SSDs instead of hard drives

[bungeejumper]

I'm currently scouting around for a replacement desktop that will be able to take Windows 11 when the support for 10 expires in two years' time. Sadly, my nine year old Dell Inspiron won't be supported. Pity, it's good enough for my modest needs. Still, that's progress.

I seem to be seeing a lot of new machines that incorporate 500gb of SSD but don't have a hard drive at all. Having heard horror stories about SSDs destroying themselves without warning, this is a matter of concern to me. Will there normally be a spare SATA connection inside the case for a backup hard drive, or might I have to rely on an external drive via USB?

TIA

BJ

[Infrasonic]

Depending on the motherboard there's usually 3/4 or more SATA sockets. SSD provision might also include M.2 slots for NVMe SSD's which are faster than SATA.

Don't rely on the retail websites for accurate tech specs, Amazon, PC World, Argos et al often get them wrong. Go to the OEM site to check for accurate specs.

An easy option with a desktop is once you have set up your SSD on a new Windows machine clone it to either another SSD or HDD so that in the event of a complete failure of your C drive SSD you can boot into the clone. I use a free app called EasyBCD which is basically a GUI for BCDedit in Windows.

Either keep the clone as a base state initial install or boot into it now and again to keep it updated (licensing is fine, you're still only running once instance of Windows). Bear in mind updates for an occasional use drive will take ages, the last thing you want in an emergency use situation is it being negated by a feature update kicking off - what I did was turn off the updates.
You could pull the ethernet or turn off the wifi connection first before booting into the clone as another way of controlling that side of things.

As well as the clone you should have a full + differential / incremental scheduled backup routine in place, so you can restore your latest backups to any new drive in the event of a failure or corruption of your existing install..https://blog.macrium.com/techie-tuesday ... 2a9c30a905

[Breelander]

...I seem to be seeing a lot of new machines that incorporate 500gb of SSD but don't have a hard drive at all. Having heard horror stories about SSDs destroying themselves without warning, this is a matter of concern to me.

It was a matter of concern to me as well, when I got my first SSD (to replace a dying HDD in a laptop). Then I read this and stopped worrying.....

I never thought this whole tech journalism gig would turn me into a mass murderer. Yet here I am, with the blood of six SSDs on my hands, and that’s not even the half of it. You see, these were not crimes of passion or rage, nor were they products of accident. More than 18 months ago, I vowed to push all six drives to their bitter ends. I didn’t do so in the name of god or country or even self-defense, either. I did it just to watch them die.

Technically, I’m also a torturer—or at least an enhanced interrogator. Instead of offering a quick and painless death, I slowly squeezed out every last drop of life with a relentless stream of writes far more demanding than anything the SSDs would face in a typical PC. To make matters worse, I exploited their suffering by chronicling the entire process online.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210226184 ... -all-dead/

[GeoffF100]

It is a non-issue. SSDs are more reliable than hard drives, and you should be backing your files up anyway. One local back-up and a cloud back-up should be enough, but the more the merrier.

You do not have to junk you old machine, by the way. You could run Linux on it.

[U962]

I've had two SSD fails and no HDD fail.

One SSD gave me maybe 30 seconds of warning before it totally and completely failed. not readable by anything including linux.
The other one it's failure mode was that some directories and the files in them were inaccessible or scrambled but the computer continued to work as normal. In other words the failure was in a section which did not hold critical windows files. Indeed I have no idea until I tried to access these files how long the part failure had been ongoing.

You should always keep and regularly update backups.
All my backups are on HDD's and I keep lots as well as a full disk image(s) from Macrium's program. So in both the above failures it was a case of sigh loudly, count to 10, get a new drive from Ebuyer.com and sort out the re-imaging back and file back copying.

[mc2fool]

I seem to be seeing a lot of new machines that incorporate 500gb of SSD but don't have a hard drive at all. Having heard horror stories about SSDs destroying themselves without warning, this is a matter of concern to me.

It happened to me. The HDD on my (then) laptop failed and I replaced it with an SSD which died suddenly after just 11 months. I even wrote it up here. viewtopic.php?p=191283#p191283

Fortunately both times I had a recent (less than 1 day old) full+differential system backup, so it was just a matter (well, the faff) of replacing the duff drives and restoring the backup, and as I keep all my personal data synced up to "the cloud", the restored systems then syncing down the few things I'd changed in the hours since the backup.

