SSDs versus spinning-rust drives

[David Schwartz]

Haven’t you heard all the crying from Apple users over their devices failing for the past several years? No? Hmmm … well … neither have I.

iPods had small spinning disks for a while, but not for 8-10 years. iPhones NEVER had spinning disks; first they used flash, then SSDs. 

MacBook Airs have ALWAYS had SSDs. Ditto for iPads.

I’ve had several Apple devices since 2014 that had only SSDs and the failures have been from anything BUT the SSDs.

Apple has been shipping SSDs in their machines for a decade now, and you can’t buy a MacBook of any kind that doesn’t have SSD for a few years already.

SSDs started out as a way of reducing the size and power consumption of devices. 

But I’ll warn you now ... once you get used to the speed of an SSD, moving back to a machine without one will make you want to throw it thru the nearest window. 

In reality, it’s the HDDs that fail — and not the mechanisms, but the logic boards! And usually the chips that control the motors and servos, as well as the power regulators.

At my last job, a colleague’s SSD failed. Actually, it was the security chip on the M.2 module that failed. The “logic board” in effect. This chip is responsible for encrypting and decrypting data on the SSD memory chips so they’re impossible to read even if removed from the circuit board and put into another board. Again, it wasn’t the memory chips that failed, but support logic.

Someone told me there’s a LOT of ECC logic and extra memory built into SSD memory chips that's designed to help them last far longer than you might expect.

Also, the “constantly gets written to disk” part isn’t accurate because of smart disk caching by the OS and the storage device itself.

-David Schwartz



> On Dec 1, 2019, at 1:05 PM, William Lindley <wlindley at wlindley.com> wrote:
> 
> Contemplating ordering an SSD as at least the boot and main drive for my PC.
> 
> Is that even a good idea?  Are /var, logfiles, and all the other stuff that constantly gets written to disk, still a Really Bad Idea for solid-state memory with its limited write cycle times?
> 
> Or is that no longer an issue?
> 
> And does anyone really trust SSD to maintain actual documents, family photos, and such over long periods of time?
> 
> \\/
> 
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