 4 192GB, one of the 192GB drives is flakey, random bad blocks and file curruption issues of files that had been fine but gone bad and have not been written to since their creation some months ago. I've reloaded it several times but eventually had to remove it from service because of its poor reliability.

Re:One of 7 Transcends

[poptones]

My experience with transcends has been they are absolute crap. This is based on a sample of a mere three devices, but none of them worked properly. One lasted only an hour or so, the other two were spectacularly slow. I've also had bad experience with transcend sd cards, one in my first Canon was just way too slow. It was faster than the uber crappy adata that came with the camera, but still not fast enough to record video reliably.

I bought 4 Sandisk sata 5000s to use in a raid0 and they were ok, but even in this application where they were attached to a dedicated hardware RAID card (the goal was to see if I could make a deliciously fast drive) it was little better in real world use than my 300GB WD. Yes it was noticeably faster when booting, and applications launched like 4 times faster, but for most everything else there was little diff. Even running filters on very large images in gimp was only perhaps twice as fast. Maybe if I compiled my kernel five times a day it would be worth it, otherwise just not. I sold three of the sandisks on ebay and kept one for my cnc machine, where the solid state ruggedized nature is actually of some use.

Re:One of 7 Transcends

[quercus.aeternam]

You don't happen to have that bad drive around do you?

I'm in the market for a bad sata ssd or two.

As an aside, I suspect a fair number of people are. Specifically, just about anyone using ZFS can hook up a 'bad' ssd as a read cache. Cached data is checksummed before being used, so unless there are performance issues, it's all good.

An interesting reference.

[Anonymous Coward]

As silly as it is, I learned a lot from CFLs. I really wanted them to be great...and they are...now. When they were first introduced, Sam's Club was the first place I found them at a semi-affordable price. I bought a ton of them and replaced everything in my house that wasn't on a dimmer. I replaced them all again inside of 6 months as they all died. Fast-forward a few years to the present. I was at Sam's the other day and noticed that they have LED based incandescent/CFL replacements!!!! I stopped myself as I was picking up a few packs. "At least find some reviews first", I told myself. So I did. Same crap, different decade. They'll eventually be good and affordable. Right now they're neither...just new and cool. I suspect SSD's are the same. Cool. New. Nifty. Whatever. In a few years, I'll buy one when a TB SSD is cheaper than a TB platter.

Re:An interesting reference.

[jedidiah]

You bought new tech from WALMART of all places and then are surprised when the tech doesn't perform well.

Time for a reality check there.

The Walmart version of something was "cheap" but it failed quickly. Imagine that.

The moral of the story isn't not to buy new tech but not to buy ANY tech from Walmart.

Re:An interesting reference.

[ducman]

That's not a very useful argument. I buy _really_ cheap incandescent bulbs at Wal-Mart, and they last about as long as the package claims. I buy significantly more expensive CFLs from Wal-Mart, and they don't last any longer than the cheap incandescent bulbs, even though the package claims they will last 10 years. Wal-Mart didn't _make_ either of them.

Re:An interesting reference.

[danpritts]

wal-mart spec'd them and their specs say "drive every possible penny out of the production cost." http://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart Incandescent bulbs are a very mature and well-understood technology, and they are dirt cheap to start with, so there is less room/incentive to cut them to the bone.

Re:An interesting reference.

[compro01]

Comparing incandescent bulbs to CFLs is like comparing an electric heater to an air conditioner. Both change the temperature, but they work in very different ways and one is a lot more complex than the other, and consequently, harder to get right.

BS?

[Red Flayer]

It's starting to remind me of the claims about long-lifetime compact fluorescent light bulbs that, in reality, have turned out to be BS!"

Bad troll. I read the fine article linked in this claim. The claims are not BS... there have just been problems with the supply-chain doing cost-cutting, and with people using cheap CFLs inappropriately. It's important to note that the Energy Star ratings board has been retesting CFLs and revoking use of the label for CFLs that fail to meet the standard.

It's not BS... it just needs some refining. Don't use CFLs on a dimmer switch. Don't use them in poorly ventilated enclosures. Don't use CFLs in fixtures you turn off and on a lot.

A little bit of consumer education goes a long way... but unfortunately so does FUD like the submitter's.

Re:BS?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's true though that a lot of the cfl's sold during certain big box promotions were lacking.

I used cfl's at the the time for one of my grow rooms.

The ones I bought at $4 or $5 a pop lasted a couple of years, the ones walmart was pushing at $1 ea lasted about a year.

Fixtures were cheap, but not heat-trapping, which is the main factor in cheap fixtures causing premature failure as I understand it.

On balance, I prefer my metal halides.

Sure, a spare $100 bulb is expensive, but cheaper than the cfl's it replaces.

Re:BS?

[spinkham]

Also, don't use in rooms with showers.
I use CFL, and the ones in dry rooms last a long time, but the ones I put in my bathrooms kept dying. Humidity shortening the life of CFLs is a known problem.
I've since switched to halogen bulbs in the bathroom and they work better for me with some power savings over normal incandescents.

Re:BS?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you use a cheap CFL "inappropriately"? What, there's a special way to screw it in?

Re:BS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched my entire house to CFL's three years ago. Since then, I've one ONE fail - and it was in an enclosed can light over a shower. I'd say that there ARE good quality bulbs out there, but they cost more than a buck or two each.

Re:BS?

[1000101]

"It's not BS... it just needs some refining. Don't use CFLs on a dimmer switch. Don't use them in poorly ventilated enclosures. Don't use CFLs in fixtures you turn off and on a lot." Except you don't see that up front on the package when you buy it. If the consumer doesn't see that they will expect it to work like a standard bulb.

Re:BS?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not BS... it just needs some refining. Don't use CFLs on a dimmer switch. Don't use them in poorly ventilated enclosures. Don't use CFLs in fixtures you turn off and on a lot.
-------

But it is BS.

They were marketed in the same form factor as replacements for incandescents and have led to the removal of incandescents from the market, despite the fact that they totally fall down in applications for which incandescents worked just fine.

Re:BS?

[blueg3]

The package certainly indicates not to use them on a dimmer switch.

Re:BS?

[danpritts]

Use it in a dimmer, or in an unventilated enclosure, or where it's turned on and off a lot. That's inappropriate use for pretty much any CFL, not just cheap ones.

Re:BS?

[TheLink]

Bathroom lights tend to have more on/off cycles, and also are more likely to have cycles with very short "on" times. Many CFLs don't handle that well.

Re:BS?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't use CFLs in fixtures you turn off and on a lot. "

If you re-read what you wrote perhaps you'll realize that it BS too.

Re:BS?

[pete-classic]

Many individual bulbs fail to fulfill the claims. Spending many times as much on a replacement (over an incandescent) under the theory that it will last for years, only to have it fail after a few months is very disheartening. The reasons aren't very important to the consumer.

The technology on the whole isn't BS, but I have had more than one BS experience with it.

Perhaps you and I saw different materials, but when the initial push for CFLs came down. The emphasis was on how it was a direct replacement for incandescents, which is certainly BS, even by your own description.

Out of about twenty bulbs in my apartment, there are only three that are good candidates for CFLs by your criteria. I actually use them almost everywhere, but they fail early and offer poor light in most of them.

You can't have your cake and eat it, too. The reality, as I see it, is that CFLs offer a great deal of advantage in very limited circumstances, and a much lesser advantage in most practical circumstances. The problem is that they're marketed (by the manufacturers, retailers, environmental groups, and the government) as if the optimal advantage can be achieved merely by installing them, which is manifestly untrue.

This concept is also known as bullshit.

-Peter

Re:BS?

[Anonymous Coward]

CFLs are marketed as a replacement bulb yet you're suggesting they should not be used as one. Original CFLs were failure in design and technology.

same with SSD: some here suggest that perhaps people are writing to them to often so they fail?

car analogy: if CV joint fails does it mean that one should not turn as often?

Re:BS?

[spinkham]

The one in my shower light only got turned on once or twice a day, and would be on for 30 minutes or so. Yet it would die in a few months, even with an exhaust fan running in the room. The same bulbs in other areas of the house have lasted for years with more light cycles and other abuse.

See also the EPA energy start faq: http://energystar.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/energystar.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2567

Re:BS?

[vsny]

From the anecdotal evidence just in these comments alone, CFL clearly have a very large distribution of failures. Maybe the MTF is accurate but the distribution or log-sigma is very large. I have had 4 fail within weeks and they are used 'appropriately'. I have never had incandescents fail in this way.

Yes I may have cheap bulbs. But they still have a long rated MTTF values listed on the box.

Sure, maybe the ones that do last will survive several million hours. I can say nothing about the MTTF, but clearly there is a very large distribution of failures which suggest very high early-failure rates. You really need to see the failure distribution statistics to determine how they came up with these lifetime numbers.

Re:BS?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's not BS... it just needs some refining. Don't use CFLs on a dimmer switch. Don't use them in poorly ventilated enclosures. Don't use CFLs in fixtures you turn off and on a lot."

Hmmm. Let's compare to my house....
No dimmer switches. Check. (eliminate 25% of lights)
Poor ventalation. Check. Darn. All those globe lights and integrated fans are out. There goes another 25%. I wonder about can lights?
Nothing that is turned off and on a lot. Check. There goes 90%. The kitchen stays on a lot. The rest no.

Okay. Other than that 90%, I'm a big fan of CFL's!

Re:BS?

[BikeHelmet]

Don't use CFLs in fixtures you turn off and on a lot.

My father insists this claim is bullcrap. Luckily I don't have to listen to him anymore. I think he's on #8 in just 2 years. ;)

Re:BS?

[GottMitUns]

What you are describing is about 90% of common usage!

That's a good analogy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like with the bulbs, the problem is probably that you're going for the cheapest thing you can find. Cheap out on hardware for marginal savings, have it turn out to be shit, what a surprise.

Re:That's a good analogy.

[rhyder128k]

I remember when I decided to spend a little bit extra and bought an IBM Deskstar HD.

Enough Memory?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is the memory on your PCs? I just realized this week that my 4GB of memory on my PC is being read as 2GB and my HD is getting slammed anytime I run anything that uses a lot of memory. Fortunately I don't have an SSD and additional memory is now on the way...

Compact Fluorescents are awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that article is not very balanced. Have I had failures? Yes, but the bulbs that work go long and strong. In my parents house there is a CF bulb that has been on for almost 6 years. It is rarely turned off (they use it as a night light). They may have issues but I don't think it is any greater than tradition bulbs have.

"PC and Linux boxes"

[TC Steve]

What exactly is the difference between a "PC" and a "Linux box"? Or has this guy fallen prey to the marketing of Microsoft / Apple and using "PC" to mean "Microsoft Widows" computer?

Re:"PC and Linux boxes"

[Virak]

Or has this guy fallen prey to the marketing of Microsoft / Apple and using "PC" to mean "Microsoft Widows" computer?

I realized some of Apple's ads were a bit questionable, but I didn't think any of them went quite so far as to claim Microsoft's software actually kills people.

Re:"PC and Linux boxes"

[jedidiah]

"PC" was synonymous with IBM clone a LONG time ago actually.

PC only really got conflated with "microcomputer" or "home computer" once most of the other options died off.

OTOH, a contemporary Mac really a "PC" in any aspect of the term.

