How Long Do HDDs,SSDs and Flash Drives Last.

[etcetera]

I've been using Crucial's RAM for years. Touch wood, it's never yet let me down. And that's why I went for a Crucial MX500 SSD when I wanted a new primary drive a couple of years back.

Yah, it's "only" single-level cell technology. But from what I understand, enterprise always prefers these, 'cos they're more reliable.

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@bob466 :-

Take a look at HD Sentinel, Bob. It's a neat, easy-to-use GUI method for keeping on top of the most important S.M.A.R.T stats for your drives. It supports HDDs, SSDs, along with the newest NVMe technology.

https://www.hdsentinel.com/

Create a dedicated directory for it, anywhere you like, and just unzip the tarball into it. This makes it portable; just click on the HDSentinelGUI binary, and it'll fire straight up....

As far as SSD 'maintenance' goes, I'm rigorous about T.R.I.Mming the things; I don't have it set-up to auto-run in the background all the time, I prefer to run the thing manually, once a week.....regular as clockwork. I have a cron notification set-up to remind me when it's "time for a T.R.I.M..!"

SSDs don't NEED 'trimming' all the time; once a week is fine. For normal, day-to-day usage, the inbuilt 'garbage collection' routines will keep 'em pretty much crud-free.

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@APTI :-



I'll agree about 'black' & 'blue'; had both of those myself. Green.....I always understood these are what they call 'Eco' drives (in other words, they constantly 'power-down' at every opportunity, so are that bit slower at reading data.....'cos they have to spin-up all the time before getting to work).

As for 'Red'; I always understood these are enterprise-quality drives?

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@etcetera :-



BackBlaze have for years been publishing annual reliabilty reports. They've been trialling SSDs for about 5-6 years so far, and been reporting on them for the last 3 years. They came to the conclusion last year that SSDs have now achieved 'parity' with HDDS in terms of price, reliability and general longevity...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...es-of-13-ssd-models-going-back-up-to-4-years/

They ARE frank about admitting that 4 years worth of data is nowhere NEAR enough to start making accurate, long-term predictions for drive failures & behaviour; for that, they normally like at least 12-15 yrs worth of data to work with.


Mike.

Well, there we go.
I think they are more reliable than HDDs, clearly. Their failure method is different, you have to think about the TBW rating, or now the PTB (PetaBytes Written) figure. They got some which offer 2.4PB (case in point, Samsung 990 Pro 4TB) and soon 4.8PB. And that's the conservative figure. Usually they work well beyond that. Petabytes. I don't even do incremental backups, I just clone the entire disk.

What the video doesn't mention is the enormous speed differential. After you use a fast SSD, you will never want to seat in front of any HDD. Such as when your boot time goes from 4 minutes to 19 seconds. That's not even the fastest. Or less, if the SSDs are RAID-ed. They are so fast that it's easier to completely shutdown the machine versus putting it to sleep.

Linux runs even faster on them than Win10.

The latest-greatest Samsungs and Intel offer speeds around 8000-10,000 Mbs/second.
A plain-jane 2.5" laptop HDD, rated for 5400 rpms or such is only 80 Mbs. It is an increase in speed of 2 orders of magnitude. A 7200 RPMs HDD is faster but not by much. Even the fastest HDD which is Seagate Cheetah 15.5K RPMs is still around 100Mbs IIRC.

The whole reliability issue is moot. Stick dual SSDs in your machine (machines like Dell 7770 come with 4x2280 slots) and clone the OS. If your primary disk fails, just boot off the clone. The SSDs are the size of a chewing gum stick. You can clone them once a week and still have them function for the next decade or two, well beyond their obsolescence.

The HDD "spinning rust" era is gone much like the CRT era. And even large data centers are slowly catching up. As they disks slowly die, one by one, they will be replaced by the much faster and more reliable SSDs.
Eventually nobody will even make HDDs. They will join the CRT monitor and VHS tapes.
Who wants to run an Oracle database off a slow HDD? Access times mean everything.

 

[etcetera]

My previous machine was this Sun workstation, 4x3.5" HDDs.. The fastest HDD one could get, enterprise-grade.

I encrypted the machine with VeraCrypt, the whole filesystem.

Then I thought, these HDDs are old, I don't know the runtime on them. So I cloned the boot disk to another disk.

Eventually I had the boot disk fail, that familiar grinding noise they make. I thought, no problem, I will just boot off the clone I just made, so wisely.

I tried and couldn't get it to boot. Turns out that VeraCrypt protects the info and if it detects it has been cloned, it doesn't boot. It encrypts the disk using some kind of disk ID tied to the encryption. You can create a perfect clone and it won't work. It's pretty smart. Took me 3 days to recover the data and I almost lost all data I had. Everything I had was encrypted and the main boot disk failed. I did end up recover it off the clone disk but it wasn't obvious at all how to do that.
I will never trust the old spinning rust after that.
I get that SSDs also fail, so cloning the OS and testing the backup is essential.

 

[bob466]

@bob466 :-

Take a look at HD Sentinel, Bob. It's a neat, easy-to-use GUI method for keeping on top of the most important S.M.A.R.T stats for your drives. It supports HDDs, SSDs, along with the newest NVMe technology.

​

Mike.

Thanks Mike, but I already have a tool for that...GSmartControl works just fine....

I also have Trim set to daily and will run the command every now and then too and SSD is optimised to run more efficiently...fingers crossed.

 

[bob466]

Do they still use 'windoze only' Magician ?

Yes they do but who needs it with linux GSmartControl tool.

