Solved HDD Vs SSD

Echo what others are saying, never ever had a SSD fail. I think you'd be hard pushed to find a medium to high end PC/laptop these days with a HDD

NtSFstEddie said:

You don't want to "replace" the HDD with a SSD.You should add the SSD to your PC as your system drive,to run windows and other programs from,use your HDD for storage and you will get the speed of the SSD with the durability of a HDD.

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Instead of asking the question speed of SSD, I would ask the question "durability of a HDD?" SSDs are more durable the HDDs, especially in laptop computers.

Bottom line: Do a little research on any drive prior to purchase. There are definite differences, and you will sometimes get some real benefits by spending a little more. As an example, and I'm just picking one at random here, the 2TB Seagate Firecuda 520 has a TBW rating of 3,600. That works out to just shy of 2TB every single day for 5 years. That's impressive! Plus, you get 5,000 MB/sec read and 4,400 MB/sec read. Is it worth the extra money? Maybe not, but it all depends upon your personal list of priorities.

I happen to be using a 2TB WD SN 850, it comes in over 7,000 on the read. Is it worth the money.....welllllll........... On benchmarks it's fantastic. And if I am just copying a file from 1 place to another, it's great. But day to day usage....it's pretty much impossible to tell any difference between my son's SN750 which is 1/2 the speed.

The real performance gain on SSD and NVMe is that almost instant random access time. It's 0.1ms....which is loads better than a standard HDD of 15ms or so. But raw throughput isnt' reall the be-all, end-all in my opinion.

Modern ssd's have come on so much I don't think wear is much of a problem anymore

Hi there

For OS / VM's etc -- no problem. For NAS / file sharing etc nothing wrong in using older HDD's -- even as RAID 0 -- which speeds up the older HDD's no end. I'd never go back to OS on a standard type HDD.

Cheers
jimbo

I have had lots of SSD's over the years, unlike Clam1952, one of my OCZ Agility 3's 120Gb failed for no apparant reason. I have had, or still have, OCZ, VERTEX, SAMSUNG, KINGSTON, CRUCIAL, SANDISK and WESTERN DIGITAL. The price of SSD's has fallen as they get more popular, and if you have a laptop, they are more shockproof, and there is a power saving, and of course the speed increase is an advantage.

If you're not sure, get one of these. They are quite cheap, fast and as long as you do regular backups you're covered in case it fails. I've put these in laptops and netbooks I've sold on, because they're cheap to buy and fast. £25 isn't bad for a hard drive/ssd drive. They have good reviews too. And crucial tend to be reliable. In my own laptop I have a 1tb Samsung Evo 860 2.5inch. Been using it about two years and no issues.

The benefits are not only speed (or I think of it more as zippiness) but also you won't lose your data if you drop it.

The 240gb is only £25

Crucial BX500 240gb

The 500gb is only £52

Crucial BX500 480gb

I'd never go back to an hdd. The difference is most noticeable in low powered machines that struggle to run Windows 10 on 2gb ram - adding an ssd makes them run way better.

I've had nothing but SSDs in my systems for years, the only HDD being a WD Black as my external backup drive which I originally had in conjunction with my first SSD in a hybrid system; so still use it for something. When I built new in July two M.2 drives is all I wanted so as to eliminate even more cable clutter from the case.

@AntonisCy
You'll want to change out your system drive for an SSD and relegate the old HDD down to data storage. The results will astound you.

I recently did this with a laptop that was gifted to me, by installing a Transcend 256GB M.2 NVMe drive as the system drive and using the factory installed Toshiba 1TB SATA-III HDD as a data drive.

Here are the results, according to CrystalDiskMark7.


I unfortunately did not properly record the boot times before I made the change. I can say with relative certainty that boot times went from around 2 minutes using the factory installed HDD, to less than 15 seconds after cloning to the SSD.

If you want to view the raw data of the CrystalDiskMark7 tests that I performed, I uploaded the results to my OneDrive.

You won't go wrong by using an SSD as your primary system drive. You'll get better performance gains though if you opt for an M.2 NVMe drive as opposed to a SATA SSD.

It is up to you if you think the better samsung evo is worth more than the samsung qvo. Or if the crucial mx500 is worth the extra over the crucial bx500. I like to have the extra disk endurance for a slightly higher cost.

