Questions about SSD's and Hard Drives

tonythetiger

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I'm looking to get a SSD or new hard drive for Christmas but I don't know what to get. Basically all I want to do is separate my operating system, drivers, and anything that is necessary to start up a computer from my games, school documents, porn, etc. I had a scare yesterday in which Windows told me some Western Digital file was corrupt and everything took minutes to load and finally the whole computer just crashed to where the screen froze. I left the computer off for a whole night and now it seems fine. Like I said I want to do a clean install to where I can separate things to where if this happens again I can just re-install the OS on the drive and have the other data on hand in an instant. I've never looked into SSD's and was wondering if you guys could have any suggestions.
 

Brian

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I once made a relevant post about this on ebwf, enjoy:

 
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tonythetiger

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So get a small sized raptor that holds the OS and use the old hard drives to store data or get a large sized raptor that holds the data and use the old hard drives to store the OS?
 
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silberfuchs

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A lot of what you posted is outdated or just plain wrong.

so a 128 Gb drive has the same performance as a 1st gen sata drive if you go beyond 65-75 GB, or even worse.
I've never heard such a claim. While it is true that once the drive becomes almost full you might experience some slowdown, it is nowhere near as bad as you say it is. Both because, even then, the drive will be operating much faster than it would a SATA HDD, but also because the slowdown will not happen up until, say, about 95% capacity. What you are describing sounds like an issue with firmware (more specifically of the Seagate drives) that causes it to not handle wear-leveling properly.

also they're not as reliable as normal hdd's.
This is an outdated myth. The very first Seagate SSDs had many issues, and this was among them. However, any SSD produced in the last 4 years has an life expectancy beyond the average HDD.

also if a classic rpm drive fails there's a 99% chance you can recover all the files you stored on it.
That entirely depends on what fails and how it fails. If you scratch a platter, forget about it; there's no recovering that section. If the heads go out of whack, you might be able to recover some data depending on how bad it is. If you bring a magnet too close to it? You're definitely going to be missing some data. If the filesystem is corrupted, you can expect to recover most data. But, that's an issue with the FS, not the drive, so it is irrelevant between different drive types.

SSDs are recoverable, contrary to the popularized myth. The "problem," and root of the myth, is because the firmware will ignore the "do not write" signal. Why does it do that? Simple: wear-leveling. Even if your drive is not being told to write anything, or even if the data cable is not attached, the firmware will still move data around the drive to optimize performance, minimize used blocks (almost like defragging except done for size purposes), do error checking, and move data off blocks that can be expected to fail soon. SSDs actually contain extra chips that provide more storage space but are reserved for when other blocks fail. Old recovery software was not designed with this type of writing to occur and so was not equipped to handle data unexpectedly moving about when it is not supposed to be written to.

(or best case scenario: you pay a lot of money to recover a part of it, 10x more than you'd pay for a regular drive).
This is false. Recovering a standard HDD can be very expensive, as well. It can get up to thousands of dollars to recover a drive, regardless of what type.

so basically you get a $XXX windows only drive that boots up really quick
It's much, much more than that. The OS, in this case Windows, will not be entirely loaded into RAM. I mean, Windows 7 is about 20GB itself, and I can almost guarantee you won't have enough RAM to fit that. That means that it will be constantly hitting the drive for various files. Even if you aren't using a paging file (ie. SWAP partition), you'll still see a huge difference in performance. Even in the servers I work on that have 128GB+ RAM, we still use SSDs (racks of about 35 of them in RAID) for the OS and file storage.

and it's new and shiny but dont move shit around too often or it will wear faster and make sure you have that backup drive ready.
Again, we're not using the first Seagate SSDs made. Even if you are constantly hammering a newer SSD with writing to the drive 24 hours a day, every day, it would still take 5+ years to start seeing blocks fail due to being written to too many times. And, then, again, the backup chips will take over.



If you have an SSD and start seeing the capacity slowly dropping over a few weeks, then that is the warning to backup your data. Other than that, SSDs don't really fail much more often than an HDD would.
 

silberfuchs

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a power spike/loss is much more frequent than putting a magnet next to your internal hdd, if you're not retarded that is. i was talking about how the average joe bricks a desktop rpm drive: fried pcb or fs corruption.
A power issue is just as likely to cause the heads to crash into the platters of HDDs, scratching them, and causing irreversible damage. I seen this exact thing happen a few weeks ago, which ruined about 10 of our drives on another server in one fell swoop.

When a HDD fails, do you even know how they repair it? They have to disassemble it and stick the platters into a donor drive to even attempt accessing the data. I'm really hoping you aren't ignorant enough to think just anybody can do this with a screwdriver, so I'll leave it to you to figure out why it costs so much.


but you do need thousands of dollars and many weeks to recover things from a ssd - it's a clusterfuck of a procedure, i doubt you even know what you're talking about.
It requires desoldering the chips and resoldering them into a new drive. Of course, differences in firmware and perhaps hardware encryption will cause issues. Nice way to try and make a jab at me, though. I mean, how would I, who has actual experience with these things, know what I'm talking about, right?


i have never heard of these voodoo 'backup chips' (sounds a lot like the classic hdd sector reallocation feature except you pulled it out of your arse) and also I really think, in fact i'm sure you are confusing regular mainstream consumer grade ssd's with your raided enterprise level (maybe slc) ssd's in terms of endurance and overall reliability.
Well then, lets just see what OCZ, a producer of SSDs, has to say.
Why do certain models of OCZ SSDs have more "non-usable" space than other models?

