To SSD or not to SSD

[prideslayer]

990FX uses SB950 southbridge. It shouldn't have a problem with large drives.

 

The built in windows softraid (or any OS like BSD or linux, or OS agnostic like ZFS) will be much faster than any hardware RAID. Problem there is just no battery backup and difficult recovery, neither of which appeals to me. Like it or not, your CPU is a lot faster than the one on even a dedicated RAID controller.

 

I don't really like onboard raid myself. When I retired my own SCSI drives I switched to the onboard to save a few bucks, and that decision came back to haunt me, so I ponied up for a nice Areca.

[lordofthedread]

SSD against RAID, OK let me explain why you are wrong, at first if you build a raid 0 and one of the drive fails you loose all your data on it. It tends to fail indeed due to the lower quality of HDDs nowadays(mostly because of more and more moving mechanical pieces inside to accomodate the bigger and bigger size), unless you get dedicated RAID drives that are quite expensive.

 

A regular HDD is under a warranty of 2 years nowadays, maybe 3 for some brands and 5 if you get the expensive ones (WD black or RED for example), cheap HDDs like WD Green will run at 5400rpms instead of 7200 wich will impact performance especially if you talk about raid.

 

Not talking about RAID 1 here as, while protecting your data, won't get you anywhere in terms of performance but lets take a simple example of RAID 5.

 

You need at least 3 drives to run it, a better setting will be to have 4 drives to get a spare in case one of the drive fails, lets take a basic example with 4 WD 7200rpm Black for performances :

 

226$ each on newegg

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533

 

Thats a total of 904$ to mount your RAID without counting a dedicated controller (I would not advise to mount a RAID 5 using the controller on you MB whatever it is)

 

For about the same price you can have :

 

2 X 512gb PCIE SSD drives mounted in RAID 0

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249044

 

The performance will be actually better, while you loose space and the safe data setting of a RAID 5 it should be considered a valid option.

 

Back in reality any small SSD with a 3 years warranty will be a life changer from mechanical HDDs for anyone using a computer, it will also save power consumption and avoid noises and it will be also a lot safer in case of shocks (you can drop a SSD while its running, try that with a regular HDD and we'll talk about it).

 

As I said previously I am working in data recovery and believe it or not but we don't have that many inquiries for SSD drives while regular HDDs continue to fail (this include RAID settings), you could say that it is because HDDs are here longer with a larger userbase but on the other hand not a single day pass without an inquiry from these new 4TB HDDs that failed out of the blue, and these HDDs are quite a novelty.

 

10 years ago HDDs were made to last, I still have a Samsung 160gb that runs smooth, sadly it is not the case anymore, most HDDs nowadays won't get past the warranty provided, the building quality of HDDs for all brands dropped significantly in the past years (thats also why the warranty dropped from 5 to 3 or 2 years depending on models and brands).

 

Again a SSD should not be considered (yet?) as storage and you should not get them to store your data but just to boost your performance for somewhat a decent cost (99$ fo a 256gb SSD).

 

In the future I truly believe that SSDs will finally replace HDDs that did not evolved that much in the last 10 years (save their size and some oddities like helium drives), it is still a motor, magnetic platters and R/W heads in movement in a sealed box, the only evolution was to make the platters thinner (more fragile) and put more platters and more heads in the same box.

[prideslayer]

SSD against RAID, OK let me explain why you are wrong,

Challenge accepted.

 

if you build a raid 0 and one of the drive fails you loose all your data on it.

1. I always build RAID-10's, not RAID-0s.

2. Neither RAID nor SSDs are a replacement for backups.

 

mostly because of more and more moving mechanical pieces inside to accomodate the bigger and bigger size

HDDs have no more moving parts today than they did 5 or 10 years ago. Adding more space does not add more "moving parts" except, perhaps, an extra platter. Even this is rare though.

 

(ignored irrelevant warranty stuff)

 

You need at least 3 drives to run it, a better setting will be to have 4 drives to get a spare in case one of the drive fails, lets take a basic example with 4 WD 7200rpm Black for performances :

WD Blacks are specifically not for use in RAID because of TLER. Try some Seagates instead, and RAID-10 rather than RAID-5 (which is slow, especially during a rebuild, and a 2nd drive is more likely to fail during a rebuild.)

 

Seagate ST1000NC001's are 7200RPM 1T enterprise disks, $110 @ the egg. Four of them is $440. That's a total cost of... $440.

 

You get roughly the same speed, and four times the usable space as one of those $480 SSDs. RAID-0 is a terrible idea, and a dishonest comparison to a RAID-5 (or RAID-10) HDD setup. One of these setups has redundancy, the other doesn't.