Re:"PC and Linux boxes"

[Molochi]

When I got into computing as a kid, microcomputers were the general class of computers that Commodores, Apples, IBM, etc... fit into. Into the 90's I associated "PC" as an IBM product. The later "PC clones" were microcomputers claiming IBM PC-DOS compatibility. We had a few Xenix machines at my first job and I don't think anyone ever refered to them as anything other than Xenix machines, though I think they were pretty much standard XT-clone hardware. Most software requirements generally required a "100% IBM-PC compatible" computer. PC-Clones were designed to run DOS and later Windows. Once OS/2 failed, PC hardware became synonymous with Windows. IBM bowing out of the consumer microcomputer market sealed the deal.

Given Apple's historical relationship to IBM, and the fact that they outlived IBM in the consumer microcomputer market, I can see why they might not want to have Mac Microcomputers be called PCs. Even if they run on the same hardware now, "PC" as a term really refers more to how well a microcomputer runs a MS OS. Mac refers to primary support for MacOS. There are still differences going either way.

Linux isn't hardware specific. Linux isn't the hardware it runs on. You had (and still have) people developing Linux on all sorts of hardware that aren't even microcomputers. I wouldn't be surprised to see ARM netbooks becoming an important install base for Linux. My router runs Linux.

So today, when I say Linux PC, I am still referring to a microcomputer that is designed to run under Windows. But if you say you have a "Mac" or a "PC" that just tells me what OS came with the hardware. It doesn't tell me that Linux will fully work on it, as it could be using an unsupported chip. If you want to have a "name" for a microcomputer that primarily runs linux, you first must produce a microcomputer that runs Linux better than anything else. Then you brand and sell your marketing term, 'cause that's all we're talking about here.

I think your data sample is missing something

[initdeep]

My first response would be: "What type of computers are these being used in? Desktops? Servers? Laptops? Netbooks?"

My second response would be: "What systems settings have been changed so the OS is properly set up for an SSD drive?"

My third response would be: "What exact make and model drives are we talking about here?"

All of this is important in determining whether this is just another typical anecdotal ask slashtards to make me feel better type question, or whether you are seriously asking.

Without specifics, this is nothing more than a waste of time.

If all of the failed drives are of a specific manufacturer's netbook mini pcie based 4GB SSD drives, and all were having the same basic issue, then it's really an indication of a problem with one manufacturer's drives, and not SSD's as a whole now isn't it?

It's like saying all 1.5TB rotational hard drives suck and lose data becuase at one point seagate had tremendous firmware problems with their 1.5TB hdd's.

If on the other hand, it's several different drives, in different environments, from several different manufacturers and across several physically different types of SSD's (mini pcie, full size, etc) utilizing several different types of RAM and several different controllers, then it would suggest a more widespread problem.

You don't even have a large enough data sample to begin to answer these questions.

Me personally, I've got SSD drives in everything from my home desktop, to my work laptop, to a couple of small file servers, to two different Dell Mini 9's running aftermarket Runcore SSD's

All have been in use for at least a year (the work laptop is actually a Dell xps m1330 that is almost 2 years old and has a 64GB Samsung SSD in it).
All are working flawlessly and show no signs of dieing.

Re:I think your data sample is missing something

[Anonymous Coward]

The original poster didn't ask you to debug his problem or theorize why he drives failed. He asked you a very simple question: what have your experiences been like with flash drives? You don't need any of the data you're asking for above to do that.

Re:I think your data sample is missing something

[Spad]

You do for it to be meaningful.

For example: "I haven't had any problems at all with SSDs" is a completely worthless statement for anyone reading this discussion unless I include some context; which drive(s), what kind of usage, what OSs, how long have I been running them, etc.

As has already been pointed out, all the drives that the OP was referring to used the crappy JMicron controller that's been largely slated in all reviews for its poor performance and iffy wear-levelling - especially with older firmwares. This makes the information worthless to me because I have an Intel X25-M G2 drive which has a different controller altogether.

My SSD died yesterday

[fljmayer]

I got an OCZ Vertex 5 months and was very happy with the speed increase. Yesterday the laptop blue-screened and wouldn't boot any more. The BIOS test reported a read error. I am waiting for an RMA number from OCZ.

Re:My SSD died yesterday

[T7g]

I have a Vertex as well but I spent the extra time to convert my Gentoo install into a read-only drive that hosts everything except /var and /home, /etc and /tmp are located on ramdisks and /etc is copied up from another directory at boot. So, I can emerge sync without remounting rw but I can't emerge anything else unless I remount rw. So, I pretty much have free reign on when it gets written to and when it doesn't I also used nilfs2 as it's filesystem, screwed up it's entry in /etc/fstab so the garbage collector never runs, and left a bunch of unallocated space at the end of the drive for wear leveling. Not a single problem yet.

Re:My SSD died yesterday

[doob]

<snip> I spent the extra time to convert my Gentoo install into a read-only drive that hosts everything except /var and /home, /etc and /tmp are located on ramdisks and /etc is copied up from another directory at boot.

<snip> I also used nilfs2 as it's filesystem, screwed up it's entry in /etc/fstab so the garbage collector never runs, and left a bunch of unallocated space at the end of the drive for wear leveling.

Not a single problem yet.

If you have to do all that to make an SSD reliable, I'd say they aren't reliable enough for normal consumer use yet. :)

Re:My SSD died yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you by any chance update the firmware in the process?

Re:My SSD died yesterday

[fljmayer]

Since I couldn't boot any more, I simply swapped in my old hard drive. I didn't try to update the firmware of the Vertex, which would have been difficult anyway.

What products?

[Anonymous Coward]

So one of the first things I did was learn about SSDs by reading some of the articles on AndDTech. I am running an OCZ at home for about a month or two and it's been great so far. I made sure to reflash the firmware first before doing anything. At work we run a EMC SAN that uses SSD's. The I/O on it is amazing and as far as I know there have been no failures on it.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

Re:My experience with Flash SSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh!

I can't help you with your SSD issue, but the...

[Anonymous Coward]

...CFL issue TFA is referring to is pretty clearly a case of PEBLAS

Problem Exists Between Lamp and Stepladder.

Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.

hmmm, that's not so good.

[Anonymous Coward]

i was going to build myself a HTPC with a 30GB OCZ drive, but i think i'll leave it a bit longer if this is the case..

built a few dinky machines running a non-live, non-journal, filesystem off of 4/8GB compact flash cards in CF to IDE converters, and occasionally, scsi to ide, then ide to CF adapters... no page file or defragmentation malarky either. still going fine a year or two later. from either sandisk extreme2/3, or no-name "speedy" branded cards.

maybe the size increase, increases the possibility of a duff cell or three?

nearly went SSD for my laptop's drive upgrade, but went for 500GB 7200rpm "rusty rotator" instead.

Re:hmmm, that's not so good.

[ezzzD55J]

i was going to build myself a HTPC with a 30GB OCZ drive, but i think i'll leave it a bit longer if this is the case..

And I ordered parts for a HTPC with a 30GB OCZ driver. Last night.. Nevertheless I'm not changing my mind :)

Re:hmmm, that's not so good.

[ezzzD55J]

Drive.

haha

[geekoid]

Nice troll.

You link to a story that has nothing to do with the question. Man, this is sloppy even for /. 'editors'.

The article is using examples of incorrectly manufactured bulbs that fail to spread FUD.
I couldn't help but notice they don't compare it to the failure rate of cheap incandesents.

I have never replaced an IFL and I have been replacing my non-dimming regular bulbs for over 5 years and have only replaced one, and that was because I put it in a dimmer to see what would happen.

Guess what? it's a personal anecdote, and not data; much like that article.

Re:haha

[TheRaven64]

Did you read the article you linked to (registration only, but if you google for the URL then follow the link it works because NYT doesn't require registration of the referrer is Google)? It says that CF lightbulbs do generally save money and last longer, but a few Chinese manufacturers were cutting costs and using substandard components, meaning that the bulbs didn't last long. Fortunately, they all come with something like a ten-year guarantee, so if they fail as early as the anecdotes in the article were claiming then you can just take them back to the shop and get a replacement for free.

If you read the article, you'll see that, sensationalist headlines aside, it doesn't even support the allegation of 'BS' in the link to it. First rate trolling indeed.

just wait for LED bulbs

[circletimessquare]

LED bulbs are going to render CFL bulbs a flash in the pan

no toxic mercury, no 30 second wait to dim up completely after turn on, not nearly as fragile, lasts much longer, nicer white glow, similar very low energy usage...

but currently, they are a little pricey and their lighting wattage is low

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/coming-soon-a-40-watt-led-light-bulb/

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[TheRaven64]

Yup, LEDs will be great, but they're not there yet. Meanwhile, I've been happily using CFs for about ten years (closer to fifteen if you count the fact that I switched the bulbs in my room at my mother's house before I left home). I'd be surprised if they haven't been largely supplanted by LEDs in ten years, but that's still 25-30 years of use. Not bad when you consider that incandescents with the current design were only introduced in 1964, so have only been around for a bit over twice as long. Hardly a flash in the pan.

LEDs really need to push into new homes first. With the current prices of LED bulbs, there's no excuse for not providing a DC lighting circuit in a new build.

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[Fujisawa Sensei]

LED bulbs are going to render CFL bulbs a flash in the pan

no toxic mercury, no 30 second wait to dim up completely after turn on, not nearly as fragile, lasts much longer, nicer white glow, similar very low energy usage...

but currently, they are a little pricey and their lighting wattage is low

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/coming-soon-a-40-watt-led-light-bulb/

Sorry, I replaced all my incandescents more then 4 years ago and was really happy with the results. Still not happy with the cost of the LEDs. So just go ahead a replace those incandescent lights and wait on the LEDs. I will still be cheaper in the long run.

And if you're thinking the LEDs don't contain toxic materials; you should do a little research on GaAs and other environmentally friendly semi-conductors.

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[QuantumRiff]

I've been looking like crazy, since the guy that remodeled the house I just bought loved Recessed can lights and dimmer switches. Right now, the only bulbs I see that come close in the LED range cost about $120 each. The CFL dimmables are crud, their lowest setting is still something like 75% of max brightness, so they are very bright when the dimmer is all the way down. I need a replacement LED "can light" in the $30 dollar range, before I can do anything about them. And the ones I have actually seen in that price range are designed for desklights and such, where they don't have to actually throw the light more than 2-3' from the bulb.

I really, really want to get rid of my old style bulbs, but the payback on 10x $120 bulbs is a very, very long time..

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[jandrese]

Don't LEDs use up exotic metals that are in short supply already in the world (and thus are likely to grow even more expensive) like gallium? Granted, the articles I saw on that awhile back may just be commodity price manipulation on the part of flippers, but it does seem like a bit of a concern that we just don't make enough of the stuff to supply the world's needs for something like switching all of the worlds lighting to LED.

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[Anonymous Coward]

I really need to stop trying to post between application redeployment.

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[Anonymous Coward]

At the rate they're going, we'll be waiting a while. How long have LED lights been "just around the corner"? 5 years? And they're still ridiculously expensive and dim and essentially useless for anything but really focused applications like flashlights!

I'll just keep buying mid-range CFLs; by the time they burn out LEDs might be worth considering. Actually, come to think of it, that's what I thought when I started buying CFLs 6 years ago (only had 1 burn out since then)...

