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I have in my family had experience with 3 Crucial SSDs that are all just over 3 years old. One started to act up recently. The other two are fine. However, I recently bought a Samsung 850 PRO 512GB that is so far doing great. The PRO range from Samsung are more expensive than the more popular EVO range, but the PROs are based on a new technology that is supposed to significantly extend their lives. If you are concerned about reliability, and you are willing to pay the extra bucks, take a look at this range from Samsung.
One tip: The Samsung software will offer to upgrade the drive's firmware. DO NOT DO IT. Many Amazon customers complain that it ruins the drive utterly. I use mine as it came out of the box and it works great.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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See my post below. Twas the SSD - died and went to chip heaven (about 6 weeks old).
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this, if you are wondering is my that's a surprise face.
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[Fair disclosure - I'm a SanDisk employee]
I may not comment on the merits of SanDisk vs. other manufacturers, but I can report my personal experience.
Both my work laptop and my main personal laptop have had SSD drives made by SanDisk for the past 3-4 years. So far, no problems with either.
I recently (2 months ago) bought another personal laptop, which came factory-equipped with a Samsung drive. No problems with that, either.
I may be at the far end of the bell curve, but my personal experience with SSD drives has been good.
Data recovery from SSDs is much more difficult than from HDDs. In an effort at wear-leveling, SSD drives use a logical mapping between LBAs and physical sectors. This means that access to the physical medium is insufficient for data recovery - you also need to have the mapping table.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
modified 19-Apr-16 3:19am.
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Data recovery from SSD is easy - you go to your last back up.
Knowing SSD are harder to recover when they kaput you are of course more conscientious in your back up routines.
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I agree, however the % of people that maintain a useful back up is going to be low. SSD's are not really an issue, it's always been the same...
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Why beat around the bush, they've been in use for years now and if there was such a fundamental flaw with them, they wouldn't have taken off like they have.
You're not going to be desoldering chips on an SSD to try to recover data. Just keep your backups up to date just the same, whether you're using spinning disks or SSD and just enjoy the speed boost already.
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I'm just wondering if there hot temperature was causing hardware to fail before it is due?
Just interested...
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All spinning disks I've ever owned ran a lot hotter than the SSDs.
Keep in mind that you only get to hear from those who had problems. The silent majority never takes the time to report everything's fine.
Anecdote: I personally don't know anyone who's made the move and regretted it. More often than not, the comment I hear is "why did I wait this long".
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There're some server SSDs that run hotter than spinning rust; but like the 15k scsi drives they're intended to replace are way too expensive to end up in consumer devices.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Sure, but Glenn's concern here was putting an SSD in a laptop.
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If you like being stuck with a 6GB pipe, keep with the old, comfortable magnetic.
If you want to abuse a 32MB pipe, you have to go with an M2 SSD. This is where they make magnetic media look like dinosaurs.
You can pull data off of a dead SSD, it just requires somewhat more specialized equipment/software.
Thanks for the reminder, btw. I'm overdue to create a system image at the house.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
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Silly fat fingers and lack of proof-reading.
The comparison came from a different source, a Tom's review if I recall correctly. It's entirely probable that I misread Gb as GB in the article.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
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Just to clear up some facts:
- the '6GB pipe' appears to be referring to the SATA 3 data bus, which is limited to a theoretical I/O throughput of 6Gb/s (750MB/s) of raw data, or about 4 Gb/s (500 MB/s) of user data. That is still a lot more than what current mechanical drives achieve. Moreover, the SATA bus in no way limits the speed of random data access, which is the main advantage of SSDs, not the data throughput! For everyday use, a SSD easily speeds up any drive operation related task by a factor of 10-100. And this, for the most part, does not depend on the bus being used!
- the '32 MB pipe' may be referring to PCIe 3. IIRC, PCIe does not use data bus, instead it uses DMA, and therefore is not affected by the same limitation as SATA. I have no idea what the limits for DMA, are, but I suppose the '32MB' should probably read '32 Gb/s'.
- 'M2' devices use either SATA or PCIe as data interface. So when you advise picking M2 SSDs, you are probably referring to the improved performance you specifically get from M2/PCIe devices, not M2/SATA! You can get PCIe SSDs without M2 however, so 'M2' is not the deciding factor here! Moreover, M2 is currently not well supported (the Microsoft driver is abysmal), so I would advise against it without first picking up more detailled information.
One additional thing to consider is just how much data do you tend to read and write over the course of a normal day? Megabytes? Gigabytes? Terabytes? If you get to the Terabyte range, then a PCIe SSD may be well worth the investment. Otherwise, chances are that you hardly notice the difference to a standard SATA SSD! Other than solid drivers, and double the space for the same money. Just saying 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Thank you muchly for the detailed explanation.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
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So in all of this discussion so far no one talked about the limited read/writes. I haven't done any homework so maybe it is writes only or that no longer exists. I have an old win 7 laptop that the hd light is almost always on. I have removed a lot of software and narrowed the hd access to some windows system file. Can't recall the name off hand. I'm assuming they are attempting to index the drive in some fashion, even with the indexing service disabled or maybe they are reporting all I do back to Microsoft, who knows, but it bugs me.
So windows is hitting the hd a lot, wouldn't that cause an ssd drive to fail faster? Maybe I'm the only one who has this happen and it really isn't an issue.
To be fair, I don't know that I care if my laptop boots faster. (My old Commodore took 20 minutes to load a game from tape.) I might care when actually taxing the system, but I have too much crap for a tiny ssd to support. I know there are other probably better ways but I'm an old dog.
Jack of all trades, master of none, though often times better than master of one.
