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Power-Loss-Protected SSDs Tested: Only Intel S3500 Passes
lkcl writes "After the reports on SSD reliability and after experiencing a costly 50% failure rate on over 200 remote-deployed OCZ Vertex SSDs, a degree of paranoia set in where I work. I was asked to carry out SSD analysis with some very specific criteria: budget below £100, size greater than 16Gbytes and Power-loss protection mandatory. This was almost an impossible task: after months of searching the shortlist was very short indeed. There was only one drive that survived the torturing: the Intel S3500. After more than 6,500 power-cycles over several days of heavy sustained random writes, not a single byte of data was lost. Crucial M4: failed. Toshiba THNSNH060GCS: failed. Innodisk 3MP SATA Slim: failed. OCZ: failed hard. Only the end-of-lifed Intel 320 and its newer replacement, the S3500, survived unscathed. The conclusion: if you care about data even when power could be unreliable, only buy Intel SSDs."
Relatedly, don't expect SSDs to become cheaper than HDDs any time soon.
"after experiencing a costly 50% failure rate on over 200 remote-deployed OCZ Vertex SSDs"
Stop gloating about how you got the good batch of OCZ SSDs! Some of us weren't so lucky....
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
and get a UPS. Why blow more money on a slightly more reliable SSD when a UPS is so much cheaper?
These things are already expensive; surely spending a few more cents per unit on a capacitor to ensure power loss reliability isn't a big deal.
The cap only has to be big enough so the controller can do a controlled shutdown.
I've bought a few handfuls of SSDs over the years, all Intel, all reliable... except one OCZ drive which was flaky and unreliable.
Cool story? You bet it is.
I am unsure if any of the drives that "failed" have a critical component that allows for the drive to sustain a temporary loss of power. Which, if any, stated that they could?
Slightly more seriously than my last post, the S3500 was the only enterprise-grade SSD tested in that batch. Frankly, I have little sympathy for you if you expected consumer-grade SSDs to perform like Enterprise-grade SSDs in a mission-critical application.
Consumer grade drives, even/especially the "high performance" ones that will often benchmark better than the "overpriced" enterprise drives, ain't designed to have perfect data retention. Of course, consumer or enterprise, any drive can fail and appropriate measures including RAID and backup* should always be in place no matter what type of drive you have.
* Yes, RAID != backup, I know, don't bother making that post.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
If I were to pull the plug on a consumer grade mechanical hdd in the middle of a write, would it not lose data as well?
>care about data loss
Isn't this why god created UPS?
Does this mean the write-cache is NAND too? I do not see that in the features for the SSDs they selected.
Also, why was Samsung excluded? Their 800 series with RAID support has been tested in the past with long term writes with great results.
http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4178/10/hardwareinfo-tests-lifespan-of-samsung-ssd-840-250gb-tlc-ssd-updated-with-final-conclusion-final-update-20-6-2013
I do not mean to plug a particular brand, but the range of SSD's tested in the articles does not seem very expansive nor do they seem to fit into the criteria they specify.
If you have important data don't store it on an SSD drive. I own decent size small company which ships lots of systems with the better drives (not Intel) with comparable user satisfaction ratings to Intels SSD drives and they certainly aren't that terribly reliable. They are much better than the junk SSD drives, but for real reliability stick with the 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM drives. Sadly the 7200 RPM drives are dead now. Nobody makes them for laptops. I guess the next best thing for speed + a little more reliability is Intel SSD.
Arguably the best price/performance is offered by the Samsung 840 EVO, and the 840 PRO if you care about the extra performance. These are some of the most popular SSD drives on the market! How in the hell did they not test them?
Original research by someone whose identity I can't look up. Hmm.
I'd trust every conclusion except the one that pretty blatantly advertises Intel. I guess that means Toshiba might be worth looking into.
There's still one 720RPM laptop drive, I just bought a 1TB 7200RPM HGST drive recently...