 

[APTI]

Well, there we go.
I think they are more reliable than HDDs, clearly. Their failure method is different, you have to think about the TBW rating, or now the PTB (PetaBytes Written) figure. They got some which offer 2.4PB (case in point, Samsung 990 Pro 4TB) and soon 4.8PB. And that's the conservative figure. Usually they work well beyond that. Petabytes. I don't even do incremental backups, I just clone the entire disk.

What the video doesn't mention is the enormous speed differential. After you use a fast SSD, you will never want to seat in front of any HDD. Such as when your boot time goes from 4 minutes to 19 seconds. That's not even the fastest. Or less, if the SSDs are RAID-ed. They are so fast that it's easier to completely shutdown the machine versus putting it to sleep.

Linux runs even faster on them than Win10.

The latest-greatest Samsungs and Intel offer speeds around 8000-10,000 Mbs/second.
A plain-jane 2.5" laptop HDD, rated for 5400 rpms or such is only 80 Mbs. It is an increase in speed of 2 orders of magnitude. A 7200 RPMs HDD is faster but not by much. Even the fastest HDD which is Seagate Cheetah 15.5K RPMs is still around 100Mbs IIRC.

The whole reliability issue is moot. Stick dual SSDs in your machine (machines like Dell 7770 come with 4x2280 slots) and clone the OS. If your primary disk fails, just boot off the clone. The SSDs are the size of a chewing gum stick. You can clone them once a week and still have them function for the next decade or two, well beyond their obsolescence.

The HDD "spinning rust" era is gone much like the CRT era. And even large data centers are slowly catching up. As they disks slowly die, one by one, they will be replaced by the much faster and more reliable SSDs.
Eventually nobody will even make HDDs. They will join the CRT monitor and VHS tapes.
Who wants to run an Oracle database off a slow HDD? Access times mean everything.

Everything there is so true. however you are mixing up an actual SSD which is the same physical size as a laptop HDD and the M.2 chip which does the same thing and the same people that tell you that the tablet has 64G of ROM for you to store stuff on, are calling the M.2 an SSD. Which it is in the broadest sense of the term. I like the M.2 also though I like them over SSD

 

[ML_113]

What was the model and the size? They make a million. The latest-greatest have impressive TBW warranty.

Evo 840 - too old , I don't remember the price but it was at least double the price of the competitors'.
I tried to use trim (using fstab) - don't know whether it worked or not - searching the net they talked about Magician. Well Magician is for Windows only.
Recently some Linux installs refused to pass it so I took it out, put it into my unused enclosure to use it as a spare disk.
Well, 120G, you can purchase a USB for 10$ nowadays.
I don't expect a SSD to last forever but some businesses are particularly cunning. Why MAC and Windows only and no Linux ?
The SSD is not the only product I had problem with.

 

[ML_113]

For those who still owned old but reliable HDD , don't discard them.
Run browsers or better still, the whole OS in RAM can make the old clunkers very fast.

 

[etcetera]

Everything there is so true. however you are mixing up an actual SSD which is the same physical size as a laptop HDD and the M.2 chip which does the same thing and the same people that tell you that the tablet has 64G of ROM for you to store stuff on, are calling the M.2 an SSD. Which it is in the broadest sense of the term. I like the M.2 also though I like them over SSD

It's the confusing Samsung naming convention. Samsung has 860 EVO which comes in two different formats. The older 2.5" size to be compatible with laptops which had the mechanical 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm rotating disks.
And the newer M.2 but they are exactly the same and the 2.5" case is almost empty. They could stuff a lot of SSD in there. Which they do, with their 8TB QVO 2.5". It's the highest capacity SSD and not surprisingly, it's only SATAIII. There is no PCIe variant.
Both are solid state drives. There are no moving parts.

The next generation of SSD is the PCIe/NVME which is also the size of M.2 860 namely 22x80mm so it's called 2280 but it's about 8 times faster. I have both. You really feel it when you from a 80Mbs HDD to a 1000Mbs SSD but don't really feel the difference between a 1000Mbs SSD and a 7000 Mbs PCIe 2280 SSD.
The main physical difference between are "keys", PCIE has just the M-key while the SATAIII variant has the B+M keys. Meaning 2280 SATAIII won't fit into the PCIe 2280 slot and vice-versa.

What is M.2? Keys and Sockets Explained

An M.2 SSD is “keyed” to prevent insertion of a card connector (male) to an incompatible socket (female) on the host. The M.2 specification identifies 12 key IDs on the module card and socket interface but M.2 SSDs typically use three common keys: B, M, and B+M

www.atpinc.com

 

[etcetera]

Evo 840 - too old , I don't remember the price but it was at least double the price of the competitors'.
I tried to use trim (using fstab) - don't know whether it worked or not - searching the net they talked about Magician. Well Magician is for Windows only.
Recently some Linux installs refused to pass it so I took it out, put it into my unused enclosure to use it as a spare disk.
Well, 120G, you can purchase a USB for 10$ nowadays.
I don't expect a SSD to last forever but some businesses are particularly cunning. Why MAC and Windows only and no Linux ?
The SSD is not the only product I had problem with.

Wow, 840 is pretty old. I heard some questionable feedback about them. Like they fail. My oldest SSD I ever used was a 1TB 850 2.5" SATAIII. Paid $300 for the 1TB version when it came out. It worked nicely mostly with win10 but also did some kind of multiboot in it. Probably Fedora.

I ran a multitude of 860, 860 and 870 in the 2.5" format, plus 850, 851, 860, 870, 880 Plus and Pro in the M.2 format, all with zero issues. Hit a private sale where a guy unloaded a bunch of mildly used Samsung 880 Pros, all 2TB, for $50 each. They seem faster than the 870 PLUS but also run a bit hotter. I need to get better heat sinks. There is no way to get more speed without heat and there is speed throttling in effect when it overheats.

I think Toshiba is also pretty solid.