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[Anonymous Coward]

A current cool white Cree MC-E LED can maintain a luminous flux of up to 730 lumens, that's about the same as a 60 watt (non-halogen) incandescent lamp. Still it requires less than 15W at this current. High-powered LEDs indeed have many advantages over CFLs. Some more that you didn't mention:

They are *better* dimmable than incandescent lamps (this requires smart electronics though, you can't just use a potentiometer) because they run more efficient when underpowered instead of less. Running an incandescant lamp at 20% of the rated brightness will still require 50% or so of the rated power. Running an LED at 20% of the rated brightness will often require significantly *less* than 20% of the rated power.
No wear even when switched on and off extremely rapidly.
Gradual degradation instead of spontaneous failure. It was nice to have a replacement bulb with you everywhere you took your maglite, but LEDs make this unnecessary.
Compared to CFLs: Slower to change hue (this is important when used as screen backlights).
Takes up much less volume (the Cree Xlamp chip in some of my flashlights is indeed *tiny* but able to pump out up to 180 lumens).

However it should be pointed out that there are huge quality differences between LED models as well. There is simply no way a no-name LED with plastic lens made in China will be able to output a useful amount of light after 50,000 hours, all bold claims to the contrary notwithstanding. E.g. the chip for a white LED emits some UV radiation that in the long term causes the plastic to cloud (sunlight aggravates the problem, obviously). A higher quality and much more expensive LED with a glass lens will not suffer from this problem.

Now what was the article all about? ;-)

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in the same situation, and I replaced the dimmer switches with standard ones. I really didn't need to be able to dim the lights anyway.

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[cheesybagel]

There is always some other technology just around the corner. I keep hearing about OLEDs for displays as well, but barring small cellphones they seem to be taking forever to get it to scale up in size and fix the longevity issues.. For indoor illumination for long periods.CFLs are still the best. More lumens/Watt and cheaper.

If everything was like we hear in these press releases, we would be using portable computers with foldable OLED screens, powered by direct methanol fuel cells, and wireless meshed networks like 4 years ago.

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[BitZtream]

Okay, the mercury part is true, but irrelevent, the amount they contain really isn't that important outside of waste disposal, you get more from eating Atlantic Salmon.

30 second wait to brighten? Either stop using them in your freezer or stop buying the cheapest ones in the store.

White light out of an LED where blue is horribly hard to produce? Your definition of white and mine are different I think.

Not saying that LEDs are going to take over, but your reasoning and evidence is more than slightly flawed.

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[EvilBudMan]

--LED bulbs are going to render CFL bulbs a flash in the pan--

Maybe, but not for a while. Florescent bulbs surpassed incandescent lights back in the late 50's to early 60's. Of course most of this was due to offices. Now the mercury in a CFL is a tiny amount in comparison but not impossible to deal with. Commercially they have been being changed out for years. We just need some way to recycle the bulbs and reuse the mercury. I wouldn't be too overly concerned if one busted out of many thousands.

The one thing I don't like about CFL's is well the consumer wanted them to look like incandescent lights. Now they have made that happen at the expense of brightness. Of course you can still buy the ones that have a different color balance, but they cost more and it is real hard to make an LED with that color balance. In fact most LED's have a real narrow spectrum. If you use a filter to correct it, you loose brightness.

In short I don't believe CFL's are going to be a flash in the pan. In fact they are just now really taking off as LED's will in the future. For now though the expense doesn't justify the savings for LED's being used as a primary light source. As a secondary source LED's are already hot (flashlights).

Re:just wait for LED bulbs

[pdbaby]

LEDs are good if for functional lighting but the light makes everything look very fake (which make them unpleasant to read by, for instance) - they have a very low colour rendering index (there's a more eloquent description of this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_bulb#Remaining_problems).

Linus updated it 5 months later

[justthinkit]

Linus updated his SSD post 5 months later and in the follow-up mentioned, among other things, an AnandTech article he liked at least parts of.

Re:Linus updated it 5 months later

[EvilBudMan]

It does seem like the Intel ones are still the ones to get for now and thanks for the interesting articles from Linus. I have over 300,000 files on my machine and do a lot of random read and write requests. Whenever the mains burn up, I might now be able to get what I want.

No problems

[MemoryDragon]

I have had one on my notebook computer for 1 1/2 years so far with daily usage, no problem whatsoever.

Shouldn't heading say...

[Anonymous Coward]

"An anonymous Seagate or Western Digital or Hitachi employee writes:". Just sayin'...

Certain Manufacturers are Doing It Wrong

[Concern]

Thank you. The brands/models were the critical piece of information.

You're probably aware that SSD's have been in the server space, at a very different price point, for a few years now, without any extraordinary reliability debacles. To some extent, this is a case of getting what you pay for. I did a moderate amount of research on SSD drives, relying especially on the independent review sites, and quickly eliminated all of the brands you described.

As is frequent in fairly new markets, there are a few smaller and less well-run companies trying to dive in, and their first customers get to beta test their v0.* and v1.* offerings.

The prevailing wisdom seemed to me (and to people like i.e. Torvalds) that Intel was far and away the top of the heap in terms of performance and reliability, and some drives based on a newer Samsung controller (i.e. OCZ Summit) were a perhaps credible alternative. Other brands were clearly struggling to even be in the game, with frequent firmware updates and outright debacles (i.e. Indilinux, Micron) and we're in the process of shaking out who will make it and who will not.

I have only fielded a few consumer-grade SSDs over about the same amount of time as you, but going with Intel's G1 and G2 MLC products has so far yielded zero failures.

If you are already in the market for an SSD, and you are ready to spend premium money for premium performance, you should go the whole distance and go with Intel, the current market leader. See also the latest news on these models.

Re:Certain Manufacturers are Doing It Wrong

[Spatial]

The Indilinx controllers are not in the 'debacle' category by any measure.

Re:Certain Manufacturers are Doing It Wrong

[danpritts]

You're probably aware that SSD's have been in the server space, at a very different price point, for a few years now, without any extraordinary reliability debacles.

I spoke to a rep from a big storage company (can't remember whether it was netapp or EMC) who claimed that the company has seen ZERO SSD failures in the field with their current tech, which has been in the field for a year and a half.

I wasn't buying SSD level stuff from them; no particular point in lying to me about it.

Of course, this kind of enterprise level SSD costs 100x what the models being discussed here, as you mention.

Re:Certain Manufacturers are Doing It Wrong

[Concern]

Not anymore, I think, but there was a period of time a little while back when the firmware updates were coming thick and fast.

Even if every firmware update works, that's not an "OK" situation for many people/companies, and not every update is guaranteed to work. Compare this to Intel drives, which have had a very low single digit number of updates over their model life on X25-M G1/G2, for instance. The firmware was "finished" before the product shipped, it had comparatively few issues (like halting or weird slowdowns, though there was one early on IIRC) and its performance has been consistent and generally better than other drives for the specs that matter most on the desktop (random reads and writes).

Re:Certain Manufacturers are Doing It Wrong

[Maxwell]

I second the 'your are buying junk drives' issue. I will even use my own anecdote, per Slashdot tradition, to back it up:

    We have hundreds of IBm X300 laptops with 64G Samsungs in them. zero failures so far.

Re:Certain Manufacturers are Doing It Wrong

[imbaczek]

Not anymore, I think, but there was a period of time a little while back when the firmware updates were coming thick and fast.

yes, and praise them for this. they made a product which wasn't ideal but were dedicated to making it work, and the results are visible in e.g. OCZ Vertex, which is (arguably) the best bang for buck atm.

Re:Certain Manufacturers are Doing It Wrong

[Concern]

Don't get me wrong - I think Indilinux looks to have a good future, and I am glad that they supported their users. I just can't really praise them for not finishing the product before they started selling it.

The real problem here was about "time to market" - companies were hustling to get to a lower price point before their competitors, and build their reputation in a new market. In that race, it happens again and again that corners get cut. No surprise really, and I don't think it will ever change.

As for the best bang for the buck, I find it harder to make as definitive a statement as you have. In any case, I don't think I could add anything to the (fairly nuanced) words of tomshardware or anandtech.

Re:Certain Manufacturers are Doing It Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to go get expensive drives then rather than look at the SSDs that pretend to be disk drives and suffer performance problems because of it, look at the PCIe cards such as the fusion-io cards that are directly connected and have correspondingly greater control by the user and much better diagnostics and failure prediction tools, as the driver can see all the gory details.

Windows 7 is SSH friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

A moot point maybe since everyone agrees already..

But I noticed that Windows 7 detects SSD (even in a RAID config with the on-board ICH controller) and automatically turns off defrag on them.

Nice !

Re:Windows 7 is SSH friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not going to say anything about the headline
I am not going to say anything about the headline ...
I am not going to say anything about the headline
Oh, the detention is over.

Re:Windows 7 is SSH friendly

[Spykk]

Windows 7 is SSH friendly

Putty still works, then?

Re:Windows 7 is SSH friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome!

  #ssh hax0r@datamine .... nothing...

do I need ultimate version or something?

Re:Windows 7 is SSH friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

> putty windoze_7_box
.
.
.
Network Error. Connection Refused

*Scratches head*

Re:Windows 7 is SSH friendly

[BhaKi]

Mod parent down. This is utter BS.

Re:Windows 7 is SSH friendly

[giuda]

[citation needed]

(for both of you)

Yes there is

[XanC]

As of this morning. It's a couple stories down on the /. front page.

Re:Yes there is

[tolan-b]

Aaaand now it's been pulled.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/28/intel_yanks_ssd_update/ :p

OCZ Vertex - so far so good

[magnosis]

I have 2 of the 32GB OCZ Vertex II in a RAID-0 configuration for my OS (Windows 7). Blazing fast and error-free since installation (3 months ago).
As noted in my previous (anonymous) post Windows 7 is very friendly to SSD, it detects mine (even when RAID0 with the onboard ICH controller) and automatically turns of defrag.
It should be noted that I selected the Vertex II based on excellent reviews, plus OCZ now uses a much improved chipset on them. A bit pricey, but you get what you pay for.

Restore

[tohands]

No more "Send your faulty HDD to us and we will restore your info from it using your reader"

How apropos.

[198348726583297634]

I had a Patriot 64gb SSD in a small, low-traffic Ubuntu server (several services were running but no specific tuning options were set) that died this weekend. Sunday afternoon, several Apache processes pegged the CPU at 100% between them (load average climbed steadily up to 40ish, and I was unable to start or kill anything else). Thinking that one of my users had written some bad PHP, I rebooted the machine. It wouldn't restart (Grub loading...please wait...). Booting into System Rescue CD, the partitions on the SSD were detected, but none could be mounted due to bad sectors all throughout. dd_rescue was able to retrieve the important data (that which hadn't been backed up..), but the time/money spent bringing the server back online seemed a totally unnecessary hassle. SSDs were supposed to be reliable (no moving parts, right??), but I'm definitely going to wait for a few years before buying another. The drive was less than a year old.

Re:How apropos.

[MarcoAtWork]

and you wouldn't use an intel SSD in a server why? The more I read about SSDs the more it seems that you either buy intel or stick with normal HDs.

Long Lifetime CFL "BS"

[MadCat221]

If you think the long lifetime of CFLs is "BS", then the problem is not the bulbs, it's the shoddy wiring in the building. They're sensitive to that. You don't call the canary a useless bird in the coal mine when it keels over. I've had the same two solar-spectrum bulbs in two of my room lights for two years and counting.

Re:Long Lifetime CFL "BS"

[cdrguru]

There is nothing wrong with CFL bulbs, as long as you get a well-made one that high-quality components were used in.

When you get a poorly made one that the cheapest components were used in, you will have problems and they are a waste of money.

Unfortunately, both types sell for the same price at the same stores and there is no way to tell what you are getting. Might be getting one that will last for years of quality service, might be getting a piece of garbage. There is no way to tell.

