TE Records

[Zenith]

SSDs have a declared write limit, which might be 50TB in the case of a cheap 256GB SSD. It's probably higher these days. At one time it was usual to have an SSD like that for everything that had to load fast, and a larger HDD for everything else. Most people don't write more than a couple of TB per year and the SSD would be obsolete long before it came near the TBW limit, which was usually conservative anyway. There was all sorts of lore to do with over-provisioning and keeping unnecessary writes off the SSD. Probably too much was made of it at the time, and no one seems to worry these days. There were a few studies where SSDs were written to heavily over months, and they all easily exceeded the TBW limits.

HDDs have an annual failure rate, which the last time I looked, a couple of years back, was surprisingly high, 5% to 8%, for consumer grade drives, although much better for Enterprise drives.

I'm aware that surveillance HDDs are still sold, and I thought one of the reasons was write endurance. I've never had anything to do with surveillance systems. Also Enterprise drives of 20TB and over are sold. I assume it's because they offer a low cost per TB and the performance hit can be tolerated one way or another.

[bd139]

The main reason surveillance drives exist is that insurance companies demand surveillance systems and to keep costs down people demand cheap surveillance systems. So it's literally down to the lowest aggregate price. Doesn't matter if they even work or not, the box is ticked.

An installed 1TB disk in a surveillance system is around the 30 quid mark. I'm not sure I'd trust a 30 quid 1TB HDD myself...

[Specmaster]

All this debate about SSDs v HDDs and their lifespans etc is all interesting, but I however have to disagree slightly for as I said, my desktop PC is a 2011 vintage, running a AMD FX8350 CPU @4Ghz. It has had Windows XP, then Win 7 and now Win 10 64bit OSs on it and throughout and for the last 8 or 9 years it has had a Crucial 500GB 2.5" SATA 3 SSD as its main drive with storage drives HDDs of 1 x 2TB and 1 x 500GB HDD these drives have been in the PC for over 12 years with zero issues, and diagnostics software report no problems with any of the drives.

However, prior to that I had a Corsair 128GB SSD for the OS, which failed within 2 years and then a Vertex OCZ 240GB SSD which also failed within 2 years. The current Crucial SSD has clocked up 41,717 hours of daily usage and the software reports its temperature as being 29C, has 7,789 starts and has written over 45TB, and reports as being in optimum health, all very impressive, but those spinning rust discs have been installed for longer than the SSD, and they also report back to be in excellent health.

[AVGresponding]

As with anything in life, ymmv

ssd_ymmv.jpg

[bd139]

Not really. The trick is not to buy garbage SSDs

[tautech]

Not really. The trick is not to buy garbage SSDs

Yeah well in the early days of SSD's good ones were bloody expensive so to dip our toes in this new technology we had to limit our SSD budgets and continue to use spinning rust for our main data drives. Boot times were slashed !
With W7 we engaged Trim and even a couple of 60G OCZ drives here gave excellent service until W10 came along and they were no longer recognised by the install.
Now as they are cheap as chips it's a different story..... pun intended !

[Zenith]

For a few years I used a Samsung 60GB SSD and an HDD. It made a vast difference to boot and load times. I can't remember what it cost, but it wasn't cheap. Eventually it was possible to buy much better SSDs for a reasonable price. It was replaced with a Crucial MX500 500GB SSD.
The Samsung ls still used in a thin client which I play with sometimes. I took it out of its case and fitted it in place of the horrible Disk On Module 2GB thing it came with.

Ebuyer are offering a 128GB Patriot SSD for £10 and an Integral 480GB for £22. You can return things to them, unlike some. They'd do for a PC used for mucking about, or car diagnostics.

[tggzzz]

My HDDs have been powered on for >70k hours. Given they are off overnight, that corresponds to 12 years or so.

[Zenith]

I've found that after about 6 or 7 years calendar time, and probably 3 or 4 years power on time, there have been bigger, faster and quieter HDDs available at a reasonable price. There came a time when I found noise from a PC was extremely irritating, and that's why a 1TB Fujitsu had to be replaced before its time.

I've only had two HDDs fail. One was an IBM 20GB DeskStar (aka DeathStar), which was a notoriously unreliable model, and part of the reason IBM exited the HDD business. It failed just out of warranty. The other one was a 500GB HDD which came out of a set top box, and already had a few years power on time. It had about 6 years years power on time when it died.

[tggzzz]

When buying mine I looked to find which HDDs had fewest failures.

No doubt it has all changed in the meantime, not least because of the "new" way of increasing capacity by partially overwriting adjacent tracks. Presumably that is a poor-man's equivalent of multi-level signalling, but it does increase the failure rate.

[Zenith]

The failure rate figures weren't always that easy to access. Then some faults take time to show. The 20GB DeathStars weren't obviously naff from the off. And then capacities were increasing rapidly, so a model wouldn't be on sale for more than a couple of years.

PRML techniques were being used from before 2000, as the bits became too densely packed to read by previous means. That was when 40GB would be a big drive. They must be reaching the limits of what can be done with helium filled drives and shingled recording, but that's been said before. The speed of the interface must be a problem for really big drives, 20TB or so.

This system boots from a 256GB SSD and has a 3TB Toshiba HDD, which is convenient for storing a lot of stuff in a disorganised way that doesn't need fast access. I suppose I could get away with a 2TB NVME SSD and be less slack, but there's no pressing need. It's backed up regularly to external HDDs. The other PC has a 1TB NVME SSD and a 500GB SATA SSD for odds and ends.

I surmise HDDs will be around for a few years yet, as cost effective and good enough for a lot of applications, such as backup. It beats me why new 1TB HDDs are still a thing. They are about £50 new, apart from the WD Black, which is £96, putting it firmly in premium brand 1TB SATA SSD territory.

[tggzzz]

The one that appears to be problematic is shingled magnetic recording. It was introduced in 2014.

Some manufacturers appear to have been economical with the actualité about which of their HDDs used SMR.

[bd139]

This Apple thing has random soldered on chips. I expect them to outlast the rest of the machine.

The PCs in ownership have a Samsung 990 Pro, Samsung 980 Pro and WD SN850X, all 1TB. Your stuff is on them. Cheaping out is a false economy.

[Zenith]

You still have to back them up. Samsung, Crucial and WD etc might be the premium brands, but they still have a definite failure rate. Anyway, there are reasons for backup other than SSD failure.

[bd139]

Yes

I back up onto 2x 1TB Samsung 870 EVO stored at different locations.

And onto Amazon S3.