That said one of the newer Seagate drives scored faster in a speed check. Not sure what to make of that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do it again OP with exactly the same parameters, but this time compare SSD's to platter hard drives.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm sure the reviewer tested what they had available, but I'm not sure I'd draw any conclusions from this list of drives. The drive that passes is the only current generation drive on the list. Everything else is last generation or older. In the case of the OCZ Vertex, much older. Most of the current popular drives seem to be omitted.
People who have "important data" and fail to make a backup copy - no matter which type of media they are using - deserve to lose their data. Seriously, what you said doesn't only apply to SSD's.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If you are worried about data loss during a power failure wouldn't the money be better spent ensuring there isn't a power loss?
UPS are cheap and reliable, and give you time to shut down.
Its interesting and good to know that the intel SSD survived thousands of powercycles while it was trying to work without losing a single byte of data. But my desktop SSD is on a UPS. And my laptop has a battery built into it. So a power failure affecting the SSD in the middle of an operation is pretty much unheard of.
Hey lkcl, I don't know if this is a concern of yours, but I ended up having some fairly costly troubleshooting a few years ago with the original OCZ Vertex drives where the root cause was my laptop battery had degraded enough to where the OCZ wasn't getting the necessary voltage/current on boot-up or when the power was unplugged and it ran off of battery. The OCZ Vertex drive hardware wasn't well designed to handle not getting enough power (it was still receiving power) and totally and completely corrupted the flash to the point where it had to be sent back to OCZ. I think I did 7-8 drive returns and a laptop motherboard replacement until I finally figured it out. You might try that on the Intel S3500 and see what your results are.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my skim through the article, it seems like he only used a single drive of each type. That makes it hard to demonstrate that the differences he saw were real, and not just random. I.e., it may be that all drives have a 75% chance of surviving the test, and that the Intel one just happened to be the lucky one. A more robust test would be to test N copies of each drive. N = 5 should give pretty good significance if this really is completely deterministic.
Yes, you could buy an Intel SSD for twice the cost of one without power loss protection. Or, you could buy a UPS for a mere $43, and get protection not just for the SSD, but for all the other components, as well as non-disk related software. So why would I care about power loss protection in the hard drive again?
some of them have hard power on off switches and some places use power breaks to mass turn games off at the end of day
This isn't particularly useful to many people, or even accurate, since it was horribly gimped with the low cost requirement.
If this was tested for every brand and a selection of each of the main SSDs they have from low, middle and high-end ranges, then it'd maybe be useful.
But that shit is going to be expensive, so don't expect it any time soon.
I suggest you just get yourself a UPS if you haven't already got one.
Even a simple wall UPS that goes between your computer and power will be fine.
All you will be needing is just a few minutes to make sure you shut stuff down before the power pops off, so even low-power UPSes will be fine.
Intel needs to feed data from said drives to the NSA while you sleep.
(Side note: unplug the cat5).
This is all a great theory, until the "data" in question is something like copy protection hackery that someone's high-end software puts on your SSD boot disk without necessarily telling you anything about it.
The only time I had an SSD failure, the hardware guys were great and got a replacement to me the next day, while it took literally weeks (and, in the end, a recorded letter threatening legal action) to get Adobe to let me use the software I already f**king bought on the same f**king PC it was always installed on, after I'd reinstalled everything on the replacement SSD.
If that had been an isolated occurrence, I might be willing to drop the point, but since I know of others who have also been screwed by Adobe's DRM/copy protection mess after a drive failure and I also know of other high-end software providers who play similar games, I don't think "just back everything up" is a good enough answer to unreliable drives. A drive failure typically costs some of us at least an order of magnitude more than just replacing the hardware itself once you factor in downtime, and we shouldn't have to mess around with RAID arrays of SSDs just to compensate for poorly designed products that fail unnecessarily.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Adaptec's new 8805 (currently backordered everywhere). Their no Zero-Maintenance-Cache-Protection = no battery cache. About $500 or in that neighborhood.
Dont buy shit software from EA then, because really we know they are the biggest retailer using DRM still.
To be fair, even if you dont agree and continue to buy software that is copy protected, that is the issue, not the SSD.
Backup everything fools.