Re:Long Lifetime CFL "BS"

[MyLongNickName]

You can call it BS, but it is not. I have one room where my CFLs have been going on two years. In my kitchen, they don't last three months. I figure it is due to three things. 1) It is directly under my son's room. He still likes to jump off the bed (he's six). This is normal, but I am sure shakes the heck out of the bulbs. 2) Temperature from being close to oven. 3) Lights are turned on and off many times a day.

None of these items are particularly unusual. If CFLs can't handle this, then I will not use them where they won't return a positive ROI for me. It is particularly irksome when governments think they should mandate that I use something... let me make the choices that are right for me.

Re:Long Lifetime CFL "BS"

[SnarfQuest]

There is an incandescant bulb that has been burning for over 100 years. Do we rate all incandescant bulbs based on this extreme example, or on the more commonly seen lifetimes? In my experience, the lifetime of CFL's is nowhere near the 20 years that many of them claim. You're lucky if they see three years, then you have something that you are not allowed to toss in the garbage due to toxic chemicals.
CFL's flicker, buzz, and frequently don't start when you turn them on. They don't work well in cold weather, and often don't fit in the space inside the lamp. And you are going to be required to use them by law in the near future.
Blaiming CFL problems on the wiring is like blaiming your speaker problems on the fact you aren't using monster cables. If it works for incandescant bulbs (which require more power than CFL's) than it should work for CFL's. You'd need really borked wiring to have it otherwise.

Re:Long Lifetime CFL "BS"

[BitZtream]

et me make the choices that are right for me.

While I whole heartedly agree, most people are too ignorant to make the right choices for themselves.

This is why we have warning signs on bug spray and bleach, and placards on lawn mowers that tell you not to pick them up while running and clipping your hedges with them.

Personally, I say remove the warning labels and let people kill themselves, we're slowing evolution down by not weeding out the useless chaff, and I for one would rather let evolution handle population control more than we allow it.

Likewise, what you can take away from this story is not to hire this guy to work in your IT department. Just because he can connect wires to the only plug they'll plug into, and match the colors, doesn't mean he is qualified to understand what he's doing. I've had friends, who know nothing about PCs build PCs from parts and do a good job with the occasional hiccup like mounting the board directly to the case without standoffs. The only reason they didn't do that is because, and I quote: "I thought something was wrong, but everything else was color coded, these didn't seem like extras." As soon as I explained why the new PC wouldn't boot it made total sense to her, but she also never claimed to be able to do it, she just didn't want to wait for me to get back in town and was willing to take the risk. Fortunately, the machine appeared to function fine afterwords, but it ran Windows, so if it was broken, you'd probably not be able to tell the difference between fried hardware and bad drivers.

Doesn't answer why it hurts the drive,.

[NoYob]

Your link doesn't answer why it hurts the drive.

Also, googling doesn't give the poster's reasons or insights. Unless there's a Google feature that allows one to search another's mind.

Geeze!

Re:Doesn't answer why it hurts the drive,.

[compro01]

Flash cells have a finite number of write-erase cycles (typically on the order of tens of thousands to millions). Defragging uses those up for no good reason, and thus shortens the lifespan of the drive.

Re:Doesn't answer why it hurts the drive,.

[NoYob]

Thank you.

Light Sensing Switch -- there's your problem...

[Guppy]

I only use them on the outside garage fixtures that our neighborhood covenant requires that I leave on all night. (They're on a light-sensing switch.) Despite the promises, they manage to only last about a year or two.

There's your problem, light sensing switches (and dimmers) will absolutely destroy most CFLs. I'm surprised they lasted over a year. Your typical light sensing switch isn't equivalent to a regular light switch that flips on and off based on the amount of light.

There's a couple of problems with photosensor switches. First, around dusk and dawn it may flicker on and off, which shortens the life of CFLs (but not cold-cathode CFLs, which are ok with rapid cycling). Second, even when completely "off", many photosensor switches will leak a bit of current, which may mess with your CFL's electronics, anything less than full-on / full-off is bad. Third, some photosensors and dimmers may have built-in "bulb saver" features meant to extend the life of incandescents -- they may pass the current through a diode or negativetemperature coefficient (NTC) thermistor (which again will kill CFLs).

Re:Light Sensing Switch -- there's your problem...

[isomer1]

Agreed. Unless he's using dusk-to-dawn switches explicitly designed for cfl bulbs he's just tossing money away. Most older style switches (the predominant types on the market) will state that they should not be used be used with cfl bulbs. To the GP you might consider something like the following: http://www.touchandglow.com/product-p/s-751mg-2pk.htm which as I understand it basically applies a Schmitt trigger to keep the bulb from fluctuating between states.

64GB SSD in my Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh died

[lazyforker]

I upgraded the stock 8GB in my Dell Mini 9 with a Crucial 64GB half mini-PCIE PATA SSD (Part Number: CT64SSDN100P00). I bought the SSD in mid-June, and it died mid-Sept. The drive had ben installed in a Dell Mini 9; I'd installed OS X retail and had been using the device pretty lightly (usually 2-3 hours per week). No warning signs whatsoever. At least with my dying HDDs I get errors, bad blocks etc.

Crucial's customer service was excellent but ultimately I had to get a refund since they no longer sell compatible SSD for my machine.

My other experience has been with a replacement SSD in my early-2006 Intel Mac Mini. The HDD died (not a bad run - this is my HTPC, jukebox, photo repository etc so it's basically been on almost continuously) and I recently replaced it with a Kingston SSDNow V-Series 64 GB SATA2 2.5" drive. So far, so good. Silent, cooler and busier but ask me in 3 years about the reliability.

I'm about to upgrade a laptop's HDD with a Crucial SSD - all I've done so far is format the new drive in an external enclosure and copy a large amount of data to the device. It functioned completely reliably for both hours it was in use.

Intel X25M - one data point - works great!

[Dr. Crash]

I bought an Intel X25-M 160 Gb (MLC) from NewEgg within a month of them becoming
available. I did do the Intel firmware update (from http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=17485 )
to get the 8850 firmware within a few days of the update coming out.

I can say "No problem, it *rocks*". I can boot Ubuntu 9.04 / Studio in about five seconds from Ubuntu
splash to login prompt. Mac OSX Leopard is similarly fast.

Of course, I paid something north of $600 for this privilege. But to me, it's worth it.
   

Re:Don't Defrag - FALSE

[jackb_guppy]

If 2 ACER NETBOOKS with 8G SSD and windows.

DEFRAG does work! Improves start of windows time, improves Firefox and Open Office time. I use IO BIT SMART DEFRAG to do this in the background in real time. This alone brought the machines back into original start times after on month of use.

Then added PAGE DEFRAG to defrag system stuff during boot, another improvement.

Lastly added FLASHFIRE to setup 64M buffer in memory to minimize all writes, now the run better that disk based machine.

Don't believe the hype. These systems need to "cleaned" like every other.

1 out of 10 Dell ATG laptops with Samsung SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I currently administer 10 Dell ATGs with Windows Vista - over a year old now - So far 1 SSD has failed - not even recognizable to the BIOS or any other PC I put it in. Dell tech support said this was the first time they'd heard of an SSD failing. I dont beleive that given that they advanced replaced it.

Silent corruption in USB Flash

[gweihir]

Not exactly the same, but I have now experienced silent corruption in two out of two flash drives that I git wrong data from. One was not written for some time and the other I destroyed in a continuous overwrite experiment. The real issue is that neither gave any read errors ever. That is very, very bad. I sure hope SSDs are better and at least report errors instead of silently giving you wrong data.

Asus Phission working fine

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Asus 1000, I got it specifically for the 40GB SSD. It was preowned, and used lightly. I've since been using it as the sole PC in my house for about a year now, using EXT3, I've not disabled aything, used it with EXT4 for a while as well, and it's holding up well.

1 year

[Anonymous Coward]

One year of light use. The MTBF figures are completely fictitious.

Possible ground loop issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a company that bought a bunch of Dell Mini 9 laptops with SSDs to use for field reprogramming of microcontrolled electrical equipment in the field. It worked great in the lab but failed in the field. The SSDs would suddenly be "wiped" with the OS gone. We eventually gave up on using them, but some investigation did indicate that there was a ground loop between the laptop and the electrical device. The same problem never happened on any of the regular disk drive laptops that we were also using.

Re:Possible ground loop issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've got a ground loop in that situation, you've got bigger problems, dude.

A purpose for everything

[Anonymous Coward]

SSDs have their place. It's just that it's not to replace HDs.

SSDs are replacements for optical drives and external HDs and such. You know, basically storage media. They are not meant to take the wear and tear of daily excessive reading/writing like mechanical HDs are.

That seems to be a recurring theme these days, using new technologies to replace old ones when the old technologies were actually better. The CFL is a great example of this, since we've known for a long time that using fluorescent bulbs for certain purposes is a good thing. They just don't actually work as an actual normal light bulb that well. Also, LCD and plasma displays are great for presenting nearly static information on displays (wall displays, status displays, etc) but are less good for replacing standard CRTs at displaying varied content, especially content with a lot of motion. Even newer displays have a slight amount of lag and a lot of tearing with any motion of the content being displayed.

Use the new technologies for what they are best at. Going outside of those boundaries, even when modifying these core technologies to try to fit their unintended purpose, isn't a good thing.

I'm going to be modded down to hell for this because /. mods don't know the difference in a well-stated point of view and a genuine troll. So I might as well post anonymously. Sad that people who try to tell a solid, alternate viewpoint to the established "truth" (note the quotes) these days have to do under a veil of secrecy to protect their own reputation.

Problems problems problems

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to deal with an embedded network appliance company called F5 Networks. They released a BSD/OS based load-balancer called BIG-IP that, at the time, was essentially an embedded Pentium-III system.

They attempted to market a SSD model of their BIG-IP that would supposedly see fewer drive failures. A Lexar PCMCIA flash card attached to an EIDE converter was utilized. The results were disastrous. Constant logging to the /var/ partition in conjunction with frequent updates to files' last-accessed date within the Berkley FFS file table resulted in premature failure at a massive level. The company eventually issued a patch that would reduce file activity, but it was little more than a stopgap measure until a product recall could be executed.

Several years went by before they dipped their toes into the SSD arena again. By this time, the drives were much better, and they still had their filesystem patches in from before. But extremely heavy logging to the /var/ partition still caused issues, and the official response from support was to either run a scandisk style program on the drives to map out bad blocks and then re-image the drives or to RMA the product back to the manufacturer.

Their current product, a Linux based load-balancer called Local Traffic Manager, utilizes both a SSD drive and traditional hard drive. The owner of the equipment can choose which type of drive they want to operate from. Our company just uses the traditional hard drive; we ditched the use of the solid-state flash drives.

Have flash drives gotten better in the decade since the fiasco with those Lexar drives? Yeah. But UFS partitions under a standard Linux install most likely abuse the SSD the same way that a standard install of BSD/OS did with FFS all those years ago. You'll most likely need to find a way to reduce or eliminate the last-access filesystem updates, as well as sending syslog messages to a remote server with a traditional hard drive. IMHO, the less writes you can do to the drive, the longer it will last.

CFL reliability

[Firethorn]

Reminds me of some religious types. "If it ain't in the book, I don't believe it."

There's a big difference between religion and relying on a reasonably unbiased testing company like consumer reports.

Your bias against CFLs approaches religion more. I think it was last month that we had quite the discussion about them.

BTW, I just had my first CFL blow on me - it still produced a visible glow, but no longer lit like the 100W equivalent it's supposed to be. It was in the bathroom, and a transplant from the time I lived in an apartment. It saw at least 5 years of usage, it predated the time I started writing the install date on the base in permanent marker.

