

SSD Poised to Become Drive of Choice in 2010 - madfishevan
http://blog.allion.com/ssd-poised-to-become-drive-of-choice-in-2010/

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sparky
Not much content here, it's a press release mostly stating that Allion is the
first official independent SSD test house for the SSD Association. Certainly
no additional evidence for the hypothesis put forth in the title, other than
stating that USB3 is faster than HDDs can sustain, which shouldn't be news.

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illumin8
It's a really terrible press release. First they talk about a collaboration to
develop a PCI-based SSD card. Then they start talking about the limitations of
USB 3, which shouldn't even apply to a PCI-based SSD storage solution. They
even manage to get the speed wrong. USB 3 is 6 gbps, not 5. Don't waste your
time reading it.

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electromagnetic
A little misleading, USB 3.0 is only expected to have a throughput of IIRC 400
megabytes/second after protocol overhead. It's entirely possible to get 300
megabytes/second out of a properly configured HDD system. Considering the
considerable price difference between a HDD and SSD, 33% faster transfer rate
isn't hugely important for the average consumer.

SSD might have some advantages, but it also has disadvantages and I'm still
not personally impressed with the drives viability over long periods of use.

Edit: I also fail to see how USB3 is really relevant, especially considering
that eSATA is capable of providing up to 6Gb/s, compared to the 3.2Gb/s
estimated by the USB 3.0 specification after protocol overhead. Regardless of
HDD or SSD, USB3 still isn't the deciding factor if you're looking for high
transfer speeds with external drives.

~~~
AngryParsley
I disagree about the long-term reliability of SSDs. Intel's X25-M has a 5 year
warranty. They claim that writing 100GB/day for 5 years will not cause it to
fail. If we compare the technologies in terms of reliability, flash has three
things going for it:

1\. Flash degrades predictably over time. Manufacturers know the average
number of write cycles a cell can sustain and design SSDs with "spare" flash
and wear leveling. They can engineer the expected lifetime of the drive. Hard
drives usually fail spontaneously.

2\. The most common failure mode for flash cells is to fail on write. Even if
a cell gets "stuck," the data can still be read. Hard drives fail on read or
write, and in most cases all data on the drive is lost.

3\. A 3.5" 7200RPM drive's platters spin at 70mph on the outside edge. The
head gap is measured in millionths of an inch, making them very susceptible to
vibration and shock. Since SSDs have no moving parts, they're practically
immune.

There are really only two disadvantages of SSDs: cost and capacity.

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sokoloff
Most hard drive faults do not cause an instant loss of all data on the drive.
(Look at SMART reallocated sectors/events. Take 50 of your drives that are
"working just fine" and I'll bet that 10 of them have reallocated sectors.)

~~~
AngryParsley
From <http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf>

"Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four
strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline
reallocation, and probational count."

Most drives that fail have no SMART errors. In other words they fail
spontaneously. BTW, if you have a drive with even a single error, replace it
now or at least make sure you have a spare on hand:

"After the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60
days than drives without scan errors."

"After their first reallocation, drives are over 14 times more likely to fail
within 60 days than drives without reallocation counts, making the critical
threshold for this parameter also one."