If your story includes "I use an Adobe product", you really have no one to blame but yourself for any and all disasters.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How many samples of each model did you test? Did you purchase them from different vendors to increase the odds of serial randomness? Was the failure rate consistent for across the same models?
It's up to Adobe customer support to resolve this issue for you, and they probably will. I have had games with "limited number of installs" run out of installs since I constantly upgrade my machine(s). I send them an email explaining the situation and they send me a new key. After all the "copy protection" is supposed to prevent someone from cranking out pirated copies by the millions, not to make it impossible for a user to recover his software.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That it is losing data outside of the data being written.
Some SSDs are notorious for the firmware's block tables getting corrupted if they're suddenly powered off. Unlike a hard disk, what this means is they could potentially be writing under the assumption that the set of blocks they're reading/writing are meant for an entirely different set of sectors than they actually contain. IE massive data corruption because you're not getting back the data you're assuming you will. Due to the write limits of Flash, the SSDs are basically constantly shuffling the window of writable sectors in order to do 'wear levelling', which means if anything disrupts that process and they're using either old or new physical block locations with the old logical ones, your data may not be ending up as it should be.
I Should probably get around to migrating off of that..
I am responding to the relatedly footnote so no, this is not off topic.
I think one reason SSDs are not going to become cheaper than HD's anytime soon is because the price on hard drives is plummeting partly in response to the more slowly lowering price on SSDs - it's just the competitive nature of the industry, even if that means sometimes companies are competing with themselves. I can get a 1 terabyte 7,200 RPM hard drive for $50 bucks, or I can get a Sandisk Extreme 2 120GB SSD for $100. I was recently faced that decision and went with the SSD. The performance is too much to pass up. Plus I already have a fast as a hard drive can get 500GB hard drive. Depending on what you put on which drive, it really is the best solution.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The expensive SSDs are not always expensive because the manufacturers are greedy. Data corruption on SSDs is a huge issue. And even before this article I would not touch OCZ if you paid me. But the author is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find a suitable solution, and the title should reflect this - sub 100 pounds is one cheap SSD. Since Intel makes Flash I would expect them to pass - or by horrified if they didn't. I would expect Samsung to pass as well as they fab lots of the flash that everyone else buys. Many of the others just buy it, arrange it on a PCB and sell it - not as much understanding or engineering going on there. Nice to know, but the blurb would be better if all the main players were included in the testing.
As many others have posted, a UPS will protect the whole computer from data loss in the case of a power outage. what about the data stored in memory without a UPS? Are you going to test that? the idea that a capacitor can store enough temporary power for shutdown is neat but worthless. SSDs were made to replace harddrives. what happens when you unplug power from harddrives in the middle of a write? Why would you want SSDs to be better than harddrives in that function?
What does the failure rate of ocz ssds have anything to do with this crazy test?
If I were to pull the plug on a consumer grade mechanical hdd in the middle of a write, would it not lose data as well?
My only guess is that they're looking at it from the point of view of file system corruption with journaling filesystems, and whether or not stuff committed with sync() is actually safely stored on the drive at that point in time or not. However, the poor way in which the author describes this (assuming it's what he's attempting to describe at all) seriously makes me wonder why I should trust that he knows what the hell he's doing.
Some years ago while discussing design of a journaling filesystem with someone in a newsgroup, we were wondering whether sector writes to a hard disk could be expected to be atomic or not. Once a drive has begun writing to a sector, there's a very tiny amount of time it has to keep power in order to finish the sector, which would seem trivial to store in a capacitor, and with some added circuitry, the momentum in the spindle could supply some power as well. Not to mention that attempting to read a half-written sector is going to cause all sorts of hell for an algorithm that assumes there was a full sector there and so it should be able to error correct it into something meaningful, and might cause it to prematurely declare the sector dead and remap it. So it seemed a bit silly to think that a hard disk wouldn't be able to check its power status between sector writes and simply avoid beginning one which it wasn't going to be able to finish reliably, and this would allow someone to utilize this fact when designing a journaling filesystem since they could at least count on any sector they read to contain valid data even if they couldn't count on whether it was current data or old data. For example, each sector of the journal might have an index number allowing old entries to be distinguished from new ones without worry that the drive died half-way while writing the sector, thus causing it to begin with a recent index number but contain older data at the end. Of course, neither of us knew if this was true of how drives worked or not, but one random person took the time to reply simply "sector writes are atomic" for whatever a random person's word is worth.
