Not long ago, I wrote about upgrading a laptop to an SSD. I’ve been using the OCZ SSD in that Acer Ferrari for several months now, and it’s all been working well.
But SSDs make me nervous.
I’ve been reading some of the articles on SSDs at Anandtech recently, and what I’ve read hasn’t exactly filled me with confidence. Anand’s experience with Crucial’s C300 is a pretty good example of what makes me nervous: firmware updates that brick drives.
Then there’s OCZ, who has a deservedly good reputation for reliability. Yet buggy drives can still slip through their QA process.
The good old rotating media hard drive is tried and tested. I’ve had hard drives run for years, with no issues whatsoever. Still, they’re mechanical devices, so I upgrade my hard drives every 12-18 months. That’s partly for performance reasons – hard drive technology is still evolving, even though it’s a supposedly mature technology. But I also move data onto new drives fairly early in a hard drive’s life cycle to minimize the chance of reliability problems.
I have, on a couple of occasions, run into reliability problems with hard drives. Usually, though, those problems are predictable – the drive begins making weird noises, usually repetitive clicking or grinding. I’ve learned over the years to trust my instincts when I hear anything odd, and I immediately copy off the data on the drive. And, of course, I do run semi-regular backups.
SSDs are less predictable. When they fail, they fail spectacularly, and without warning. I’ve known people with SSDs who experience an SSD failure between system reboots. One moment, the PC is working like a champ. The user installs a driver, or other update, reboots the drive, and… nothing. No boot, no data, everything’s just… gone.
On the other hand, what’s interesting about the SSD business is how it holds the potential of reshaping the storage business as a whole. The traditional drive companies – particularly Seagate and Western Digital – have dipped their toes in the SSD waters, but their efforts have been somewhat anemic. Seagate’s SSDs are targeted almost exclusively at the enterprise market, while Western Digital’s SiliconEdge drives have <a href=http://www.anandtech.com/show/2954>trailed the competition</a> on the performance side.
What’s interesting is that the innovative products aren’t coming from the traditional storage companies. That’s was true from the beginning, with companies like Korea’s MTron, which entered the market early on. But it was Intel, a chip company, who really raised eyebrows with their X25 drives back in 2009. The X25’s quickly garnered a reputation for both high performance – particularly random write performance, which had been a weak spot with older solid state drives – and price/performance ratios.
As the price for NAND flash plummeted, other companies dove into the fray. The main players in the market now seem to be Intel, OCZ and Patriot, with companies like Crucial and Corsair diving into the fray. There are many other players in the market, too numerous to name. Back in the early days of LCD TVs, one pundit famously quipped that “anyone with a checkbook and a plane ticket to China could get into the LCD TV market.”
The same seems to be true with the solid state drive market.
Still, I don’t trust them enough to build one into my production system.
The issue with Crucial drives isn’t the first time we’ve seen firmware brick SSDs. You may recall the infamous Intel X25 SSE firmware update that also turned Intel’s SSDs into useless paperweights. On top of that, there remains the issue of capacity at a reasonable price.
Anand Shimpi notes that his system consists of an SSD as the boot and applications drive, and a 1TB RAID 1 drive (2 x 1TB hard drives) as his data drive. I wish I could run so lean. Right now, I have a pair of two terabyte drives in my system. The boot and applications drive has 524GB of applications and other stuff on it, while the 2TB drive contains 1.25TB of data – mostly raw photo files, video and music.
I could free up 175GB by moving my Steam games folder to the data drive. But the space on the volume isn’t the only issue.
My boot and app drive tends to be very dynamic: I’m frequently installing new apps, uninstalling apps. So while I back up the partition on a regular basis, I don’t really want to trust a new technology if I’m going to need to take down my production system and restore partitions frequently – and here, “frequently” means more than twice a year. Cloning drive data to a new drive can take several hours — downtime I’d rather not have on my production system.
So I’m chugging along currently in my production system with good old fashioned, rotating media magnetic storage.
Still, I’m intrigued by SSDs. The technology is cool. Performance and capacity seems to be changing almost monthly. So I’ve got several SSDs running in the basement lab.
I’m just not quite ready to trust my mission critical production system to them quite yet.
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4 comments
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Ryan says:
May 8, 2010 at 1:02 pm (UTC -7 )
Loyd, I felt the same way before building my new rig in January. But after reading Anand’s high recommendation of these Intel drives, I got an X25 80 gig drive. I run it as my primary boot drive then a 1TB for storage. It runs great so far.
Brandon Champion says:
May 11, 2010 at 1:18 pm (UTC -7 )
Loyd,
One cheap trick I like is partitioning the HDD to use only 1/3 of the space for the boot/apps partition and the other 2/3 leave for data. You get the fastest part of the drive where it counts, and with 2TB drives, it still means 600-700 GB for your boot partition.
Some people go to insane amounts of trouble or expense for trivial performance gains, but this one is pretty painless.
As for SSDs, I’ve only used mine as a place to store the games I’m currently playing. I get great game load times, less noticeable texture loading and I don’t worry about losing anything if catastrophe strikes.
Markeyse says:
May 12, 2010 at 11:38 pm (UTC -7 )
SSD’s still have some ways to go, but it won’t take long. I have an SSD that I am using for my Pro Music MIDI files in my softsynth, and I love the fast reads. The less time it takes to load, the faster I can get to creativity. I think when the price gets to < $1 per GB, then that is when SSDs will take off. I will still use HDDs for raw audio and video editing, but a boot drive will be in my future once prices comes down.
50crckt51 says:
June 19, 2010 at 6:13 pm (UTC -7 )
I will be interested in what your take on the “Momentous” will be?
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