Hacker News Reader

Comment by cafebabe | Hacker News Reader

As a developer, I'm more concerned about the lifespan of a SSD than a 'usual' user. That's why I didn't get a SSD, yet. I probably would, if the SSD will last long even when thousands of files change on a daily basis (compilation etc). But maybe my concerns are unnecessary...?

View on HN

If it's replacement cost you are worried about, I think an SSD will last on average about as long as your system, assuming a max 3 year upgrade cycle.

If it's data preservation you are worried about (ie, if I wear it out and lose everything) then remember than flash memory, unlike spinning disks, is fail on write. That means that even if the drive dies, it can still be read. Compare to an ever so slightly misaligned platter getting a big scratch from a drives head.

I do daily backups for data preservation. So my concern was more for the point where writes may fail (of course the controller will care about it). You're right. As they get cheaper, I'll probably buy one this year.

Hard drives are much more likely to fail without warning than SSDs. Modern SSDs use wear-leveling along with spare flash cells to increase reliability. To give one example: Intel warranties their X25-Ms for 3 years. They claim you can write 100GB/day for 3 years without exhausting the flash cells.

The typical failure mode for a hard drive is for it to work fine and then completely die. No reading or writing, just dead. Flash cells usually become "stuck" after too many writes, turning an SSD into a read-only drive. Compared to hard drives, SSDs are much more tolerant of vibration and shock. I've had several hard drives fail, but no SSDs die on me.

Most importantly, I cannot overstate the performance benefit. Any machine without an SSD feels broken to me. Considering how much time most of us spend on our computers, $300 amortized over the life of the SSD is completely worthwhile.

That's not my experience. I bought a 128GB Patriot Torx some time ago and one day it stopped working completely. I lost all my data. They gave me a new one and 7 months later I started having data corruption problems. Now I can't even format it from Windows.

Maybe it was bad luck twice but I'm sticking with hard drives for now.

The Intel drives are especially reliable.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com