Solid state drives have a similar issue in that once they begin rewriting their data structures, if they don't finish, then the data on the drive is going to be rather fucked, particularly since they don't work on sectors like traditional hard drives, but rather, each page of flash holds many sectors, and they're not even in linear order but instead there are wear-leveling algorithms in play. So even when the OS asks the drive to sync(), in the interest of speed, since it will have to combine the sectors written with other sectors and additional wear-leveling data before committing it to flash, it's likely in its interest to lie to the OS and say "OK, it's done" when in fact it's merely committing to writing those sectors before it shuts down even if power is cut immediately. Obviously there are a lot of ways to screw up such a commitment and be unable to deliver upon it, and I assume that's what the author of the article is testing.
...but, hell if I know. It'd be nice to hear from someone who actually knows about these things.
but for real reliability stick with the 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM drives. Sadly the 7200 RPM drives are dead now. Nobody makes them for laptops. I guess the next best thing for speed + a little more reliability is Intel SSD.
7200 RPM laptop drives are readily available from multiple vendors.
It looks like all the SSDs the author was testing are low-end models, that obviously don't have Enterprise features such as high-end fault protection circuits / super capacitor in the design.
I've had many diff OCZ Vertex 2 and 3's for years with constant use and no problems. I've even had power outages and they were completely unaffected. Besides, no one puts anything that can't be replaced easily on a single SSD. That's just foolishness. They are for speed and Intel has some of the worst speeds for SSD's you can get. Samsung, OCZ, and Mushkin have all the top speed and IOPS drives on the market. Intel's are simply double the cost for a fraction of the speed. I'd use a Velociraptor HDD before I'd ever buy an Intel SSD. Not to be offensive, but you obviously don't know much about the SSD tech and market.
Yes, of *course* he was mostly testing low-end models, one of the criteria was a price limitation!
Certainly if budget is increased then you can include more enterprise level drives which would be expected to have a capacitor for controlled shutdown. The whole point of the test is whether any of the low-budget drives behave well during power outages.
I've read elsewhere that stick to OEM and you're fine, so Intel and Samsung are okay. My experience so far is the same, have had good luck with a Kingston drive in a laptop. Crucial failed on us, haven't tried OCZ.
If you have important data don't store it on an SSD drive.
Don't store it on any one drive.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
120 gig version, Randomly hangs for anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes at any given, access lights go on, and the computer becomes more or less non responsive, I can see the mouse cursor move, but no dice for anything else. Have tried reading forum advice and disabling certain power management settings, same problem. No firmware updates, and it's slow. My daughters WD 500 gig blue edition is damned near as fast loading levels in games. Pure waste of money, I'll never buy another SSD.
I understand that the reviewer was restricted by the ultra-low price point set by his employer, but the result is that this is a really poor selection of SSDs, many of them obsolete, and is not particularly reflective of the market today. For instance, he reviewed the Crucial M4 (release date: early 2011), but not the newer Crucial M500, which according to reviews has both RAID-style NAND redundancy and a bank of capacitors to protect against power failure. The M500 isn't even all that expensive on a per-GB basis, though it isn't available in the ultra-small sizes the reviewer apparently needed because of his very limited budget.
There are other, even more glaring, omissions. No mention of any Samsung drive? Nothing from SanDisk? These are two of the biggest SSD vendors, and both have a good reputation for reliability. Leaving out their products makes this roundup almost worthless.
The SSD market is advancing so fast that reviewing drives over 2 years old is going to give an extremely misleading impression of the current state-of-the-art.
How often would you say people need to make backups? Servers aren't read-only devices that get updated in batches once a month... Losing a week's worth of work can be a nightmare. Even losing a day of work can hurt. Spending more money on reliable hard drives is well worth it. Even if we're talking about your transactional database, and you've got real-time streaming backups to a peer node, the downtime of one of them is going to be costly, and again worth buying more reliable equipment.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I guess Soulskill never took a basic statistics class or journalism class.....
