

Why SSDs are worth the money - peteretep
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/17/why-ssds-are-worth-t.html

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rkalla
Something to consider before going the SSD route: failure rates are high right
now.

The Intel X-25 series seem to be doing OK, but the Vertex2 and Vertex3 (brand
new SandForce 2k-based drives) have really terrible failure rates. I've heard
mixed things about the Crucial drives.

I am sure you guys have read Jeff Atwood's post[1] about how every SSD they've
put into machines in the last year has failed. I shared that around with a
group of friends scattered around Chicago and the bay area - the friend in
Chicago has a company with 30 employees. They have put SSDs in 12 of the
developer machines, by the end of the year 10 had failed (Vertex2 drives).

I think SSDs have a lot to offer, the performance is there for the right use-
cases (which is almost every disk I/O scenario save for a few), but for a lot
of folks the idea of having drives fail _regularly_ is a suicide-inducing
though (current company included).

I'm sitting on my hands for an SSD not because I don't think they are awesome,
too expensive or not big enough... I'm waiting because the failure rate seems
to be painfully high in these things. I want some more time in the oven before
I start sticking them in my work machines.

There also seem to be other non-failure related issues as seen with the
Vertex3 launch that everyone jumped on; Lookup "Windows BSOD Vertex3"[2] for a
long list of issues. At least enough to make you take pause in buying one.

I have a 11 year old Fujitsu drive that is still running, an 8 year old
Seagate 15k SCSI drive that is still chugging and the two SATA's in my desktop
now are both 3 years old (no RAID)... I expect 5 years out of a drive at this
point, turning the speed up to 11 at the expense of digging back into my
workstations or servers to replace busted drives and rebuild RAID arrays...
uggggg... at least for me that sounds super painful.

The only SSDs I would consider at this point if for some reason I had to get
one are the Intel series, namely the 500 series. The X-25's (as mentioned) are
still going strong with low failure rates and there is nothing to suggest the
newer releases are any different. I'd rather see some 5-year results from
those things before pulling the trigger though, which is why I haven't yet. I
also haven't needed the insane speed.

[1] [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-
solid...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-
drive-scale.html)

[2]
[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=windows+bsod+vertex3&qscrl=1)

~~~
jerf
Anybody have some detailed technical insight into why the failure rate has
been so high? (i.e., I can guess as well as the next guy, I'm asking for
knowledge.) One of their initial promises was reliability due to not having
moving parts, and, well, that sounds pretty reasonable as far as marketing
copy goes. Why isn't it true?

~~~
hristov
It is a physical quality of flash memory that each flash cell has only a
limited number of writes it can handle before it fails. If you want to know
the dirty details, what happens is that electrons eventually get trapped in
the dielectric of a flash cell and ruin everything. This cannot be fixed
unless someone invents a new electron capture proof dielectric.

Flash memories use all kinds of electronics to ameliorate this problem, but in
the end most they can do is try to equalize the number of writes each cell
experiences, which results in the drive working at close to its full capacity
for as long as possible but then failing very quickly afterwards.

~~~
Symmetry
If this was the failure mode experienced by most drives that fail, though, it
wouldn't happen for years and even after you were no longer able to write to
the drive you would still be able to read from it. This might be how the more
reliable Intel or Samsung drives end up failing, but all evidence is that the
failure modes of the highest performance but less reliable drives seem to be
more interesting than that.

~~~
hristov
Why do you think it would not happen for years? As I mentioned in a previous
post there is a trade off between price memory size and failure rate so some
of the higher density memories will have much lower life than what you may be
used to.

And no you would not be able to read from it. When a flash cell wears off the
ability to read it degrades or disappears. Depending on the memory you still
may be able to recover the data using ECC or the like, but this ability tends
to disappear as large numbers of cells start dying.

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dlsspy
Amazing how many people are commenting about how SSDs don't help much. I am
stunned by how long it takes to do anything on any of my computers that don't
have SSDs now. IOPS matter to me.

~~~
lparry
It sounds like a bunch of people who havent experienced the difference first
hand, trying to convince themselves that they dont care.

~~~
wallywax
I have a laptop with SSD at work and an almost identical laptop at home,
except it has a hard drive. There are unquestionably a lot of operations that
the SSD makes much faster. But in normal day to day use, I can barely tell the
difference. Booting is fast as hell, but how often do I reboot? I don't
compile much on either machine, but neither do most normal users. I don't
think the average laptop user is i/o bound most of the time (unless they're
swapping, and then the solution is more RAM not an SSD).

