The new SSD Thread (Benchmarks, Brands, News and Advice)

[zenpharaohs]

SSDs being more reliable than regular hds, have little drawbacks wen used in raid 0.

Well I hope that's true, but the shortest lived drive I have ever had was my Super Talent 128GB SSD, which lasted about two weeks in service as a primary drive.

I agree that in time, the SSD will win, in just about every way, but it's early days for these things. I will try that new OCZ 128GB as soon as I can.

Sometimes the leading edge is the bleeding edge.

[davepermen]

Um, no, it's a bad idea. Lots of software licenses and activations are tied to the primary disk. So if you have to restore the image on it, you can have to relicense/reactivate stuff. In particular Windows Vista is inactivated every time you change the primary drive, and most times that you re-image it. In fact, Vista can be inactivated by simply changing the device driver for the primary drive (for example if you have to change into/out of AHCI mode).

shouldn't happen with windows home server as a backup system. and even then, the activation doesn't hurt me at all. never did. i'd prefer to not have it, but i have no problem with it, as it's an understandable thing.

even phone-activation is no biggie. it's less work than searching for the newest version of the crack for the os because somehow they detected my key is evil again.

i'm only having valid licences today and i'm actually sort of proud to activate. no big hassle for me.

and still, a raid0 doesn't mean your system will fail daily or weekly. it just means it has a higher chance. i'm running my newer home-pc now since some months in this mode, and it hasn't failed so far. have had single harddrives which failed faster than this.

a failing disk always sucks. but a failing raid0 for me is just like a failing disk + you get a disk for free.

[John Kotches]

shouldn't happen with windows home server as a backup system. and even then, the activation doesn't hurt me at all. never did. i'd prefer to not have it, but i have no problem with it, as it's an understandable thing.

Have you tested a restore? If you haven't then how do you know it will work when you need it to work? Windows' backups have been notoriously flakey at best.

even phone-activation is no biggie. it's less work than searching for the newest version of the crack for the os because somehow they detected my key is evil again.

i'm only having valid licences today and i'm actually sort of proud to activate. no big hassle for me.

I don't have big issues with re-activation except that they've gone overboard with activations.

and still, a raid0 doesn't mean your system will fail daily or weekly. it just means it has a higher chance. i'm running my newer home-pc now since some months in this mode, and it hasn't failed so far. have had single harddrives which failed faster than this.

I'm sure you have, you were in the infant mortality phase.

When it fails (and it will fail) please let us know how the recovery went.

a failing disk always sucks. but a failing raid0 for me is just like a failing disk + you get a disk for free.

You do? I didn't realize it was a buy one get one free deal If that's the case, striped mirrors for me.

Cheers,

[John Kotches]

I've had this question for years but nobody could give me a definitive answer on it:
If i partition my SSD, will the drive's wear leveling still apply to the whole drive or to individual partitions?

It's to each memory cell. Each memory cell has a finite lifetime. The typical failure time is X where X is the specified lifetime. It sounds tongue in cheek, but the failure of single cells will happen before the end of the lifetime of the device. These should be automatically remapped to spare blocks from the spare block pool.

I would suppose that it would still apply, being at a lower level than MBR and the such. But i need a definitive answer. No guesswork, i can do that myself.
This is important cause i want to protect the OS partition with a write filter, but still have the ability to make changes to my data partition without having to commit change in commandline everytime.

Hmmm... have to ponder that a little more. It should work in theory, but in practice will there be enough gain to make it worthwhile?

[zenpharaohs]

shouldn't happen with windows home server as a backup system. and even then, the activation doesn't hurt me at all. never did. i'd prefer to not have it, but i have no problem with it, as it's an understandable thing.

even phone-activation is no biggie. it's less work than searching for the newest version of the crack for the os because somehow they detected my key is evil again.

i'm only having valid licences today and i'm actually sort of proud to activate. no big hassle for me.

A: I have Vista. Activation has been hell.

B: Phone activation has been unpleasant. As we speak, I am running on a system that I will have to phone activate since the Super Talent SSD died. I put off the activation as long as possible to get all the device drivers and other software set up to reduce the chance of deactivation after activation. I've been through this about five times in the past nine months.

C: I have valid licenses. Just today I renewed my Mathworks software even though that means going to activation as opposed to the previous licenses. It's like paying money to have another headache.

My experiences with activation almost make me physically ill. I've lost at least four or five full man days just rebuilding my system from things crapping out. I've been computing since 1969 and this recent activation/primary crapout fun is about the worst pain I've ever had in computing.