Another point to consider is that QLC drives tend to be cheaper per size variant than other types of drive and that they use a portion of the cells in TLC mode as a fast cache, the mistaken belief that QLC drives are slow as HDD comes from the drives being tested with sustained writes over the size of this cache. For example I use an Intel 660p 512Gb NVME as my Windows drive, it is 3 years old now and is still on 95%, based on my usage over those 3 years it should last 50 years minimum, at least for writes, but has probably the lowest TBW of any drive.
In general use it is as fast as most other 512Gb drives, however if I copy a greater than 70Gb file to it the initial write speed starts at 1500Mbs then quickly drops down to 80 - 120Mbs because the TLC cache has been filled.
People still say that QLC drives are absolutely no go as OS drives because they are so slow, but honestly this is pure fiction, my system boots from cold and restart in 8 seconds average to desktop and in general use I never see any slowdown.
Each type of drive technology has it's place and uses, for me the Intel drive was the cheapest 512Gb NVME available at the time and is perfectly ok as system drive, at least for me. :)

HDD's are great if you use them say in a 4 bay enclosure enabled either in RAID combos or as JBOD ("just a bunch of disks" - which acts as 1 big combined drive) as these are excellent and cheap for NAS servers, multi-media files, file sharing, backups, other data etc. Good way also to use old HDD's.

For the OS and scratch data e.g temp storage for photoshop / other video editing, large CAD files etc why would one ever consider anythinh other than an SSD (or their NvMe equivalents).

As far as secure erase is concerned --simply write any sort of code / script that writes X'00' --hex zero to every data area. Even the FBI can't recover data from a disk that's been written that way !!

Backup disk before messing around but python is easy enough -- something like this :

import os

def secure_delete(path, passes=1):
with open(path, "ba+") as delfile:
length = delfile.tell()
with open(path, "br+") as delfile:
for i in range(passes):
delfile.seek(0)
delfile.write(os.urandom(length))
os.remove(path)


Cheers
jimbo

There is always a Cost/Convenience factor to be considered with computer hardware, this is a specific issue when you look at drives. on a laptop used for mobile use with the data being transferred to a server/Desktop regularly, a NVMe or other SSD is a good idea as it gives great performance but for limited amounts of data (due to cost), a two Terabyte drive is probably the ideal for an OS and the applications & data .

However, when you look at systems with a higher requirement for storage the traditional HDD becomes a serious contender
Eg. If you require a Desktop with eight Terabytes of data storage plus a fast access to your OS and application a Mixed media solution becomes more viable.

An M2 NVMe OS drive of 1TB with an 8TB Data HDD is one setup that I used in a previous desktop, ( I also included a specific Fast data access SSD for application databases).

Now to speed up the access times to the data I used a Second spare M2 on the motherboard and installed a 32GB Intel Optane Memory Module that worked as a buffer for the data 8TB data drive.

This setup gave me a fast access to Data but kept the cost down to a reasonable level - My needs for photo editing required the moving of largish image files (Several GB at times) and their storage

There are various options for a users needs these days

So i got my SSD today and i was a bit shocked to find a cancer warning section on the back of the package. Something to do with perchlorate. I am guessing this substance only emits after the SSD is physically damaged or something right?

I wouldn't worry about it, just don't eat it

There is nothing inside an SSD which is much different from an ordinary stick of RAM, certainly not any toxic batteries, the warning seems like those labels on everything that is bought in California. I would therefore advise against grinding the SSD to dust, mixing it with beer and drinking it. It would certainly spoil the taste of the beer.

clam1952 said:

Friend of mine is on his third replacement 860 QVO for some reason they keep failing.

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The QVO uses 4-bit MLC, four bits are stored in each cell. The more expensive EVO range uses 3-bit MLC. The TBW endurance (Total Bytes Written) of a 3-bit MLC NAND is twice that of a 4-bit MLC NAND SSD of the same capacity, Samsung have a 5 year guarantee for their EVO range, but just 3 years for the QVO.

For my 860 EVO 500GB Samsung specify a TBW of 300TB. I am quite a heavy user, but in the two years I've been hammering it I've only written 15.4TB.



At that rate of use it's going to take me another 37 years to reach its manufacturer's specified endurance. That's enough to outlive me!

I have an OCZ SSD I bought in 2013 I think it was, when 120GB SSD would empty your wallet. Since then, Windows 7 has been reinstalled on it countless times, Windows 10 quite a few times, and from Debian 9, 10, and currently 11. Even done silly things with it, like defrag it for no reason. Admittingly, I haven't run any SSD test utilites on it, but it's still going, and I don't put anything critical (for me) on it anymore.

To be fair to HDDs, I'm still using a 2.5" HDD 160GB, I've been using since 2007 as a data disk in quite a few different PCs throught out the years. I think it will be best to retire it now. I have a special relationship with luck, it's a bad one.

Just looked at my nearly 3 year old 500GB 860 Evo in HDS, 15.18TB written, performance and health still 100%, likewise it will probably last longer than me, 240GB OCZ- Agility 3 only 6.84TB and still 100% on Health and Performance and it's 10 years old, got a couple more of them as well, now as spares but still in good nick.