(OT) Questions About SSDs for a Laptop

[Jon Kettenhofen]

IMO, get the SSD but also install the hard drive, if the laptop allows 
it (otherwise try iCloud? :-) ), that will act as a backup.  Separately, 
neither may be more reliable than the other but you will be safer.
And faster.
So back up frequently.

For even faster *desktop* performance, shell out the big bucks for a 
PCI-E board mounted SSD.  At 16x, PCI-E is reputed to handle more 
bandwidth than SATA or SCSI.  I've seen Windows XP boot (completely) in 
10 seconds with instant access to just about everything except the 
internet (which varies with ISP connection . . . )

Smaller PCI-E drives (256GB) are now available for a reasonable price, 
that being around $1/GB, but the fastest - OZC Revo - are still pricey.

Not to be a wet blanket, but nearly all drives fail.
After I read the descriptions of the engineering used to give storage 
drives more room (i.e. more gigabytes and terrabytes) my faith was a 
little shaken.  An article in Tom's Hardware hit home (2011) but still 
holds some credence and that is that if you look at the reviews of SSD's 
at newegg dot com, then you will realize that perhaps no storage 
technology is perfect.  More to the point, YMMV.  Although sellers do 
their best to weed out fake reviews, some of them do make it through and 
the purpose of those fake reviews can be either to support or 
disprespect the product or manufacturer.

Recently,
Some publications have revealed that many brands of SSDs will fail if 
the power is abruptly removed, as in a plug or battery removal while the
unit is running, or the computer has a catastrophic failure like a fatal 
motherboard burnout.   The story is that so far only certain Intel SSD's 
can consistently survive this scenario.

Nevermind.
Most of us will probably never see that happen.  Storage technology is 
complicated with much error-correction circuitry in place and in 
constant use.  To see an example, check the output of the SMART 
technology built into any of your drives that are directly connected to 
your IDE/ATA and SATA (whatever you have) busses.  There is/are some 
good apps in Linux to show you this. The bottom line is that every disk 
access is checked and error-corrected because (read and write) errors 
happen all the time.  They just usually get fixed in the process.

Some interesting, if perhaps scary, links:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-stress-testing-finds-intel-might-be-the-only-reliable-drive-manufacturer 
  (Jan. 3, 2014)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/3 (Mar. 2, 2011)
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html 
(July 28, 2011)

Insight into manufacturing technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD



On 09/02/2014 01:23 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:
> I am looking at a new Linux laptop, and I have the option of a mSata SSD
> drive or a conventional drive. I am considering a 1 TB Samsung 840 EVO
> mSata SSD for the OS and all my partitions.
>
> 1. Are there any reasons not to use a SSD for the full disk, as opposed
> to just for the OS? Other than saving money, as a small SSD would cost a
> lot less!
>
> 2. I have seen recommendations on the net to backup the drive to a
> spinning drive. The laptop has a couple of bays, so I could put a back
> up drive in one of the bays. Does this make sense, or have SSDs matured
> enough that they will last like a spinning drive?
>
> 3. Anything else I should be aware of when moving to the world of SSDs?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark
>
>
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