 

most HDDs nowadays won't get past the warranty provided

This is completely wrong. If most (> 50%) of HDDs are being sent back for in-warranty service or replacement, every single HDD manufacturer would be out of business. MOST HDDs last well beyond the warranty period.

 

Actual data, no guessing: http://techreport.com/news/25643/reliability-study-tracks-25-000-hard-drives

 

In the future I truly believe that SSDs will finally replace HDDs

Some day. Not any time soon. HDD technology is not as stagnant as you seem to think it is, and the big players like Seagate and IBM introduce "revolutionary" new technologies at an astonishing pace. HAMR and other technologies are "coming soon" for HDDs. By the time SSDs get anywhere close to current HDDs in $/GB, the next generation of HDDs will probably be here -- bringing 20TB or more per drive for roughly the same price as current 2T drives.

 

By the time they do catch up, something will likely replace them both. NAND Flash is not a viable long term solution.

[...0...]

I would not advice SSD in raid. SSD are by far superiror in speed by large margin and as i have with M.2 tech(Z97 MB have M.2) it have 10gb bandwith with speeds up to 800mb prolly near future even 900+

 

I boot up my system with alll loaded on desktop in 14sec.

 

But negative point about the SSD is durabillity and price it's still rediculous high common 1TB  still 390 euro's FUCK THEM won't buy it for that price.

 

I got OCZ ssd 2x 256gb(also way to expensive) at time around 2011 i thought was great investment but ivé not bought  any new ones, i use for store normal HDD or external HDD.

 

SSD is good for startup and gaming or a 100gb map from one ssd to other is going fast compare to normal HDD.

 

If you can afford and don't have problem with price SDD is way to go.

 

 

[Azaira]

http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/ocz-z-drive-r4-pci-express-1-6tb-ssd-review/ (also a 3.2GB version)

"capable of 2.8GB/s read and write performance"

"and double performance to 5.6GB/s read and write with 1.2 million IOPS at 4k random write aligned disk access."

It's not that they wont catch up or anything, it's that they're a relatively new technology compared to HDD's

Comparing something that's only been out for a few years against one that's been out for a few decades.

The same way they are creating and revolutionizing HDDs they are also doing it with SSDs.

The new Industry SSD is over 3x faster in respect to the next best one. They are breaking barrier after barrier.

HDD's are cheaper, but SSD's are getting far faster.

Don't even worry about RAID since it's irrelevant to the OP's question.

They would just do the same thing between the two types of drives.go to youtube and search this stuff if you want to go on about it.

 

And as the OP has stated, he settled on a 512GB SSD with a 3TB HDD as storage space with multiple external drives, which is the right way to go.

He achieved boot and load speed with storage area.

 

You may think of this discussion as closed.

[prideslayer]

You may think of this discussion as closed.

Thanks for your concern.

[Guest corespore]

Since i finally saved up enough to buy a new MOBO with all SATA 3 I'm actually looking forward to going SSD for my OS. My current main drive is a few years old but it has no failures so I'll be using it for a backup. 

Actually, several of you guys sound like you've got a good deal of experience running a raid set-up, anyone know of a good site and\or tutorial as how to best get started? 

[RitualClarity]

 

But negative point about the SSD is durabillity

 I have several. I go through a hard drive every year or so ( mechanical) and yet have an SSD "die". I still have a 64gb kicking around on some enclosure. I beat the holy living shit out of them. IN fact I beat them harder than I ever beat a regular mechanical hard drive. They still run. They have a bad rep from the first generation of SSDs and some bad manufactures making crap hardware. A good well made SSD can last very long. Samsung, Intel and Crucial are my favorites ( in that order) Now I wouldn't use any other model. My generic drive.. ( which I would buy them again and again went out of business. They were re-branded.. .. Crucial and some Intel models.

 

The only hard drive that has outlasted and out performed ( reliability of course) is the WD Black 1tb from about 6 years ago if memory serves me correctly. That thing just won't die. Believe me .. I tried.. lol. 

 

Now Samsung is offering a SSD with a 10 year warranty. They have to have some level of reliability otherwise that company would go out of business. Which I doubt they will do since they have been around for a very long time.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/samsungssd/warranty.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-850-pro-ssd-performance,3861-12.html

 

 

[Azaira]

"Of course, the method Samsung uses to calculate its figures isn't divulged. I just don't think it matters, though. Once upon a time, I put almost seven million gigabytes on a 256 GB Samsung 830." - Says something about durability. Almost 7 PetaBytes... Thats what I have! XD

Samsung 830 - 130 dead in 16 months of use, 256 trillion to kill.

And they don't have moving parts, so dropping it wont just kill it like it would an HDD (not to say it wont though)

Meaning, its safer to have an SSD in a laptop than an HDD. Though I will admit I've seen some sturdy HDDs.