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Hmmm, that is my attitude about the boot up time, if you have enough memory so stuff doesn't get chached to the hd there is no real advantage and a possible disadvantage.
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I will disagree 100% on this.
I had 32GB of memory and a non-ssd boot.
Booting took a while. Serveresque machine, Oracle, etc.
So, I throw in an SSD, and my boot time is 30-40 seconds, which is easily 3-5 times faster.
In fact, it is SO fast to boot, that I stopped using Hibernation! It actually took longer to hibernate (and the hibernation file required 32GB of my boot SSD).
I wondered if SSDs would fail, and did a BUNCH of analysis of the data out there. I am a grey beard. My first HD was an RK06 on a DEC PDP-11/34a... From there a 5MB TRS-80 drive, and then eventually my own 5MB, 10MB all the way to todays 4TB drives.
I have worked with EMC where they explained that when building RAIDs they cannot use too many drives from the same batch of drives because they tend to fail at about the same time!
I have lost a few HDs in my day. And I have had 2 SSDs go bad. One was a Crucial, and it was a firmware issue where they said after X,000 hrs start turning off after like 90 seconds. They replaced it under warranty.
I have put them in TiVo boxes just to see. I took an Older SSD I had no use for, plug it into a TiVo 4 years ago, and it has not failed yet. That is a LOT of continuous writing.
Boot time, and operating speed. I can't buy this performance with a processor.
Sound: Really quiet!
Battery Life improved as well.
They have been around for some time. Engineering principles have been applied. Once they made them and were willing to put them into RAID configurations, your fears should have dropped a bit.
And finally. yep, restoring from them AINT EASY when they die. It may not even be completely possible. But think back. How long after HDs came out did we get to the white rooms of today? It will get there. Companies will figure it out, get some patents and open up a company.
In the meantime, my machine backs up weekly (full), differential (to full) nightly.
To a NAS device that I have been thinking would be fun to upgrade to all 4TB SSDs when the prices come down...
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You'll find that since the drive can be written to and read faster, that light will be on much less of the time. Only the occasional blink.
If you have room for an HDD, and you have low RAM like 4GB or something, I'd recommend putting your page file on the HDD if you want to prolong the life of your SSD.
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SSDs can be read indefinitely. It's only the writing that's limited. However, there's little to fear, as this article shows! The first SSD failing in that endurance test failed after writing more than 700 Terabytes of data successfully. Even if you write 100 GB of data every day, that's close to 20 years of expected lifespan!
That said, there are a couple of settings in Windows (and presumably other OSs as well) that you really should adjust. I've seen an article about just that topic, but can't recall it's title, nor can I locate a bookmark, if I even took one.
But the gist of it - to the extent that I remember - is that that you should disable anything continuously performing write operations; and you need to really think about what a specific process really does in order to find out who are the culprits:
(A) Anything meant to speed up searching or indexing - e. g. Windows Searchindexer - may often write to the disk to update its index, but is pointless on a SSD, because it reads so much faster. It's less of a problem when the index is kept in memory, but it's still pointless.
(B) Defragmentation is a SSD killer, and likewise entirely pointless for an SSD. The main point of defragmentation is to avoid the slow random lookups on mechanical drives. It is a workaround for the implicit weakness of these drives. But SSDs don't have that problem to start with!
(C) Antivirus software likes to write logs about just about anything. Make sure it is set up to only report relevant stuff so it doesn't continuously write to the disk! (or, alternately, if you have that option, you could tell it to write the log to a mechanical drive instead) Normally this shouldn't be a problem, but I mention it because at work our antivirus software is configured to log unholy amounts of information all the time. I can't see just how much it really is, but I have a strong feeling it's worth checking.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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I installed them on a couple of my desktops, after reducing the system drives to fit and cloning them across.
I only use the system drive to store the system and a few programs that act up if they're not in %PF% (which is a really bad place to put programs, anyway). Everything else is stored externally, so if the SSD fails, I can just plug the old system drive back in, with minimal fuss.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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There's a 850 PRO 512GB in my lap top. I got it from Amazon cheap because it allegedly had a damaged package. The only hitch was that Samsung didn't yet have cloning software for Windows 10 at that time. This was just after Windows 10 was released. One of Samsung's help desk people helped me find cloning software for 10.
No problems so far, but this machine is gets moderate use. My top reason for getting the SSD was because a laptop gets banged around and the SSD is more forgiving of bumps.
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I've replaced all the hard drives in my systems with 'em ... so far not a bit of trouble, and the machines run like greased lightning. Fast, quick upgrade. If they have any problems I've not seen them.
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I'm running a terabyte Crucial drive in my laptop. I'll second what everyone else has said: Nice speed boost, no extra heat, better battery life, no real sensitivity to physical shocks. With prices dropping like they are, there's no reason not to try one out.
Most of the problems with them wearing out have been mitigated by randomizing where writes go. My understanding is that writes to what would normally be the same track/sector in a spinning drive, go to different locations each time with an SSD. Usage is statistically modified so no one area of the disk is overused.
Also, on the subject of data recovery from the chips, most of the modern SSDs now use encryption as part of that randomization scheme. If you don't encrypt the disk, you can plug it in any system and read it, but the bits and bytes are still encrypted on the other side of the disk's interface electronics. On the plus side, this makes full disk encryption quick, the data is already encrypted, so you're just adding your key to the existing key (I know it's much more complicated than that, just trying to keep things simple).
I do still keep my backups going, but I did that with the spinning drive as well.
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, or that the "B"'s really should be "b"'s since you're talking about bits not bytes with those numbers 