Enterprise and consumer based products compared... results not so shocking...
But wait, the results are worthless as it appears only a single drive was tested. Appears because the article doesn't provide even the basic information needed to reproduce the tests.
of all SSD's over the last 2 years purchased here, only Intel drives are still in use, All other brands suffered failures and required one or more warranty replacements.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Today was a below average day with 320Wh, average in dec so far is 787Wh per day, max was 1528Wh, worst 238Wh (excluding losses in storing). This is not from a cheap installation but a 2.5kWp setup. An UPS is:
-cheaper (alot)
-can supply more energy
-can supply 24/7
OCZ? Seriously? This is why you don't trust your infrastructure to gaming nerds! No competent manager in his right mind would buy anything from OCZ which requires any kind of reliability! Their shit is only for spoiled rich gamer manchildren who have nothing better to do with their money than buy new hardware every 3 months!
Of course the DRM crap is Adobe's fault, and they did eventually resolve the issue. However, it took a couple of weeks, demonstrating almost comically bad customer service except that it wasn't actually funny at the time. As I mentioned, the problem was finally fixed only when my patience ran out and I sent them the recorded letter that starts formal legal proceedings.
Regardless of where any blame belonged, the facts are that if the SSD had not died suddenly, this could all have been avoided by just deactivating the software first, and that backing up the relevant data is simply not possible using normal tools, because to back it up, you must first know that it exists and where to find it, and you must be able to restore it (assuming that it would still be the same after swapping out the disk anyway, which a hardware signature used in a DRM system might not be).
So, a better SSD would have been worth a lot to me in that situation, and saying "Just back everything up" still isn't a good answer.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's cute, but approximately 100% of professionals working in graphic design would disagree with you. If someone else made products anywhere the level of Creative Suite and with better customer service than Adobe, plenty of us would use them.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Dont buy shit software from EA then, because really we know they are the biggest retailer using DRM still.
Every piece of $1,000+/seat software we use at my company comes with some form of obnoxious DRM/copy protection technology.
Every. Single. One.
We are not talking about expendable games here, we are talking about software that only gets away with those prices and poor customer service because it's still so much better at what it does than any cheaper and less encumbered alternatives.
To be fair, even if you dont agree and continue to buy software that is copy protected, that is the issue, not the SSD.
Well, no, it's both.
If the SSD didn't fail, there would be no problem. If the SSD even failed with more than one minute's warning, there probably still would be no problem, since typically you can deactivate licences for software on this level if you can fire it up for a few seconds with an active Internet connection. It might be wise to back up anything you can, but a drive that fails young, suddenly, and with limited options to recover because of poor design decisions is still the drive manufacturer's fault.
Of course plenty of blame also goes to the software vendors, and as you can imagine, we have about as much respect for them in my industry as their customer service warrants.
Backup everything fools.
You can't.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
What a noodle. From the linked report"
"OCZ Vertex 32gb
Further investigation then dug up an interesting nugget: it turns out that
OCZ apparently had been warned by Sandforce not to enable a switch in
the firmware which would result in "increased speed". OCZ, in their desperate
attempt to remain "king of the speed wars" ignored the advice that doing so
would result in data corruption. The results correlate with this advice:
at higher speeds, data corruption occurs."
The 32GB Vertex uses an Indilinx controller not SandForce. There has never been a 32GB drive released by any manufacturer using a SandForce controller. I'm not sure why any company would task with with this testing when you aren't even aware of the components you are testing.
In fairness, the author didn't specify the "class" of drive. He simply said 100 GBP or less, and storage didn't matter to him because his application needed less than 10GB per month of data collection.
More data, damnit!
Check the data density figures.
The latest 4300RPM drives easily beat even the 10kRPM drives of many years ago as the amount of data that is covered for each spin is high due to a different density. This presents well in continuous read/write operations but may affect seek operations where the 4300RPM drive may need to wait longer for the data to come around again.