[prideslayer]

Since i finally saved up enough to buy a new MOBO with all SATA 3 I'm actually looking forward to going SSD for my OS. My current main drive is a few years old but it has no failures so I'll be using it for a backup. 

Actually, several of you guys sound like you've got a good deal of experience running a raid set-up, anyone know of a good site and\or tutorial as how to best get started?

I'm not sure what sort of tutorial you'd want?

 

1. Pick drives based on your capacity, price, speed needs.

2. Pick a raid level based on your reliability vs. space needs.

3. Leave the stripe size alone.

 

Done.

 

My recommendation: Always and only, RAID-10 (barring expensive SAN technologies), or RAID-0 if you keep great backups and don't mind reinstalling if a drive goes bad -- and keep a replacement on hand so you don't have to wait.

 

Avoid RAID-5 at all costs. It seems like a good tradeoff at first when comparing (read) speed, reliabilty, and space. The problem is, when a RAID-5 goes degraded (drive failure), a lot more stress is put on the other drives in the array. Performance is terrible and gets worse when rebuilding. Rebuilding adds even more stress to the other drives, raising the chances of failure.

 

Something like 60 or 70% of complete RAID failures occur during rebuild, when one of the OTHER drives fails. RAID-10 is the only consumer available level that mostly mitigates the problem.

[prideslayer]

HDDs are not as fragile as you might think just because they have moving parts. It's not 1998. Dropping it is unlikely to damage a modern laptop drive, even while running -- most of them have 'free fall' detection sensors in them now that automatically park the heads before impact.

 

The SSDs are not as "strong" as you might think either. Plenty of things inside can break if it's dropped or smacked hard enough. In fact, the maximum non-operating shock limit for an SSD and an HDD are nearly identical. When operating, it's vibration that is more likely to cause problems -- and the limits on SSDs and HDDs are again, nearly identical, both operating and non-operating.

[Azaira]

Well, I know that I knocked a HDD off of a two foot tall side-table three years back and it killed the HDD. That was a sad day.

So I may be a little bias.

[Guest corespore]

The companies are still improving the HDD drive, i doubt we will see the last of the platter drive for some time to come. I think moving forward though they will most likely be relegated to storage and backup. Despite the fact PC SSD's have only been around since 1991 (give or take a few years) they have already shown significant performance, more then enough to justify the increased cost. 

[prideslayer]

The companies are still improving the HDD drive

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2050860/seagate-tdk-show-off-hamr-to-jam-more-data-into-hard-drives.html

 

 

I think moving forward though they will most likely be relegated to storage and backup.

Not sure what else they're for besides.. storage.. and backup..

[Guest corespore]

^

[absoltekk]

I generally use my SSD for the operating system itself.

 

A SSD is a lot like a stick of RAM. The problem is if it shorts out, the data on it is pretty much good as gone. With a HDD, it is possible to buy a replacement controller card for it..., so you can swap it out with the fried one and it will just fine.

 

If you do get a SSD to store important things, make sure you are backing up your data either online or onto another HDD

[lordofthedread]

 

SSD against RAID, OK let me explain why you are wrong,

Challenge accepted.

 

if you build a raid 0 and one of the drive fails you loose all your data on it.

1. I always build RAID-10's, not RAID-0s.

2. Neither RAID nor SSDs are a replacement for backups.

 

mostly because of more and more moving mechanical pieces inside to accomodate the bigger and bigger size

HDDs have no more moving parts today than they did 5 or 10 years ago. Adding more space does not add more "moving parts" except, perhaps, an extra platter. Even this is rare though.

 

(ignored irrelevant warranty stuff)

 

You need at least 3 drives to run it, a better setting will be to have 4 drives to get a spare in case one of the drive fails, lets take a basic example with 4 WD 7200rpm Black for performances :

WD Blacks are specifically not for use in RAID because of TLER. Try some Seagates instead, and RAID-10 rather than RAID-5 (which is slow, especially during a rebuild, and a 2nd drive is more likely to fail during a rebuild.)

 

Seagate ST1000NC001's are 7200RPM 1T enterprise disks, $110 @ the egg. Four of them is $440. That's a total cost of... $440.

 

You get roughly the same speed, and four times the usable space as one of those $480 SSDs. RAID-0 is a terrible idea, and a dishonest comparison to a RAID-5 (or RAID-10) HDD setup. One of these setups has redundancy, the other doesn't.

 

most HDDs nowadays won't get past the warranty provided

This is completely wrong. If most (> 50%) of HDDs are being sent back for in-warranty service or replacement, every single HDD manufacturer would be out of business. MOST HDDs last well beyond the warranty period.