Re:CFL reliability

[Z1NG]

BTW, I just had my first CFL blow on me - it still produced a visible glow, but no longer lit like the 100W equivalent it's supposed to be.

I don't think I've ever had a CFL that was as bright as its "equivalent".

Re:CFL reliability

[MarbleMunkey]

I don't think I've ever had a CFL that was as bright as its "equivalent".

Not at first, no... give it a minute or two and yes. but by then you are accustomed to the brightness and less sensitive to the difference.

Re:CFL reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, my CFL's have lasted a ridiculously long time, and survived moves from Iowa to California to Colorado in 6 years. Most of the complaints I have seen about short lifespan come from comparing the box quote to real-life usage.

The time that was quoted on those boxes was 7 years, if only used 4 hours per day with a single activation. Since most people looking to "conserve" energy will turn a light off every time they leave the room, they burn them out much faster (4 starts per day should lower your quote to less than two years).

Now days, the CFL's are being made cheaper, and wont last as long as the original models. The tradeoff is that you can get them cheaper, and used properly, you will still see a decent life expectency. I do like the above idea where you can use more CFL's for more light at the same power. My traditional use has always been to leave it running longer (to save starts, leaving the light on from when it is activated until I go to bed), so I see the savings from a different angle.

Re:CFL reliability

[commodore64_love]

My first CFL which cost about $25 when I first got it (1990s) is also still working. It's the *current* CFLs that are being cheaply made($3 or less) which often die less than a year after purchase, or else provide POS dim lighting.
.

>>>There's a big difference between religion and relying on a reasonably unbiased testing company like consumer reports.

Yes that's true, but if you've got 1 million people scattered around the nation complaining about premature CFL failures, it's kinda foolish to sit there and say, "Unless I read it in Consumer Reports it didn't happen." That kinda of response reminds me of when hundreds of thousands of Toyota minivan engines started failing due to oil overheating/sludging. Toyota too refused to believe the evidence right in front of their faces. Like an ostrich sticking it head in the sand. (Then the U.S. government stepped-in and basically forced Toyota to replace the engines for free, or else face prosecution.)

>>>Your bias against CFLs approaches religion more.

I can't help that CFLs have frequent failures. I started-out telling everyone, "Buy CFLs; reduce your electricity usage and save money." Then I got hit with the reality of CFLs failing all over the place, not just in my house, but all over the place. I started in one position, and changed the other as evidence mounted. Any good engineer does the same when he observes an obvious flaw in a machine or design. Only a fool would continue to say "CFLs are great" in the face of mounting evidence that they are not.

At this point, having observed first hand the flaws, I think incandescents are superior over CFLs. Yeah they use a *little* more wattage, but their very simplicity (a glowing resistor) makes them extremely robust for a wide, wide range of applications.

Re:CFL reliability

[commodore64_love]

I've got two 60 watt bulbs in my kitchen ceiling, side-by-side. One is the standard incandescent and the other is a 15 watt "equivalent" CFL. You can tell just by looking that the CFL is not as bright even after an hour of usage.

Plus when it's cold, the incandescent is immediately bright while the CFL is so dim you can look directly at it, and not have to squint. It's turned-on but essentially dark. All my Philips CFLs are like that.

Re:CFL reliability

[tftp]

It's the *current* CFLs that are being cheaply made

Last year I bought a batch of 10 CFLs at OSH. One was dead within minutes, the rest seem to be OK so far. I am satisfied with their warm-up time (<1 min.) and their color temperature also is good enough for the kitchen. Other rooms still use halogen bulbs in recessed fixtures, but I primarily use CFL floor lamps that are bright and efficient. My electric bill is tiny (<$30/mo, incl. one 7kW water heater and a well water pump.)

Re:CFL reliability

[PIBM]

I didn't had a single CFL last more than 3 months in my apartment. The vibrations from people walking upstairs seems to have been killing them much faster than a normal lightbulb, and at 3 times the cost, dangerous content and all, I wasn't so happy.

There are a ton of factor, and a lot of people who had a bad experience with them. You are lucky to have had them for as long!

Then, about consumer reports, they are a company built for profit (well, they charge to check their reports!) and it's a bit hard to put all our trusts in those kind of things.

Re:CFL reliability

[dangitman]

So, I assume you haven't actually measured the light output, you know, scientifically? After all, looking directly at the bulbs with the human eye is not a very accurate measure.

Re:CFL reliability

[vintagepc]

My first CFL which cost about $25 when I first got it (1990s) is also still working. It's the *current* CFLs that are being cheaply made($3 or less) which often die less than a year after purchase, or else provide POS dim lighting. .

Funny.. We have the exact same experience. We have several older CFLs which had replaceable tubes (so you can re-use the ballast until it dies.) We've only ever had to replace the tube once, and that was because somebody accidentally hit it with something and made a hole in it.
Apart from that, all of the newer CFLs we have die VERY quickly. We live in a rural area, so power isn't exactly of great quality, but the newer CFLs are remarkably intolerant of anything, while the older ones were much more stable.
Yes, the older one has a few seconds of warm-up (as in blink-blink-pause-on) but it doesn't seem to need to warm up to produce more light- all of our newer CFLs require time to reach full light output. I guess it's a trade-off to have instant-on or full-light.
That said, we're going to hold out until LED lights come down in price, and stick with incandescent until then- they're far cheaper and last longer. (what's more, there's no mercury in them, so no special recycling necessary!)

Re:CFL reliability

[Firethorn]

I hate to say it, but at 'only' 3x the cost, you (probably)weren't buying good bulbs, I tend to pay 10x the cost of incandescent for my bulbs.

For example, I have a pair of 60W equivalent bulbs that have lasted in my garage for over a year - in my garage door opener, in North Dakota. AKA that garage gets well below zero. They don't light up as much in the winter - but I don't exactly need much light, just enough to get to my truck/door in the darkness.

Then, about consumer reports, they are a company built for profit (well, they charge to check their reports!) and it's a bit hard to put all our trusts in those kind of things.

Think about it a moment. Even a non-profit needs income to pay salary for it's staff, rent offices, publish a paper, run a website. Which would you trust more:

1. A company that gets it's revenues by selling advertising, often for the very products it reviews?
2. A company that requests samples from the manufacturers?
3. A company that gets it's money by selling the review results, who doesn't accept advertising, sponsorship or anything from the companies whose products it reviews, which goes out on the retail market and BUYS random samples from the stores?

Personally, I think #3 is far more reliable. Heck, for #1 just look at gaming/sports magazines; note how glowing all the reviews are for products who's producers advertise in that magazine. #2 can sometimes work, but also gives the producer the ability to send you a altered sample. A laptop that's been extensively tested before it's sent to the reviewer. A car that has a team do a 'special tuneup', altering the engine and tightening up bodywork before it goes to the review team. That sort of stuff.

#3, well, they get they money from the consumer. If the consumer buys something CR recommends, they're likely to be pissed off at CR and drop their subscription. It's the consumer that needs to be pleased, and that they do by providing unbiased, accurate reports.

Finally, there's a reason I said 'reasonably unbiased'. It's very, very difficult for any source to be completely unbiased. I think that CR does better than most. So yeah, I'm kinda pleased that CR charges for their reviews. I trust them a heck of a lot more than many other review sites.

Re:CFL reliability

[PIBM]

To be fair, the 3times price is compared against a 4 pack of normal light bulbs which are not sold in single packaging here. Also, we've had subsidies from the electrical company handing back up to 10$, as to make them more affordable and used. So no, it wasn`t the case of the 'cheapest available solution' and after the first failures I went with other big names with the same results.

For CR website, looking at it gives a very bad first impression, as they look like many scam site, not offering much on the first look beside ways to hand out your credit card. I had to look it up on google to make sure it was the real site and not just a phishing page.

We have something equivalent to CR, who makes money from their paper edition which includes everything they recently reviewed in a nice to read version, and they also have support coming from television relations, and they don't look like a scam site, or a site to sell something 'as seen on TV!'

It`s totally possible that CR just have a really bad design, and that the content they show is just too much built for selling the content. Anyway :)

Re:CFL reliability

[Clairvoyant]

So, I assume you haven't actually measured the light output, you know, scientifically? After all, looking directly at the bulbs with the human eye is not a very accurate measure.

Nor is comparing it to the regular bulb. For all we know, maybe normal bulbs are brighter when it's cold?

Even more offtopic: Nor is comparing AAC to OGG (with your own ears!) by the way... religions are useless if you don't know it when you see one

Re:CFL reliability

[jridley]

So use a 23 watt CFL. Nobody's forcing you to go by the claims on the package. You're still burning just a little over 1/3 the power.

Re:CFL reliability

[garyebickford]

I started writing the install date on the base in permanent marker.

That is a great idea! I might start doing that too. If many people do that, in a couple of years we will start to have some sweet real-world longevity data.

It would also be good to establish a brightness measure at the beginning and once a year thereafter, to see how much they have dimmed. But I'm not sure how to do this without buying a lightmeter - maybe take a picture with a webcam and summing/averaging over the image?

In my case, it will mostly be LED lights I'm installing on my sailboat, where the present eye-popping cost of LEDs that can survive marine conditions is outweighed by the need to keep the power draw at a minimum, and my lack of desire to climb the mast any more than necessary. Changing lightbulbs 55 feet up a swinging mast ain't no fun. Well, maybe some fun... :D

Re:CFL reliability

[Firethorn]

That is a great idea! I might start doing that too. If many people do that, in a couple of years we will start to have some sweet real-world longevity data.

Got the idea here, actually. Of course, my first love for the bulbs was that I didn't have to replace the suckers(anywhere near as often). With traditional incandescents I was having to replace a bulb every week. It got annoying.

It would also be good to establish a brightness measure at the beginning and once a year thereafter, to see how much they have dimmed.

I haven't noticed any fading, but you'd really need a light measure - a webcam will automatically adjust for brightness like our eyes do. Still, I'll fully admit that my standard is 'still bright enough to see what I want to see'.

I fully understand your reluctance to want to change lights frequently on a boat. Especially the idea of possibly needing to do so in a storm. That's an ideal usage for the more expensive but more durable bulb. It's like street lights - it makes more sense to spend the money for a quality bulb that'll last longer because it costs more to get the crew and equipment out there to replace it as the bulb itself costs.

Re:CFL reliability

[commodore64_love]

>>>looking directly at the bulbs with the human eye is not a very accurate measure.

Lots of science is done with the human eye as instrument. Besides it's as if the difference is miniscule. They are mounted side-by-side, and the incandescent bulb is *clearly* brighter than the CFL.

Re:CFL reliability

[commodore64_love]

>>>You're still burning just a little over 1/3 the power.

If you take into account that CFLs are reactive power, which requires the electric company to burn about twice as much coal to "rebalance" the power factor to one, then you're using 2/3 the power of the incandescent. For such a trivially small savings (~35%) and the inherent disadvantages (mercury poisoning, flickering start, heat-sensitive) why not just stick with the superior incandescent?

Re:CFL reliability

[commodore64_love]

If fluorescent tubes/bulbs start to flicker or dim, you can rejuvenate them by leaving them turned-on a long, long time. I first discovered this while staying in a hotel with a bad bathroom bulb that at first flickered, and then developed the habit of never fully turning-on. So I left it on for a week solid. After that it worked just fine.

Re:CFL reliability

[Firethorn]

To be fair, the 3times price is compared against a 4 pack of normal light bulbs which are not sold in single packaging here.

Ah, okay. I was automatically applying a /4 to the price of a 4 pack. That modifies the multiplier to x12, which is 'close' to my x10. Especially when you consider how across the board a 4 pack of incandescent bulbs varies.