Grown-ups have to worry about data availability as well as data backups.
The real lesson here is if your data has value then you shouldn't be trying to store it on the cheap.
There is a difference between "cheap" and "inexpensive". Starting with a limit of 100 pounds shows that these jokers didn't know what problem they were trying to solve... if you couldn't already guess by the fact that the entire page is wrapped in a pre tag.
Safety is importent from a SSD standpoint!
Well, any kind of high availability system should run on a UPS, no matter what kind of disk drives they use. In my experience, any cheap computer will run continuously 24/7/365 for 4 years or more, provided that it is on a UPS.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
These SSD's are the paper and pen of the future, yet, paper and pen is still more reliable.
We live in this high tech world. Yet, to cut corners and save money, devices are not being improved for stability. Instead, they are being designed to maximize marketing opportunities at the cost of the users data, and, short lifespan of the device.
I'am all for backups, but the backup shouldnt be the all, and end all, failsafe for a substandard replacement to Pen and Paper.
These SSD manufactures need to get their asses in gear. Realise what a SSD actually stores (valuable data) and build a device which actually does that job, for the sake of the user and the SSD reputation.
He tested exactly five SSDs. One example each of five different models.
Maybe he got bad examples from everyone but Intel, and good examples from Intel.
The sample set simply isn't sufficient to draw serious conclusions from.
I thought the same thing. Newegg lists at least 30 models currently at 7200rpm in the 2.5 form factor. And a couple (not SAS) at the 10000rpm.
Your argument is old. The things are even used in a place where the sun is down for half the year and the panels are mounted vertically on poles!
Some of the expensive name brand ones are just relabelled cheap pieces of shit.
I have used a consumer grade APC ups here in India (pretty bad power supplies) for the last 12 years. On my second UPS now. The UPSes have worked fantastic and genuinely failed only rarely, that too only under strange situations, such as a super short power brown out when a tree hit the power cable or some tricky situation. :), so I bought a new one).
Every other time it failed the problem was: Overloading, my battery was shot, or the UPS was too old (11 yrs
Another point, PC Power supplies (PSU) also have to be good. Just because it works, doesn't mean it is performing optimally. I suggest changing them after 4 yrs, unless they are extremely good quality. The capacitors wear out and cause funny problems in situations like these.
Sector writes are atomic because they can only be read in their entirety. The encoding of each bit depends on the contents of the surrounding bits. If half a sector is written, neither the old nor the new half will be readable.
Now, modern spinning rust drives have 4kiB physical sectors and emulate 512B sectors via read-modify-write. Think about the failure modes and cry. The solution is to use 4kiB sectors natively, but Windows 8 is the first Microsoft operating system to support that.
SSDs work entirely differently with their own interesting failure modes (but they will have use HDD-like encodings if density keeps increasing).
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
No time to read all TFA, but this doens't apply to sync writes, right? I believe SSDs without power protection will honour sync calls from the OS and make sure it's all written before returning. SSDs with power loss protection will ignore sync calls, and maybe even make sure all async data is written. This makes them faster, but not necessarily more reliable (as shown in the article) (right?)
I believe the OP story. I have a Vertex 3, all it does is lose data. I get DRDY errors left and right in linux. Sometimes the drive goes for seconds or minutes where all it does it spit out IO read errors. This is the third vertex 3 I've been through (first two were sent as replacements). Finally, I just figured out if you ignore all the errors, and let it run its course, they eventually go away and the drive returns to normal. Though randomly the errors come back, and sometimes I lose data, but I've become accustomed to this "flakyness" and just put my linux root partition on the SSD drive, and all /home and senstive data on a HDD.
There has been a few times when I thought it was bricked, but taking the SSD out and putting it as a 2nd drive in another computer then running the OCZ software works (or maybe its just coincidence). I first run the TRIM commands from the OCZ software, then if that doesn't work, I start over with a secure erase. And of course the latest firmware...
In any case, I always wondered what caused all the IO errors, I thought it was too many read/writes to sectors because of /tmp wasn't moved to ram in fstab (which I later did). Now I know that its the power failures (which I have had).