Whether you have HDDs or SSDs failures can happen, so, as others have said, put your concern into making sure you have a good backup system.

[bungeejumper]

Thanks guys, I'm glad I've stirred it up a bit. And that I'm not the only one to fret, and that some folk here have experienced the meltdowns that others say don't often happen. And that there are solutions to all this. You've reassured me. Thanks!

Your point is well taken - have a backup system in place. My current backup is a portable USB HDD which gets updated whenever I remember to do it, which is about every three weeks, I guess. And an encrypted copy of whatever I'm currently working on, on the flash memory in my office drawer. (Shudder, cross my fingers.) I could do better, I know, with an internal HDD, which was my original point of entry about SATA connections.

So, thank you all again. But yeah, I'm a dinosaur and a non-techie, and I don't want to have to mess with registry settings and patch cables and stuff that won't work with Linux unless I re-sequence the discombobulator and adopt a multi-level access thingy and do a web search for every driver on my computer to make sure that it complies with the something-or-other protocol. Naah, I just want it to work, straight out of the box. That's one thing that Microsoft are reasonably good at. (They used to say the same thing about Apple. Do they still?)

And I still can't quite manage to trust the cloud with my most personal files. (Daughter had hers hacked, on an Apple.) But hey, I'm going off topic again. So what's new?

BJ

[mc2fool]

Thanks guys, I'm glad I've stirred it up a bit. And that I'm not the only one to fret, and that some folk here have experienced the meltdowns that others say don't often happen. And that there are solutions to all this. You've reassured me. Thanks!

Your point is well taken - have a backup system in place. My current backup is a portable USB HDD which gets updated whenever I remember to do it, which is about every three weeks, I guess. And an encrypted copy of whatever I'm currently working on, on the flash memory in my office drawer. (Shudder, cross my fingers.) I could do better, I know, with an internal HDD, which was my original point of entry about SATA connections.

So, thank you all again. But yeah, I'm a dinosaur and a non-techie, and I don't want to have to mess with registry settings and patch cables and stuff that won't work with Linux unless I re-sequence the discombobulator and adopt a multi-level access thingy and do a web search for every driver on my computer to make sure that it complies with the something-or-other protocol. Naah, I just want it to work, straight out of the box. That's one thing that Microsoft are reasonably good at. (They used to say the same thing about Apple. Do they still?)

And I still can't quite manage to trust the cloud with my most personal files. (Daughter had hers hacked, on an Apple.) But hey, I'm going off topic again. So what's new?

BJ

Ok, well, in order of your mentions, and all IMHO of course, "whenever I remember", indeed, anything that requires you to actually do something, just isn't good enough, an internal HDD won't protect you against your PC or house catching fire or some similar disaster, and your distrust of the cloud is a valid concern but unwarranted as a total one.

I've described what I do elsewhere but let me run through it here again. You may think it's overkill but better that than losing stuff!

Firstly, I keep all of my personal data "in the cloud" using Google Drive (15GB free) for stuff that I wouldn't care if it gets compromised and http://www.Sync.com (5GB free) for stuff that I would. Sync provides what's called zero knowledge end to end encryption, which means that your files get encrypted on the fly by your PC as they upload, get stored that way at Sync.com, and get decrypted on the fly by your PC when they're downloaded. Only your PC(s) have the encryption keys, so not even Sync.com can decrypt them, so even if Sync gets hacked and your data is stolen it's still secure.

Keeping my personal stuff in the cloud with those systems has a number of advantages.

• First and foremost, it's off-site backup, so even if the house burns down and/or I lose all my other backups my data is saved and available to me.
• Secondly, it's totally automatic, whenever I create/edit a file it automatically gets synced up to the cloud storage, in very short order if I'm connected to the internet and as soon as I do connect if I'm not.
• Thirdly, both of those services provide deleted file recovery and versioning, meaning that they keep the versions of files synced up to them (both advertise 30 days worth, my experience is that it's usually a lot more). That means that if after a few hours or days of doing many edits to a file you decide you've just messed it up, you can just roll back to the last "good" version you had. Versioning also lets you recover from a ransomware attack.
• Fourthly, the syncing works across devices so, if, like me, you have a desktop and a laptop it means you can switch between the two. Anything created/edited on the desktop gets automatically upsynced to the cloud and straight away (if connected of course) downsynced to the laptop, and vice versa. So, after a brief moment, all of my personal files are on both, and, in fact, that means I have at any moment three copies of it all, one on each of the local drives of my PCs and one in the cloud. (I also have a select few files automatically upsynced to my Android phone.)