For CR website, looking at it gives a very bad first impression, as they look like many scam site, not offering much on the first look beside ways to hand out your credit card. I had to look it up on google to make sure it was the real site and not just a phishing page.

Huh, I don't have that impression, then again, I was reading CR before it had a website. Looking at the front page right now, it doesn't look like a scam site to me, though they do make it rather obvious that they want you to sign up. Remember - it's their sole revenue source other than magazine subscriptions. Of course, if you log in with a paid account(which I have), those go away.

OCZ Failure

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an OCZ about a year ago -- the first was DOA, the second worked once or twice and then died.

I'll try again, but probably not one from OCZ.

2 of 6 have failed

[pastafazou]

of the 6 netbooks we've sold with SSD's, two have been back in with failed drives. Both happened in less than a year, and were covered under warranty. One was an Asus netbook, the other an Acer.

My OCZ 128GB still works, but it won't boot

[mi_cuenta]

My OCZ 128GB with Windows XP SP3 lasted for 4 months in my Dell laptop, then it stopped booting. After trying to re-load it three times, I gave up and re-installed the original Laptop HD.

The SSD still works, it but it won't boot. It seems to me that specific boot sectors went bad.

-- Lessons from the masters: Jump-starting your PC will actually burn it

Data recovery?

[A Friendly Troll]

When an SSD dies, how do you pull data from it?

With hard drives, you can pay lots of money and get some stuff back, but can you do that with SSDs? If not, I foresee a lot of problems once SSDs become mainstream because non-IT people never do backups...

Re:Data recovery?

[taustin]

The flash memory itself is actually fairly robuts, and easier (or, rather, cheaper) to recover from than a trashed hard drive. Googling for "flash drive recovery service" produces 2.5 million hits, and a lot of it is software you can use yourself. Some tests have involved driving nails through camera memory cards, and all but a handful of pictures being recovered with minimal effort.

Re:Data recovery?

[A Friendly Troll]

Yes, but isn't data on SSDs (not regular flash media) encrypted, with the key being somehow hardcoded inside the controller? What if the controller fries?

I really have no clue how those things work.

Re:Data recovery?

[EmagGeek]

You crack the case open, plug a JTAG reader up to the JTAG port, and you read the data off to an image, and burn the image to a new drive.

Re:Data recovery?

[BitZtream]

No.

The additional cost required to make controllers that will do on the fly encryption is considerable on a large scale and there really isn't a point to it. When the drive works, you can just use the standard interface to pull the data off so encrypting it is pointless additional latency and cost. In order to be even slightly useful the key has to be unique for each device which means you can't just mass produce the controller in the typical way, you have to build in some form of way to modify it for each controller so the key is unique or someone just learns the key from one drive and uses it to get data off all the other models. In a controlled environment where you can see that putting A in results in C coming out, you can brute force your way to finding the key much faster than typical encryption where all you know is that C came out, and you need to figure out what went in.

There are drives that do it, but you pay out the ass for them, just like with USB sticks that do encryption. The cost isn't so much because its really THAT hard, its just that the demand is so low, and people who really care about encryption are willing to pay with their first born for it. On that note, I don't care about encryption of my personal data and you can have my first born anyway, so maybe thats a bad example. :)

IDE drive 'password protection' on most drives is simply a controller password, the drive is still contains the raw data. This of course is not true for every drive, but for the drives you buy from newegg, bestbuy or your local computer store it is. Most people aren't going to take a drive and swap out the controller board from an identical drive to get at the data on a desktop PC.

Of course, the reality of it is, VERY VERY few people have data that is worth encrypting, no one cares THAT much about your data, hence why no one really uses BitLocker, TruCrypt or encrypted filesystems (Settle down geeks, no one cares about your data either, regardless of how important you think it is) in the real world. Geeks do, but geeks do plenty of pointless things because they just want to do it to learn or in most cases, ePenis size.

Re:Data recovery?

[A Friendly Troll]

OK, that makes sense :) But why were there serious issues with Intel's drive just recently, when changing some password bricked the system entirely and Intel said the data is gone forever?

Re:Data recovery?

[Culture20]

geeks do plenty of pointless things because they just want to do it to learn or in most cases, ePenis size.

Too true. That's why I learned a little about photo editing software.
I'll let the internet decide which reason I meant.

SSD reliability

[Peter_JS_Blue]

I have 4 SSDs, 2 x 128 GB OCZ and 2 x 16GB Samsung

I get lots of problems with FreeBSD 7.2 on one OCZ (random drive crashes but easy to fix with fsck) but the other OCZ works fine on Ubuntu 8.04

One of the 16GB SSDs lost a partition a while back when running Fedora 9 needing a complete re-install.

In summary: SSDs are not particularly reliable.

"100W" CFL for $1 on sale

[Anonymous Coward]

"100W" CFLs were on sale for $1 recently. I grabbed a bunch. These were nice ones too, with almost zero warm-up time.

At that price who cares if they fail as fast as a regular bulb when you are burning 40W instead of 100 for the about same luminosity.

Well, the landfill owner does *coughmercurycough* but other than him and Mother Nature, who cares?

Thumb Drive

[BlueBoxSW.com]

I'm waiting for a thumb drive that lasts for more than 6 months.

Until then, I can't see trusting this technology with any important task.

Intel mainstream x-25

[Twilightman42]

Been using this on my Linux laptop for over a year, best investment I have made. Load times are instant, system scans lightning fast, and so far it has been 100% reliable. I think brand can play a big part, a high quality SSD is expensive, but is very reliable. Same with CFB really, the 1$ 6 pack from the dollar store is not going to last as long as a nice one from a hardware store.

CFL warmup

[Firethorn]

Not at first, no... give it a minute or two and yes. but by then you are accustomed to the brightness and less sensitive to the difference.

Heh, for that 100W bathroom light, I considered that a 'feature', not a detriment. Especially for those midnight visits.

It was also the only lightbulb with a noticable warmup period, but then, I'm probably pretty tolerant of variable light levels. My pupils simply adjust to compensate.

Of course, being aware of lighting conditions and setting them up to be efficient helps. I've seen people attempt to pour more light into a situation where it's the bad placement of light causing you to see too much light from areas other than where you're looking at causing even more problems. You want to illuminate what you're looking at - so your eyes don't simply adapt to the higher light levels and make what you're looking at seem even dimmer.

Consider the difference between viewing ranges for a candle and a 1M candle light. You certainly can't see a million times as much - your eyes adjust to keep perceived levels within tolerances.

Re:CFL warmup

[Kvasio]

For those night visits I have LED-snake on suspended ceiling shelf. LED light reflected from the ceilling is light enough not to walk into wall, but dim enough not to shock my eyes.

good point, didn't think of that

[circletimessquare]

so a nobel prize to the first guy who can devise a white LED from common elements rather than rare elements, like properly doped/ layered aluminum boride, or whatever

Re:good point, didn't think of that

[Anonymous Coward]

How about an efficient bulb made from...glass and tungsten?

GE was working on a more-efficient version of the incandescent bulb. It was to start out twice as efficient as current bulbs and eventually be four times as efficient; comparable to CFLs. I'm guessing they planned to replace the tungsten filament with a tungsten photonic lattice. Alas, stupid laws that banned incandescents outright -- instead of banning inefficient bulbs -- caused them to drop the project.

IMHO, CFLs suck. I've had nearly a dozen (various brands and price ranges) fail in the last 18 years. One of them (a ring-shaped bulb made by Lights Of America) came close to bursting into flames. Because of that, I no longer trust them.

The article refers to bulbs made by Feit. I bought an LED night light made by them which failed after 1 year.

when it gets banned

[zogger]

In Europe I think they are outright banning incandescents shortly. Then what? You can't just have no light in all those places you just said were inappropriate.

Well, I just checked, yes the ban went into effect last month (this is a pro-ban link)

http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/09/01/europes-incandescent-light-bulb-ban-begins-today/

Merchants are allowed to close out remaining incandescent lightbulb inventory and that's it.

I therefore predicteth a robust and lucrative underground black market economy with incandescents in euro-peon-land, just because CFLs don't cut the mustard quite good enough yet for all applications, as you pointed out some examples thereof, and others have noted that they find them severely lacking for this or that reason.

Well, you want ketchup or mayo on that sammich? Whoops, sorry we *only* have ketchup, by law....

I just don't like the CFLs, the ones I have tried anyway. I'm down to one in the wellhouse and that's it, I removed the ones I had installed throughout the house, thinking I was being a good boy and all, and went back to cheap incandescents that are suitable for purpose. I found the CFLs won't light up a room from the ceiling, looks like twilight to me and defeats the whole purpose of having an overhead light, I can't use them for reading, the color and intensity are way off sitting next to a normal table lamp with one of those things in there, and for close work, forget it, I have to throw on a headlamp anyway then so what's the point?

    I will hold out for cheaper/better LEDs instead,(I already have some portable battery operated ones I use now, mostly during the frequent power outages here in colonialized and exploited third world rural merika, and like them a lot, and they are just bargain basement el cheapo ten buck chinese camping lamps and they work just great, same batts for a few years now) and in the meantime, conserve energy in other areas /me thinks about a rainy day nap right now ;)

Stock SSD on an EEE 1000 40G

[CFBMoo1]

Over a year and no problems. It sits on my desk when I'm at work cranking out streaming music and video running Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix with an ext2 file system since I heard journal file systems put more wear on them. I've yet to have any real problems at this point. Also do some web surfing and even used it to do a few days work when my work PC was down.

You just buy dimmable CFLs

[name_already_taken]

How do you handle the lack of dimming? I have a bunch of sockets with a dimmer and am afraid to put a CFL in there. Can I disable the dimmer easily? Or is it OK to just push the button all the way every time?

Thanks a lot,

Well, you can either buy dimmable CFLs (they do exist and are available in stores right alongside the non-dimmable ones), or you can leave the dimmer turned all the way up and just use it as an on/off switch. It will work fine and there won't be any damage to non-dimmable CFLs as long as you don't use the dimming function for any real length of time.

One difference with the dimmable CFLs is that the color temperature doesn't change much as you dim the light. With an incandescent lamp as you dim the lamp, the filament cools down, and the color temperature drops - so a dimmed incandescent lamp shifts towards the red end of the spectrum and changes how colors look. It's kind of nice to be able to dim the lights and have the colors of things in the room stay the same.

Re:You just buy dimmable CFLs

[gd2shoe]

I urge caution with dimmable CFLs. Usually they aren't dimmable at all. As the ggp post said "And yes, any dimmable ones are crap. Even the quality dimmable ones can't be 'dimmed'." If you found an exception to that, then you're lucky. The rest of us want to know what brand you use, how long they've been installed, and how frequently you dim them. (and do they buzz?) As pointed out by cheesewire elsewhere in the thread, there are at least two different types of dimmers. Maybe some dimmers simply refuse CFLs.

Dimming works fine...

[bradley13]

...you just have to buy quality stuff. About 10 years ago, we bought five standing lamps, each with 3x32watt dimmable bulbs. The electronics in the lamp are specifically designed to dim CFLs, and the CFLs are designed to be dimmed. The total price for each lamp (they are nice lamps) was several hundred dollars. However, in 10 years, we have replaced only one bulb. The warm-up time is negligible and the light quality is excellent.

Hot-wire bulbs are a throw-away product. You just can't look at CFLs the same way: you are buying an electronic appliance that ought to last for years. Either spend for quality, or use some other kind of lighting.

You get what you pay for.

