The Technology Thread

So, SSD drives.

I’m glad they are starting to get a little bigger in the TB range. but when will the price match the size? I’d love a 16TB SSD at $300s :).

I’d ditch all my regular drives in a heart beat. they are faster and generally considered more reliable :).

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I find 2 TB of SSD is enough for games and stuff but my 12 TB Synology NAS full of HDDs is what I use for serious storage.

Can never have enough backup storage, especially in a fault tolerant array

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I remember how pleased I was when I got a PC that had a whole megabyte of storage space. Things have changed just a little since those days.

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I didn’t get an internal hard drive unil 1991, before that it was all diskettes baby!

*and some cassettes

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I have no nostalgia for the A Drive. :slight_smile:

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Falling costs for larger SSDs is certainly welcome, but I’m happy with smaller sizes; one for the boot drive and maybe one for games is all I want. For general storage I still prefer mechanical drives, since I use backup disks that sometimes sit untouched for years, and I’ve yet to find solid information about exactly how long SSDs will hold their data without power.

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Buy lots of cheap spinning drives and RAID them together for big speeds.

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SSDs are awesome. The chip shortage is gonna make buying them suck for a while but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before (anyone remember when the cost of RAM flew into low Earth orbit after a manufacturing plant fire?).

There’ll always be a home in my, er, home for platter HDDs, though. RAID arrays and NAS truly benefit from the cost-to-storage ratio.

My daily box sports an M.2 for operating system, an SSD for media (where the reads will always exceed the writes), and then three platter WD Blacks because they’re workhorses and provide more storage than I’ll ever need for the lifetime of the build.

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I store everything on an array of 5 1/4" floppy disk drives the size of a Greyhound bus. The storage capacity is 12 gigabytes.

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Have SSD’s gotten a lot more reliable lately? I’ve had a few thumb drives fail on me.

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Good question. I assume there are ongoing incremental reliability improvements, but I don’t know the details. I’ve not yet had an SSD or thumb drive fail, at least not due to reaching the write cycle limit. I’ve had a handful of SSDs with over 60,000 power-on hours and they’re still trucking.

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I was under the imprssion that SSD’s where generally more reliable than Hard drives?

Granted, I’ve never had a hard drive really fail on me in 30 years. but SSD’s are also faster than standard drives, so in that case I find them more useful.

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It depends on how you measure reliability. Hard disks have delicate moving parts that are very sensitive to impact and will absolutely eventually fail, but if they’re treated gently they can last decades. SSDs fix both those issues, but their memory cells have a fixed number of write cycles before they become unwritable (typically millions of cycles, so most of us will never hit that limit), and if disconnected from power long enough they will lose all their data. The best info I’ve found so far suggests 2-3 years on the shelf before this happens, but I haven’t yet found concrete numbers about it.

So I’d say reliability is a wash. Both have strong benefits and both have an Achilles heel.

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