Solid state drives

[floridaorange]

Re: Solid state drives

In your opinion, do you think these thinks can help prevent Hard Drive failure? I am on my 3rd hard drive on this macbook (white 2007 model).

[ganjamo]

Re: Solid state drives

Sadly nothing can prevent that.
HDs tend to fail because of physical damage and overheating. SSDs do not suffer from neither of those since its just flash memory stuck together and have no moving parts that cause friction. However, they are not bulletproof, some fail just like RAM memory fails and recovering data is not as easy as it is on a HD.

So...use time machine regularly and you will be fine.

Plus put one of this babies on your Macbook and you wont need a new computer for a while.

[demonAfro]

Re: Solid state drives

Portman Wills, friend of the company and generally awesome guy, has a far scarier tale to tell. He got infected with the SSD religion based on my original 2009 blog post, and he went all in. He purchased eight SSDs over the last two years … and all of them failed. The tale of the tape is frankly a little terrifying:

Super Talent 32 GB SSD, failed after 137 days
OCZ Vertex 1 250 GB SSD, failed after 512 days
G.Skill 64 GB SSD, failed after 251 days
G.Skill 64 GB SSD, failed after 276 days
Crucial 64 GB SSD, failed after 350 days
OCZ Agility 60 GB SSD, failed after 72 days
Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, failed after 15 days
Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, failed after 206 days

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

[floridaorange]

Re: Solid state drives

Sadly nothing can prevent that.
HDs tend to fail because of physical damage and overheating. SSDs do not suffer from neither of those since its just flash memory stuck together and have no moving parts that cause friction. However, they are not bulletproof, some fail just like RAM memory fails and recovering data is not as easy as it is on a HD.

So...use time machine regularly and you will be fine.

Plus put one of this babies on your Macbook and you wont need a new computer for a while.

Very cool, and informative and thanks ganjamo for the info.

With regard to overheating, I notice that when I have my computer on certain surfaces the fan tends to come on more often. Is there any truth to that? Or am I imagining it? How do you prevent overheating?

[thebanned1]

Re: Solid state drives

this might help m8, good article on it

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Cases-How-to-Avoid-Overheating/142/1

edit : sorry just realised u had a macbook oops

[ganjamo]

Re: Solid state drives

floridaorange, theres a cool widget called iStat that shows you a lot of your macbooks info. You can see there the temps and the fan speed. If you use your laptop in a surface thats uneven such as in bed the computer cant clear hot air very efficiently and it might have to turn the speed up on the fans to be OK. Thats the CPU fan though. On Macbooks and in most other laptops HDs does not have fans.

[i!!ustrious]

Re: Solid state drives

worth it forreal

[floridaorange]

Re: Solid state drives

floridaorange, theres a cool widget called iStat that shows you a lot of your macbooks info. You can see there the temps and the fan speed. If you use your laptop in a surface thats uneven such as in bed the computer cant clear hot air very efficiently and it might have to turn the speed up on the fans to be OK. Thats the CPU fan though. On Macbooks and in most other laptops HDs does not have fans.

Just installed it, thanks for the recommendation!!

[thebanned1]

Re: Solid state drives

just reading up on these as considering getting one http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531 << this article tells u how they work and stuff, reading it ( on page 10 now ) has made me think if its a worthy buy considering how i use my boot drive today

[thebanned1]

Re: Solid state drives

definitely not so sure about these now... i think they are a bit of a security risk if you happen to store personal info on your hard drive.. reading this article says that you can typically over write a cell 10000 times before those cells become damaged which is fair enough to the average user but if like me you typically erase personal data with secure deletion programs then if you take the gutmann method ( 35 passes ) typically on ssd's you could over write them just 285 times before the cells damage beyond repair ( i could be wrong here ) which in my eyes puts me off buying one especially when price is to be considered here also.

[PROG]

Re: Solid state drives

^good read. maybe a SSD would be better of for installing OS only. a small 20-30 gig

[TomTom]

Re: Solid state drives

Got myself a Vertex 3 120 GB SSD last week and I luv it! Windows boot till everything is ready for me is about 20 seconds and shutting down is done in 5 lol. When I copy files inbetween the drive and the amount is below 1 GB, I barely see the copy progress window coming up before it's done. 500MB write speed ftw! Also mirroring my former 250GB C partition to the 120 GB SSD worked like a charme so I am very happy with the new investment.

[thebanned1]

Re: Solid state drives

Got myself a Vertex 3 120 GB SSD last week and I luv it! Windows boot till everything is ready for me is about 20 seconds and shutting down is done in 5 lol. When I copy files inbetween the drive and the amount is below 1 GB, I barely see the copy progress window coming up before it's done. 500MB write speed ftw! Also mirroring my former 250GB C partition to the 120 GB SSD worked like a charme so I am very happy with the new investment.

i,m the opposite side of the scale, got one yesterday, osz solid 3 120 GB, installed it @ 11 AM and was still trying to sort out performance issues @ 12:30 AM, its all enable this, disable this, do this do that... finally roughly about and hour ago i,ve got it to a state where i,m happy ( almost ) but i,ve yet to to put it under stress, i,m currently sitting with 27 GB of stuff on it and absolutely shitting myself about putting more on it.... so far i,ve re routed temp and tmp files, google chrome cache, internet explorer cache/temp folders to other hard drives and that has helped a lot, freezes quite a lot actually and aint really good @ multi tasking ( i.e. listening to music on media player while installing windows updates... yea i know pretty simple eh ? )

we all know about avoiding jmicrom controllers well i'd also like to add sandforce controllers to that list, really pissed off with it to be honest, in 2 minds about sending it back... i should of got the intel one @ the same price but this was at least double the write and read speeds so i though what the hell, big mistake... this is my most disturbed computer experience by far YET

[thebanned1]

Re: Solid state drives

12:30 AM as in 13 n a half hours later btw

[TomTom]

Re: Solid state drives