Re:Dimming works fine...

[commodore64_love]

Okay this about the 5th post that said "Don't buy cheap; pay more for better quality." Well they bulbs I've used so far cost $1- for 3, or about $3.33 each. If I go to a $10 CFL then I'm not really saving any money versus buying a 20 cent incandescent at the grocery store. The energy savings don't compensate for the much-higher expense.

Re:Dimming works fine...

[bradley13]

That is, unfortunately, absolutely right: you do not save money with CFLs. For that matter, any energy savings is also questionable, once you account for the energy used in production, not to mention disposal.

We have CFLs for various reasons. For example, the big CFL lamps mentioned in the post above are in rooms that are often used by 20-40 people. With that many bodies, they already get too warm. Without CFLs, we would need some 2000 watts of lighting - that would be intolerable.

In the end, forcing CFLs is yet another political scam. So is just about anything touted for its energy conservation potential. Energy is the lifeblood of civilization - we ought to see how cheaply we can generate more of it, not shave pennies like misers.

Re:Dimming works fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

any energy savings is also questionable, once you account for the energy used in production, not to mention disposal.

Citation needed.

Re:Dimming works fine...

[pla]

Oh, not this crap again...


you do not save money with CFLs.

Tell that to my electric bill, which dropped roughly 25% when I switched to (almost) all CFLs. And as for lifespan, I still have half of my original set of them fully functional (almost a decade ago now). And quick tip, don't just buy twenty of them and replace all your lights en masse, do it as they burn out (otherwise, you've thrown away a perfectly good $0.50 bulb).


For that matter, any energy savings is also questionable, once you account for the energy used in production

Yup. You caught 'em. All those evil corporations actually sell their products at a loss compared to the cost of energy required to produce them - Because your statement implies exactly that. Same for all those naughty solar panels, dontchaknow. And yes, I appreciate all too well how massively unfairly the utilities favor corporate customers over mere humans - But even considering that, if GE could make more reselling electricity than selling CFLs, don't you think they would?


not to mention disposal.

Ahh, the specter of all that spooooky mercury. That 100% recyclable mercury. Along with the 100% recyclable phosphorus coating the 100% recyclable glass. And the (merely) 99% recyclable fiberglass and plastic in the base, don't forget that.



Yes, CFLs have their shortcomings - And most people get them totally wrong (with the exception of how poorly they work with dimmers, that alone holds true). They start right up, they only take a few seconds to reach full brightness, they do save money, they do last 10x (or more) longer (though they do admittedly have a slightly higher out-of-box failure rate), they come in full-spectrum versions (and something incandescents don't, they come in germicidal versions as well). They even come in every common form factor now, from candelabra to GX53 (I learned that part when I discovered my new house had all candelabra-base lights).

Re:Dimming works fine...

[nathanh]

For that matter, any energy savings is also questionable, once you account for the energy used in production, not to mention disposal.

You are absolutely wrong. My CFL cost me $18 each approximately 7 years ago. I have easily recovered this in electricity bills already. Because the $18 covered the entire cost of the CFL - including the energy required to produce and deliver them - there has been an energy saving.

Quick sums: 100W globe, 2 hours per day, 300 days per year, 14c/kWh = $8.40 per year. 25W CFL, 2 hours per day, 300 days per year, 14c/kWh = $2.10 per year. The ROI is less than 3 years. And 2 hours per day is *very* conservative. And I have generously excluded the cost of incandescent globes.

Re:Dimming works fine...

[jabuzz]

Your analysis is flawed in two respects. First the purchase price of a CFL does not accurately reflect the energy used to make it. Almost all CFL are made in China, which is particularly poor in terms of energy efficiency in manufacture and has a poor environmental record in manufacturing, especially for CFL's. You also need to remember that it is the amount of CO2 produced that is important.

Secondly depending where you live, and whether you have thermostatically controlled central heating your energy saving will be considerably less if anything, because the central heating will just have been working harder.

Where I live in Scotland this is second issue is very significant. I only turn lights on when it is dark. During the summer it does not get dark to late, and I hardly use lights. However during winter it gets dark earlier and I use lights a lot. However it is also colder and I have my thermostatically controlled central heating on as well. If I switch to CFL's all that will happen is my central heating will make up the short fall in heat by working harder. It is also complicated by the fact that a significant proportion of electricity in Scotland comes from CO2 neutral sources for example hydro provides a bit over 20% of all electricity in Scotland.

CFL's are indisputably cheaper over the life cycle. However it is *FAR* from clear that they are the environmentally better option. Remember there are *NO* zero cost options.

Re:Dimming works fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

"you do not save money with CFLs."

Are you nuts?

I run 4 lights continuously, 24/7 on a barn/garage with it's own utility line. They used to have 60W standard light bulbs. I used to change, on average, 1-2 burnt out bulbs a month. A 4 pack of regular bulbs where I live cost $2.

I bought a 4 pack of those 13-15W crappy green color CFL at Home Depot years ago for $9.99 when HD went CFL crazy. Don't like the color spectrum, but they are brighter than the standard 60W bulbs. In 2 months, I saved $10 on my electricity bill, average $5 a month. The CFLs last 4x longer, so I'm also saving myself hassle climbing up a damn ladder to change barn on a 15 foot ceiling.

iow, the savings on the electrical cost PAID FOR the cost of all CFL bulbs in 2 months. And they operate longer than 2 months (averaging 4-6 months). So I roughly save another $10 back in energy savings alone. And I still haven't accounted for the 60W regular bulbs cost, which were $2 every 2 months. So in 4 months, I save roughly $14.

The real savings, as already mentioned, is the hassle not changing light bulbs every time one burns out. Also, Home Depot have red and blue packaged ones, which I've purchased, which are supposed to be warmer or brighter but keep roughly the same lumens or greater while using the same wattage, roughly 14 watts.

That $42 at $2 gallon heating oil on my crappy 25+ year old heating oil steam boiler that also supplies my hot water, that's roughly 1-1.5 months of free hot water during the summer months.

In any case, it bears repeating--for me, the energy savings are nice, but the hassle of not driving to the store to buy light bulbs (gas), pulling the ladder out and changing bulbs (time, effort, safety), is worth the cost of the CFLs alone on a direct comparison. Switching to CFLs are like getting your light bulbs for free and getting a rebate on top of that for using them.

Re:Dimming works fine...

[Epi-man]

They start right up, they only take a few seconds to reach full brightness...

What sort are you using? We have many ceiling flood lights in our house and now that the temp has dropped (70 F) they take a few minutes (not seconds) to reach full brightness. The standard spiral style do come up immediately, but the floods definitely take a while now, which annoys my son to no end. I tell him to suck it up, they save us so much in power/lack of cooling needs during the summer (I'm a strong proponent of them, but have to disagree about start up times).

Re:Dimming works fine...

[queazocotal]

'Almost all CFL are made in China, which is particularly poor in terms of energy efficiency in manufacture and has a poor environmental record in manufacturing, especially for CFL's.'

Assume that the total purchase price of 99p (not a cheapest bulb) goes into purchasing energy at 1p/KWh in china.

This is 99KWh of energy.

Assume that the bulb saves 60W when on (a 22W bulb producing about as much light as a 60W bulb).

This means it's a net positive after only 1600 hours of burning.

Most of my CFLs last a _lot_ longer than that.

Re:Dimming works fine...

[commodore64_love]

>>>Tell that to my electric bill, which dropped roughly 25% when I switched to (almost) all CFLs

What? Is your house lit-up like a retail store 18 hours a day??? It would have to be, because I don't see how else you'd see 25% drop just because you reduced your overall power by ~30 bulbs * 45 watts. That's trivial compared to how much power is used by refrigerators, water heaters, and central heat/air conditioning.

In my own house I saw no difference whatsoever. My lighting expense is virtually nothing compared to all the other power-sucking devices (heat pump, freezer, et cetera) that are running.

Right! You need a ballast-rated photo sensor

[name_already_taken]

I equipped my outdoor lights with a photo switch that says "ballast duty" on it - it's designed to turn on HID or sodium lamps which have long warmup times and which can't handle being turned on and off rapidly. It cost about $10 or $20, but it's worth it.

I put in some very cheap CFL floods and the same bulbs have been working just fine for over three years now. They have a nice light, certainly equivalent to an incandescent bulb, and they're saving me money on the electric bill as well as eliminating the trips up the ladder to change bulbs.

toxicity doesn't compare

[circletimessquare]

yes, we're talking about our famous poison arsenic, which is also a potent carcinogen

however, break that CFL, and your toddler gets a nice heavy sticky sweet ozone-mercury taste in the back of their throat, that fine white dust hanging in the air. joy

break that LED (a LOT harder to break, btw), and what do you get? a stable crystal. hell, you could probably swallow a gallium arsenide crystal and it will pass through you, inert

now if you want to talk about mining, smelting, refining, fabricating, and disposal: yeah, gallium arsenide ain't pretty. but neither is mercury by the same measures. its just that in residential spaces (not the wider supply chain), gallium arsenide bits is a lot safer than mercury vapors and dust

My experience...

[ErikZ]

I bought the CT128M225 from Crucial, and even though I haven't had any failures, I'm not using the drive to it's full ability.

Getting fully functional firmware hasn't happened yet. They finally implemented TRIM under Windows 7, but it reduced write speeds in half. I'm currently running a version of the firmware that is known to have issues, but I've turned off certain functions under Windows 7 and haven't had any data corruption problems.

I figure another year and the firmware will be golden.

At that point it would be interesting to see statistics of DOAs of SSDs and the old platter tech.

waiting...

[Anonymous Coward]

As evidenced by the multitude of failures of USB "flash drives" I will not be using SSD anytime soon. I will probably consider Intel and OCZ brand SSDs toward the end of next year, but just as a boot drive. The data arrays in my servers in my data center will continue to be hard drives for probably about 3-5 more years.

Screw SSDs

[CompMD]

Off the top of my head, here's some of the "out of warranty" drives I have at home.

WD 30GB IDE drive, 8 years old, works fine.
Seagate 120GB IDE drive, 4 years old, works fine.
Maxtor 6.4GB IDE drive, 10 years old, works fine. (from Powermac G3)
IBM 12GB IDE drive, 8 years old, works fine.
IBM 3.5GB IDE drive, 12 years old, works fine. (from Thinkpad 380XD)
IBM 4x4GB SCSI DASD array, 10 years old, works fine. (from AS/400)
IBM 4x9GB SCSI DASD array, 10 years old, works fine. (from AS/400)
Seagate 4.3GB SCSI drive, 13 years old, works fine. (several, from old SparcStations)
Seagate 1.2GB IDE drive, 15 years old, works fine.
Seagate 41MB IDE Type 17 drive, >20 years old, works fine. (from Zenith 386)
Seagate 420MB SCSI drive, 20 years old, works fine. (from SGI Iris Indigo)
Seagate 1GB SCSI drive, 17 years old, works fine.
Rodime 210MB SCSI drive, 20 years old, works fine. (several, from HP workstations)
Conner 40MB SCSI drive, >20 years old, works fine. (several, from old Macs)

I can count on one hand the number of drives I've had go bad on me:

Seagate 800MB IDE (completely died)
WD 640MB IDE drive (developed some bad sectors, still mounts, about 80% readable, can't boot)
Seagate 2.5GB IDE drive (developed bad sectors, still mounts, about 50% readable, can't boot)

The fact that people put up with hardware that basically instantly fails is a joke.

Re:Screw SSDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Those I have that died, I can count them on one hand, too, in binary. Aren't anecdotes awesome :p

Not my experience..... yet!