Raid 0 on the primary? Not in my lifetime. I'm the guy that started the thread about getting a Raid 1 primary notebook. At the moment, they don't make them small enough for me (15.4" too big to travel) but I am going to go there.

[Spare Tire]

It's to each memory cell. Each memory cell has a finite lifetime. The typical failure time is X where X is the specified lifetime. It sounds tongue in cheek, but the failure of single cells will happen before the end of the lifetime of the device. These should be automatically remapped to spare blocks from the spare block pool.

Wear leveling algorythm are more complexe than just having a pool of spare cells. What you're describing sounds like what a normal HDD would do if they found bad sectors, and that's only when it happens. But SSD wear leveling distributes writes to cells that have had less writes to them, and sometimes even moves around blocs of data that never gets modified.

[davepermen]

Have you tested a restore? If you haven't then how do you know it will work when you need it to work? Windows' backups have been notoriously flakey at best.

nope, not yet. I'm currently too much reworking my whole network at home, so at current the system is not working. But there isn't much data alive currently that would get lost on a hd failure anyways. most is shared from pc to notebook, and to an external disk => a disk failure would at worst mean some days back lost.

I don't have big issues with re-activation except that they've gone overboard with activations.

I never had to reactivate any of my systems yet. Including tossing around quite some hardware. All i had to is activating notebooks by phone as i reinstalled them with an original vista disk after bought, as they had tons of stuff preinstalled that i didn't wanted to have. but using a cellphone, that's easy. set it to speaker/loud mode, and place it besides the notebook, and start typing. a 5min job at most, done once per notebook so far.

I'm sure you have, you were in the infant mortality phase.

my english fails here, sorry. (i'm from switzerland)

When it fails (and it will fail) please let us know how the recovery went.

yes, i'll do. but i'd guess, before it fails, i'll have one or two of the fast cheap ssds that come out soon to place in there

You do? I didn't realize it was a buy one get one free deal If that's the case, striped mirrors for me.

yep, one for free, namely the one that is together with the pair. if the c: wasn't that full (less than 50%), i can even restore the backup right onto the single working disk, and continue till i have a next second disk.[/QUOTE]

so two in raid0 can be even better than 1 for uptime, as you can't buy a fresh hd at saturday evening till monday morning (and you can sure bet it'll die then, just because it likes to)



and if the backup doesn't work, i just reinstall vista, isn't a big hazzle. i have a nice small list of what gets installed on it, it isn't that much. takes a while, but isn't something terribly bad. (but i do should get a vista disk with sp1 integrated someday..)

i know how bad it can be to have a disk failure if you're not prepared for it. most of my disks that died where external usb-disks, and i've lost quite some gb worth of data years ago. that's why i moved over to multiple systems => multiple places for my data. that way, if one dies, i still have it all. unimportant if the disk fails, the raidcontroller (been there), or the whole pc/nb.

oh, and as a dj, i do have to have 2 notebooks with me for gigging, if one fails, i can quickly turn on the 2nd. so i do have a raid1 all the time, in hardware, including the whole system

thats why i don't care much about the single disk. it's utterly unimportant for me.

[davepermen]

anyways, discussion is actually offtopic in here.. (at least partially if we go too much into detail and too far away from ssds in raid, performance? savety?)

ontopic stuff:
http://www.dailytech.com/Samsung+128...ticle12319.htm

yay.. looks like that's the real OZC (as they till now allways just resold other companies products in general, and samsung ssds in particular..)

[tak.japan]

anyways, discussion is actually offtopic in here.. (at least partially if we go too much into detail and too far away from ssds in raid, performance? savety?)

ontopic stuff:
http://www.dailytech.com/Samsung+128...ticle12319.htm

yay.. looks like that's the real OZC (as they till now allways just resold other companies products in general, and samsung ssds in particular..)

Sorry if I'm missing something here but I thought whether it has SLC or MLC, SSD were supposed to be dramatically faster than regular HD?
speeds of 90MB/s and write speeds of 70MB/s, I've read that the new hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 can pull 173.5MB/sec...

[jisaac]

THis may or may not be the case. The SSD can fail for any number of reasons, not just by excessive write aging.

His failure is double that of a single drive.

It's his system, and he can do as he pleases -- my experience says it's a mistake.

Duh... I know that. but didn't i say...

So even though the chance of a crash is doubled, that chance is still very small, small enough to be considered neglidgible.

i didn't indicate that by 'crashes' i only meant maxing out the ssd's writes.