This test is disingenuous and dumb.
At £100/16 Gbytes that is well into the range of industrial grade SSDs, which do have excellent performance on power loss, but this test is only picking commercial grade hardware to test with.
That just doesn't make sense.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
enterprise ... consumer ... often benchmark better
Seems backwards.
In our work ("Enterprise") setting, we have RAID-Z that does plenty of checksumming to survive failures; so we'd want the extra performance (the only reason where our work uses SSDs instead of spinning disks).
In a consumer setting; where people store precious irreplacable memories (pics of kids) and their ownly copy of financial data; it seems reliability should rule.
I always associate not getting help except under legal threats with great customer service.
I know that's true of some desktop drives but in a laptop form factor I wouldn't have thought density differences would be as great...
It could be the Seagate has more platters, or a larger RAM buffer that is inflating the test results.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You don't seem to be arguing against my point that you know you're going to have disasters when you use Adobe products.
I really wish Adobe would show some class and open-source Fireworks (can't be beat for UI mockups), but I expect disaster instead.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm not arguing against your point, I just think it's irrelevant. The same argument would apply to any software from any vendor that messes around with your disk behind the scenes, whether it's a game or a $10,000/seat specialist design tool.
I do think it's pretty low of these software vendors to rely on copy protection systems that screw real users. I also think it's a blatant security hole in Windows that application software can do this sort of thing in the first place. The fact remains that having a reliable SSD would avoid these kinds of problems ever coming up, and if SSDs are most useful as system/software drives, arguments like "just back it all up" or "don't put any data you care about on the SSD" are not constructive.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
BTW, a good backup program will handle any file-based DRM nonsense (Windows isn't completely silly: if a program can make it a program can copy it, but most people don't use backup tools to copy files for backups). If the software is locked to something like the serial number on the installed drive then if course you're SOL when the drive fails, whatever the technology.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The trouble is, some of these schemes don't use files/registry where you're supposed to store data, they mess around with private areas like your boot sector. Why on earth should my OS allow some random application software on my computer anywhere near my boot sector? Aside from the glaring security hole, there is no systematic control and co-ordination for such access, so multiple DRM schemes could conflict, dual-booting could get messed up, etc.
Also, it shouldn't be necessary to run specialist backup tools to deal with file data. If the standard issue copy commands in the OS can't readily copy everything in the filesystem, then once again I think that OS is poor.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There's no way to know when the drive is wearing out,
Sure there is.
Smart attribute ID 202 Percent Lifetime Remaining
This value is defined as:
VR = 100(MAX(EAVG)) / BL
Where:
EAVG = The average erase count for a super block (stripe of blocks)
BL = The erase count for which the part is rated (block life)
The backup APIs serve a different purpose than the file APIs. The file APIs see a file through many abstraction layers: compressed files are seen uncompressed, metadata like created/modified/accessed times are maintained automatically, and so on. It's the view of a file that presents a file in the right way for an application.
The backup APIs OTOH give a more raw view: for example, metadata can be copied, instead of automatically maintained, and compresses files can be copied without uncompressing the stream. It's the right view of the file for primitive tools.
Each API has it's purpose, and both are well documented and available to any coder. By design, using "cp" doesn't do backup-and-restore, nor should it. It makes good sense that e.g. the file creation date is current on a copy of a file - it's a newly created file. Instead, the backup/restore command line commands do the right thing for backup.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How did APIs get into this discussion? We're talking about users running back-ups. In any sane system, the standard operating system UI(s) ought to allow copying files for back-up purposes, including preserving all relevant metadata, out of the box. The fact that this won't happen if the relevant data isn't actually stored in a proper filesystem but rather as some hack in another part of the disk is a significant problem, to which I suggest the solution is not allowing any application-level code to store data that way in the first place.
In any case, we seem to have drifted rather off-topic, so I'll stop there.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
FYI, those backup tools exist, though tape backup was sadly removed a while back. They're not part of Windows Explorer, nor should they be IMO. In Windows 7 it's in the control panel, and named Backup and Restore. Fuck Windows 8.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.