Certain drives have more reserve-space than others depending on the configuration or controller architecture of the drive. This is for performance and stability optimization, with blocks reserved for formatting redundancy and wear-leveling.
Imagine that. They reserve extra blocks for exactly what I claimed they do. But I guess I'm just pulling things out of my arse, right? Perhaps you are the one that needs to do some more research. And for your information, I have experience with both consumer grade and enterprise SSDs. I don't even know what you were rambling on about after that.


I can only take your attempts at attacking me personally instead of debating like an adult to mean you're upset that I called you out on lies and misinformation. There really is no need for that.
 

chalupa

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God, it really has been a long time since we've had an honest-to-goodness pissing match on these forums. Keep it up, ladies.
 

Fero

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Buy a new PC with the most expensive SSD you can find to store your OS and buy a few 2TB HDD's for your gay porn and la blue girl collection.

That'll fix ya right up.
 
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tonythetiger

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Buy a new PC with the most expensive SSD you can find to store your OS and buy a few 2TB HDD's for your gay porn and la blue girl collection.

That'll fix ya right up.
No gay porn, no black men, no threesomes with 2 guys, no black women.
 

chalupa

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I just store all of my data in my mind. I'm waiting for the day I can accept USB 2.0 to get it back out.
 

silberfuchs

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So once again you continue to act like a child and completely ignore what I said. I actually have done the research, provided information, and have my own experience with these things, yet you keep screaming that I'm so wrong about everything without even stating what or backing up your wild claims. I've already debunked several things you've stated, and yet you continue.

I used this magical thing called "Google" and in no more than 5 minutes found information on the price of recovering HDDs and SSDs. Most services did not even advertise how much it costs; probably because they are ridiculously overpriced. Seems that you are at least looking at $200 for the service, plus parts, plus labor. Since "parts" is going to be "an exact copy of this drive," and "labor" is going to be "a fuck ton more time than we actually deserve," you can expect the price to shoot up very quickly. I believe John Bain, aka Total Biscuit, recently had to get a 500GB HDD repaired and it cost him about the equivalent of $600 USD. These "cheap" services (pretty much anything under a few hundred) you see do not actually recover the hard drive; they only plug it in with a cable that has it's write lines clipped (same things used in forensics, this just prevents the drive from being written to) and load up software to try and recover files. Of course, that only works if the PCB and heads aren't damaged at all and the platters are readable. An actual recovery of the drive is going to cost you big bucks.

Here's one recovery service:
http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/

Notice that they do recover SSDs despite your claim that doing so is impossible.


You keep going on about this 40% failure rate, yet for some reason provide no source. So, instead, I'll provide one for you:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-3.html
Tom's Hardware, a well-respected reviewer and benchmarker among the community, using information provided from Google on 100,000 drives they used. Neither Tom's Hardware nor Google stand to profit from the sale of SSDs. Look at the data. Not only are the HDD return rates significantly higher than SSDs, but they are nowhere near 40%. These are also on the older, more unreliable SSDs. And, these are return rates for any reason, not failure rates, so the failure rate of those SSDs must be really, really low.
 

Frood

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We get it. Silber likes Super Smelly Dicks, but Brian likes Hardly Dick Dicks. It's a matter of opinion, children. Now stop arguing about dicks and answer his question which was about hard drives. God way to derail a thread, dicks.
 

silberfuchs

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The answer to his question is that it's up to him to see if it's worth it or not, and providing him with misinformation is not helping.

Yes, you will see a nice performance increase with an SSD. But, you need to examine the rest of the machine to see where your bottleneck lies. I have an SSD in this machine and would buy one again, yet I still use several large HDDs for storage and NAS for my media server. For an average user, if he is working on a budget, just skip the SSD. If you have money to spare and know better than to store everything on the SSD, then buy an SSD for OS + frequently used programs. If you are in the middle and want lots of storage, speed, and don't want to have to manage multiple drives/partitions, then get a hybrid drive.
 

tonythetiger

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The answer to his question is that it's up to him to see if it's worth it or not, and providing him with misinformation is not helping.

Yes, you will see a nice performance increase with an SSD. But, you need to examine the rest of the machine to see where your bottleneck lies. I have an SSD in this machine and would buy one again, yet I still use several large HDDs for storage and NAS for my media server. For an average user, if he is working on a budget, just skip the SSD. If you have money to spare and know better than to store everything on the SSD, then buy an SSD for OS + frequently used programs. If you are in the middle and want lots of storage, speed, and don't want to have to manage multiple drives/partitions, then get a hybrid drive.
Thanks silber, though now I don't know if it's my hard drive that's the problem. Yesterday I got another driver error but this time it was my video cards, both of which were disabled in device manager (yet somehow I was still able to see things). After that happened I got a blue screen of death but was able to shut down and restart the computer just fine.

Just to note when this error happens, it happens when I open a massive amount of tabs on Firefox when I'm downloading new porn.
 
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