[Joao]

We have 15 laptops in my office with SSD, and I have it running on my personal laptop as well. So far, so good.

Intel X25-M G2

[SlideGuitar]

Intel X25-M G2 (80gb) is a transformative computing experience. Applications boot "instantly". Of course I don't keep data files on an 80gb ssd drive... that's all over on standard 1TB platter. Once I upgrade to Win7 with TRIM I'm hoping for performance to be maintained for a good long while.

Re:Intel X25-M G2

[phoenix321]

Second that. One must see Windows Vista boot up in 30 seconds to believe it, though.

Loading bars, splash screens are just a blink in the eye, everything concerning multiple small or fragmented reads or concurrent access is going at a speed I can subjectively only classify as awesome. Sustained reads and writes are noticeably faster than HDDs, but not lightning fast.

Having Firefox launched in the blink of an eye is sheer bliss. Having Firefox started mere seconds after the Start button appeared after bootup is almost insane.

I can only imagine what a reliable SSD could do to an enterprise-class database or file server. With the billions of small, fragmented and concurrent requests on these machines, SSDs should blast them into orbit and then some.

SSD For Great Love

[srussell]

I've been running a Transcend 64GB SSD (ca. $200, PATA -- not high-end, definitely) in my laptop for 10 months. It's on all the time, except when I suspend it for transportation. It is running Ubuntu, and I've got a current uptime of 30 days. I'm a software developer; I download and install betas of OpenOffice, I upgrade Netbeans and Eclipse regularly, update and build software (including one work project that's over 1GB built), and generally trash the hard drive. I haven't had any trouble with it, at all.

I also installed an OCZ 64GB SATA SSD in my wife's laptop since mid-June (so, 4.5 months). Hers is more often in sleep mode than in use, since she has a separate, work, laptop. She uses it for writing, homework, browsing, and so on -- light duty. No problems there, either.

Neither laptop is configured to run /var/log or /tmp in RAM, or anything fancy. Both are configured with ext3 (although mine has a BTRFS partition, for play) with normal journalling.

I'm happy with mine. I don't notice the speed increase, if there is any; I mostly went this route to (a) reduce the heat, (b) reduce power consumption, and (c) reduce noise. My wife's Acer Timeline is particularly silent, as the CPU fan never comes on. I don't know if I'd put SSDs in my server; HDs are too ridiculously cheap, and I don't need extra speed for my modest music/file/web server uses. But, so far, I've been entirely satisfied with their reliability.

I do back both machines up nightly, just in case.

Re:Don't Defrag - FALSE

[moonbender]

Flashfire - yes! A large memory write buffer, because life just isn't interesting enough without it.

mod parent up

[circletimessquare]

and give him an honorary degree in material science

Adlib tiem?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assumed PEBLAS was,

Problem Exists Between Light and ____________.

But it seemed ____________ would cause _____________ with my____________.

Thanks for the ___________ clarification.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Don't Buy Cheaply

[Kneo24]

Well yes, if you buy a cheap SSD, it has a higher potential of not working. But this is true of most anything where there's cheap versus expensive in a technologies early life. Anecdotal evidence versus anecdotal evidence, you see far less people complaining about the higher quality SSD's dying than you do about the lower quality ones. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. It's really that simple, for now anyway.

Re:Don't Buy Cheaply

[Anonymous Coward]

I do hope Monster Cable starts making SSDs so I'm assured of good quality.

Pioneers

[argent]

It's a new technology. You're pioneers. You know how to tell the pioneers? They're the ones with arrows in their backs.

You have my honest thanks for taking an arrow for me.

pointless subject

[Anonymous Coward]

Bought a Corsair x64 but I couldnt install windows or format it. It shows up in windows and SMART is reporting fine conditions but it seems you cant write anything to it. Sending it back for a replacement.

OCZ 60GB Solid is... Solid...

[EmagGeek]

Ibought 4 of these last month to do testing... all have been from -10C to +85C (at 10C/min) and from 5% RH to 95%, and voltage margining to +/- 10%, in a CSZ humidity/temperature chamber, and using a variable power supply of my own design.

Did walking 1's, random patterns, with sequential and random reads and writes... all fine... no problems... 4/4 drives 100%...

Murphy's Law

[dangitman]

Aside - I have two traditional hard drives in my PC. They've been spinning almost-nonstop since 2003. Any idea how much longer I have until they crash?

You should check your machine, because they just did.

Product specific, not SSD in general

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had no issues with Samsung/Corsair P256, out of about 12. Had one 32GB Corsair fail from about 9. No failures with 64GB Corsair X series. Had near 100% failure rate with a batch of X128 Corsairs - 8 out of 10 comebacks. The replacements X128s have all be fine - hints at quality control issues. Interestingly enough, they all (X128s) failed on 2 different HP SmartArrays, after a week of solid testing on an Intel controller.

 

More than a year now, still going strong.

[Civil_Disobedient]

I've been using SSDs for my primary drives for more than a year now. I'm a software developer and the IDE I use does constant, intensive code analysis, and it was crippling my productivity. Switching to SSD has essentially taken I/O out of the performance equation. They are, in a word, incredible.

Yes, they are expensive. But the performance increases are so palpable, so immediately obvious, that I tell people it feels like going from from a Pentium 4 to a Core 2 Duo. You could spend easily over two grand upgrading to the latest & greatest I7 Extreme and not notice as much of a difference in performance as you would moving up from a 7200rpm rotating platter drive to an SLC SSD.

And as for the question of reliability, I have had zero problems with them. None. Of course, they're both Samsungs, not some no-name company that makes printers and decides they're going to try and break into the SSD market on a whim. I've been harping on my manager to switch some of the more overloaded database servers to SSD for temp-table creation optimization. One of these days...

Anyway, that's my two cents. Oh, and make & models of the drives I use at home and at work:

DRIVE #1: SAMSUNG 2.5" 32GB SATA II SLC
Model #: MCBQE32G5MPP-0VA00
Purchase Date: 8/11/2008

DRIVE #2: G.SKILL FS-25S2-64GB 2.5" 64GB SATA II SLC
Model #: MCC0E64G5MPP (Re-branded Samsung)
Purchase Date: 10/7/2008

SYSTEM USAGE: Always-on, 24/7/365 system.
SOFTWARE USAGE: Heavy J2EE software development, code inspection & analysis. Heavy application use (photographer in my spare time so plenty of Photoshop) and some Flex development on the side. Home system doubles as media-center hub & personal web server.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Basically, these things are used constantly, and have yet to fail me.

Looking AF long t-shirt woman in www.tntshoes.com

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Sounds like bad luck to me

[rebelwarlock]

I haven't bought any SSD drives yet (waiting for prices to go down), but I've been using compact florescent bulbs for years now and I've never gotten one bad one. Granted, I haven't had to buy all that many since they last so damn long, but still, if that's the comparison, there's nothing wrong with SSD.

You weren't just unlucky.

[thethibs]

or are we just unlucky?

.

One way to find out is to run the numbers. How likely is it that 3 of 8 drives will fail in 4 months or less just by chance, assuming normally healthy drives?

You can work out the math the hard way, but simulation is faster and easier. I like R for the job:

ssdfails=function() {

# test hypothesis that three of eight SSD drives failing
# in four months could happen by chance.
# Do 10,000 sets of eight drives.
# Give them a mean life of 48 months with s=12 months

a=rnorm(80000,48,12)
dim(a)=c(8,10000)

# mark the tests in which 3 or
# more drives fail in 4 months or less

b=colSums(a<=4)>=3

# add up the hits and output the ratio

sum(b)/10000
}

> source("C:\\prj\\R\\ssdfails.R")
> ssdfails() [1] 0

Zero of 10,000 trials says that the odds of it happening by chance are infinitesimal. You got crappy drives.

Maybe a little work for a foregone conclusion, but ain't science fun?

Re:You weren't just unlucky.

[thethibs]

I'll leave the other interesting question for someone else: How low do the mean and sd have to go before probability of the observed failures brings chance into "plausible" range (.05)?

Gee, new technology isn't as reliable as old tech?

[BitZtream]

Really?

No shit?

You mean when you are buying new tech, that isn't really in mass production and hasn't been around for 50 years that it isn't as reliable?

Who would have thought?

IF SSDs stick around for the time span that traditional magnetic drives have, I suspect they'll make them more reliable. Thats part of the process, as time goes on the production process, technology, and knowledge of the technology result in faster, cheaper, and more reliable devices.

If you are just now figuring this out, you aren't a geek and shouldn't be posting on slashdot. That includes most of the mods that approve these stories.

Oh how I miss the days when slashdot was for geeks with a clue and more than a months experience using a computer.

AnandTech's SSD Anthology and Follow-Ups

[JakFrost]

Mandatory reference below. Read it and get informed about SSD's, performance, and issues with controllers and firmware problems. Long story short, Intel is on top of the market, OCZ Vertex is a very close contender using Indilinx controllers. Samsung, JMicron based drives suck very much.

AnandTech's - Storage

Below is my own post about this topic a little while back when I got into SSD's.

Slashdot.org - Solid State Disk Benchmarks (Score 3, Informative)

Also, be aware of shrinking flash cell sizes, 50nm was original flash chips, now 34nm in Intel's G2 line of MLC SSDs is popular. Multi-Level Cells store 2 or more bits per cell, decreasing price at the cost of performance and reliability of read back. Also future 3 or more bit MLC drives will offer even lower cost but also a lower reliability and less write cycles. There was a great article about this problem a while back on Slashdot so just search for it.

Currently dealing with an OCZ Verte 60GB SSD prob

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny this should come up at this time. I just took my first SSD out for a spin as a test set up for a new generation of 3D CADing stations at the office. The short of it is after an uneventful OS install and the installation of all our company software the drive up and crapped out, completely hosing the data in the process. The file system and all data is completely gone.

Apparently this is a fairly widespread occurence, complete and unrecoverable loss of data. I was advised by the manufacturer (OCZ) that I needed to update my firmware to 1.4, which came out very recently. And also a recommendation to up the southbridge voltage on the mobo. They are claiming that "nvidia and AMD chipsets" are "quirky". Check out OCZ and Intel service forums for many more stories like mine.

Yes this was just one event, but it was also my only experience with SSD besides my EEEpc (no problem whatsoever...2 years strong) But I am not the only person to have troubles, and the problem I had could have been devastating under non-test circumstances.

Sure we are

[Krakadoom]

There are frequent file errors on my ipod, both current and previous. This means songs are often truncated, and they are actually hard to reload in proper version, without resetting the device entirely, since there is no direct file-system access.

Not every common form factor

[WindShadow]

At least not that my hardware, home improvement, or lighting store can find. What I need is a 1:1 replacement for common 40/60w bulbs, and all I find is incompatible odd shapes which are only "compatible" in base size. I have spent a great deal of time and money keeping the original 1880s Victorian fixtures going, and many have original shades which clip on the bulb itself.

"Looks sorta like a light bulb" doesn't cut it, I use CFL where I can, and halogen floodlights in some places, but most of my bulbs are regular incandescent. The new GE high efficiency, long life, incandescents may very well serve, they are close to CFL in performance.

You got your wish

[WindShadow]

I'd also like to see optical media go away. Burns take too long, are too likely not to work on another drive or even the same drive, have one little bad spot that spoils everything, and drives go bad all the time. I'll take SSDs over DVD-RWs. Wish more Linux distros were set up for easy installation onto and from flash memory drives.

livecdtools will take bootable install media and put them on USB flash nicely. At least for the distributions I use.