To me, the biggest benefit SSD gives is battery life. I like that it's quieter
too. But neither of those is worth the price premium. Which is why I haven't
stepped up for my home machine even though I get to compare it on a daily
basis.

~~~
frankwiles
SSDs aren't going to help you compile faster anyway... Other than network I/O,
disk I/O is the slowest operation on a computer, speeding that up does speed
up most operations for most people. Everyone is I/O bound all of the time.

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cowmixtoo
Since I posted this link last year:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584998> .... I've put a few DBs on SSD
(Postgresql and Filemaker Pro). The real-world performance on extreme
concurrent usage was been insane, ie something like a order of magnitude
faster. For instance, a query on FileMaker Pro that would take up to 10
minutes on a heavily used instance (100 people accessing at one time) now
takes seconds.

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mike_h
Dropbox is an awesome way to offset the failure risk. I keep all my
development projects on Dropbox, so the moment I write to disk, it's syncing
with at least one other running workstation plus the Dropbox remote storage.

(The brains of my homedir are symlinked to Dropbox as well: all dot files
including shell history)

~~~
Tichy
A very expensive way, though? My notebooks HD is 250gb, almost filled.

~~~
mike_h
Sorry to see this and respond late, but yeah, mine is pretty big too. Most of
that doesn't change hour-to-hour in my use case luckily, so incremental backup
to disk is good enough for the bulk. If you work mostly with code or other
text, you can probably find a few folders of frequent business that fit on a
small Dropbox plan and just sync those.

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henryw
If your servers were doing as much write as reads, then SSDs might not be as
fast. I had (raid10) 4 intel 80gb ssd vs (raid10) 4 15k rpm scsi drives, and
the scsi drives were faster with heavy innodb writes. You might wanna do some
stress benchmarking before going into production if you have heavy writes. Now
I'm sure the FusionIO line of drives will probably be faster than SCSI's,
though I haven't tested them.

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BoppreH
High failure rate, high price, low capability, but great speeds. So the ideal
setup is SSD for your OS and programs and a spinning disk for your documents?

~~~
gte910h
SSD for your OS, apps and documents where speed matters backed up to your
spinner.

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cubicle67
here's something I'm curious to know - how often do you reboot your computer?
I've got two I use daily, one has an uptime of 47 days, the other (a little
macbook that spends all day on the road with me) about 32 days. They're just
never off. Do people still turn their machines off?

~~~
noarchy
My Macbook comes out of sleep mode almost instantaneously, so I come out of it
with uptimes that are similar to yours. My PC desktop, meanwhile, gets
rebooted when Windows Update demands it, so it varies.

There are workplaces where people might be rebooting daily, I don't know. I
just know that at home or at work, I don't.

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unsigner
Everybody keeps talking of boot drives - and the guy in the video boots his
laptop. Do you really boot often enough to make a difference?

I think I see my machine boot about 10 times when I reinstall Windows (used to
be yearly 10 years ago, much less frequent now), then basically never, modulo
city-wide power failures and stealthy Windows Update ninjas in the night.

Is it something peculiar to laptops, e.g. when you forget to charge them and
they shutdown completely instead of sleeping?

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keithnoizu
Running 3 raided SSD drives on my home workstation . . . seriously considering
upgrading to one or more raided hyperOs DDR2 Ram Disk Drives. The write
latency is nasty on compile time.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Curious about this, is it RAID-0 for speed or some other variant?

~~~
keithnoizu
Raid 0, Although I've heard something or other about a larger performance gain
being realized by other raid configurations.

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MatthewB
My Macbook Air screams. I bought a macbook pro about 1 year ago and my brand
new MBA (top model) is noticeably faster. Not only boot and shutdown times but
overall snappiness of the machine. The main reason for this is the SSD inside.
I love it and will be installing one in my PC desktop soon enough. I can live
with the high failure rate although I haven't run into any problems myself
yet.

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viae
I have seen the light and been converted to the Church of SSD. The expense
/is/ worth it. I routinely run Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 (running
Windows Deployment Server to reimage computers at different physical
locations) on my Macbook Pro via VMWare Fusion at all times (in addition to
all the other random apps I have open on the Mac). I haven't noticed /any/
performance penalties day-in-day out. Compare this to my previous Macbook Pro
from three years ago, which begged for mercy booting Windows XP. Sure, I have
more RAM and an i7 now, but it was always disk thrashing that killed me....
that's not a problem any more.

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keyle
I have only good things to say about the Corsair SSD's. I'm all SSD now, and
they're very fast with very good reviews for a very decent price.

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dekz
I recently bought from OWC to be shipped internationally. It took 32 days and
arrived a DOA drive and had consistent kernel panics (even when doing an
initial clone). YMMV but if you're wanting to do an SSD upgrade, get ready to
take into account failures.