 

Actual data, no guessing: http://techreport.com/news/25643/reliability-study-tracks-25-000-hard-drives

 

In the future I truly believe that SSDs will finally replace HDDs

Some day. Not any time soon. HDD technology is not as stagnant as you seem to think it is, and the big players like Seagate and IBM introduce "revolutionary" new technologies at an astonishing pace. HAMR and other technologies are "coming soon" for HDDs. By the time SSDs get anywhere close to current HDDs in $/GB, the next generation of HDDs will probably be here -- bringing 20TB or more per drive for roughly the same price as current 2T drives.

 

By the time they do catch up, something will likely replace them both. NAND Flash is not a viable long term solution.

 

 

Adding more platters in an HDDs is adding more R/W heads ence the more moving parts inside, a single platter HDD is way more reliable than a 3 or 4 platters thats basic maths.

 

I took the WD black as example because of performance, it is not a drive to make RAID setups but it is a very good performing drive.

 

I did not say that they did fail before warranty but right after hence why they dont run out a business, a drive that is warranty 5 years failling after 6 is pretty normal, a drive failing after 2 year and a half with a 2 year warranty is what you should expect, a lot of basic HDDs are warranty 2 years for a reason, not to be replaced until warranty voids, 2 years goes pretty fast in my opinion.

 

A few years back every single HDD on the market was under warranty for 5 years, it changed for a reason.

[Mashi]

Adding more platters in an HDDs is adding more R/W heads ence the more moving parts inside, a single platter HDD is way more reliable than a 3 or 4 platters thats basic maths.

 

A few years back every single HDD on the market was under warranty for 5 years, it changed for a reason.

 

 

Here's the thing though, area density is what determines how many platters are required in order to get to the desired size.  Meaning that if you want a 4TB drive, you're getting 4 platters currently.  This is pretty much true though out the industry.  With the current technology we have, we're reaching the physical limitations even with how close each individual track is.  We can't bend the laws of physics, so one of two things are going to happen.  Either there will be some kind of breakthrough as to how data is stored per track, or traditional HDD's are dead.  I'm leaning towards the second one myself, especially as nand continues to drop in price as manufacturing quality improves.

 

And you want to know why warranties changed?  That's simple, bottom line.  The drive market hit the very bottom, and the actual profitibility of the drive companies were becoming questionable.  The same thing happened turning the dotcom implosion, when there was a massive glut of hardware on the market.  Take a look how many companies died or were absorbed.  We went from 30+ HDD companies all making their own drives, to less than 10 companies in 5 years.

 

[Halstrom]

I generally use my SSD for the operating system itself.

 

A SSD is a lot like a stick of RAM. The problem is if it shorts out, the data on it is pretty much good as gone. With a HDD, it is possible to buy a replacement controller card for it..., so you can swap it out with the fried one and it will just fine.

 

If you do get a SSD to store important things, make sure you are backing up your data either online or onto another HDD

Yeah which is why I only keep the O/S & Games on my SSD, if it crapped itself all my long term data is on my HHD, I buy a new SSD and reinstall Windows & Games via DVD/Steam etc

[prideslayer]

Adding more platters in an HDDs is adding more R/W heads ence the more moving parts inside, a single platter HDD is way more reliable than a 3 or 4 platters thats basic maths.

They almost never do that anymore -- they tend to keep the head and platter count the same, and increases in capacity come from greater bit density on the platters.

 

When they do add a platter, the heads are attached to the armature (the moving part), and the platter is attached to the spindle (the spinning part). Maybe it's nit picking, but adding another platter and associated heads is like adding another blade to a fan -- it's not really a new, distinct, moving part.

 

I did not say that they did fail before warranty but right after hence why they dont run out a business, a drive that is warranty 5 years failling after 6 is pretty normal, a drive failing after 2 year and a half with a 2 year warranty is what you should expect, a lot of basic HDDs are warranty 2 years for a reason, not to be replaced until warranty voids, 2 years goes pretty fast in my opinion.

That still is not true. If you look at the backblaze reliability study you'll find that the actual failure rates are:

- 5.1% first 1.5 years.

- 1.4% second 1.5 years.

- 11.8% after 3 years.

 

This is hardly 'most'. It's hardly 'half'. After three years, 88.2% of mechanical drives are working fine. After 4 years, 78% are working fine. This is according to a study by a company that puts these drives under nearly constant full-use stress (backblaze is an online backup storage provider).

 

A few years back every single HDD on the market was under warranty for 5 years, it changed for a reason.

Sure. To save money. The drives are more prone to failure as they get older, I don't disagree with that, but when you say "most" won't last much beyond their warranty, you are wrong. MOST will last beyond their warranty, with a good margin.