Setting up both is easy, the only change to your working habits needed is to move all of your folders & files into the Google Drive and Sync folders that they create on your local drive.

Secondly, both my desktop and laptop have scheduled automatic daily image & differential Macrium Reflect backups to a NAS drive on my LAN. I have a Buffalo LS220D, which was a cheap (£145 six years ago) and pretty basic one and I don't think is available any more but does the job. Mine has two 1TB HDDs in it which I configured as RAID 1, meaning that the two mirror each other. So, if one goes belly up (as indeed, one did about a year ago) everything is still on the other and the box keeps working off of the one, until you replace the duff one, at which point it mirrors the existing one to the new one and then carries on with the two as before. I keep two weeks worth of full system backups for each PC on the NAS drive.

As I said upthread, when the HDD and later the SSD on my laptop went belly up, after replacing each I simply restored the last backup from my NAS to the replacement drive, and then let Google Drive and Sync.com sync down the few things I'd changed in the hours since the backup.

And, as if that's all not enough ... I also have Windows File History backups of my personal data from both PCs to a USB flash drive stuck in the back of my router, on an it's easy, it's automatic, and you can't have too many backups basis. (It's also makes it quick and easy to restore a previous version of a file directly from Windows.)

And I have a 2TB USB HDD attached to the NAS which the NAS does automatic weekly backups of the backups on the NAS to(!), keeping three weeks worth. The purpose of that is to let me recover the whole PC(s) from a ransomware attack, as those generally lock up everything they can see from the infected PC, but that drive is set up to be read-only from the LAN so won't be affected.

Hope that's given you some food for thought at least, and I definitely encourage you to use cloud storage as an immediate and automatic backup system for your personal files, and to consider a method of full system backups.

[BT63]

In my experience, SSDs are generally a bit less reliable than HDDs but over many years I've come to the conclusion that Samsung's products are more reliable than other brands. I have a very early 120GB Samsung SSD, I think from about 2008, which is still in full working order, having gone many multiples of write/rewrite cycles past its design life.
I also came to the conclusion that Western Digital HDDs were among the most reliable - I have one pre-2010 Western Digital that still runs fine after doing a hundred thousand hours of service.
Seagate HDDs have been the least reliable - I've had a lot of those fail.

So my most important computers have Samsung SSDs and auto-back up any new or modified files regularly (half hourly) to Western Digital external HDDs and the HDD is swapped every few weeks so I have a backup that isn't connected to the computer.
For laptops, where an external HDD for backup isn't practical we have them back up new/modified files half hourly to a good quality SD/micro SD.

SSDs make the computing experience much better than HDDs. Games in particular load faster and run smoother. Boot up takes about a third of the time, without the couple of minutes of sluggishness after bootup that HDDs also cause.

And regarding Windows 11, with some tweaks/bypasses/cheats/tricks it will run perfectly well on very old hardware (e.g. 15yr old Pentium dual core), and runs surprisingly well on such old machines as long as they have 8GB RAM and SSD and as long as they are only used for casual computing.

I moved over to Windows 11 when it came out a couple of years ago but after a year I went back to Windows 10 which I found was more stable, more compatible and required less keystrokes to get things done.

[Infrasonic]

In my experience, SSDs are generally a bit less reliable than HDDs but over many years I've come to the conclusion that Samsung's products are more reliable than other brands. I have a very early 120GB Samsung SSD, I think from about 2008, which is still in full working order, having gone many multiples of write/rewrite cycles past its design life.
...

Early SSD's were pretty much enterprise spec, DRAM cache, SLC NAND memory, super caps et al.
You can still get SSD's to that kind of spec but they cost a lot more...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8k_XIEhKWo

SSD update video focusing on SSD technologies, life expectancy, SLC cache, and DRAM vs DRAM-less SSDs. Or in other words, this video is about why some SSDs cost more than others, and the performance implications of getting a lower-cost drive.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:02 SSD Technologies
08:14 SLC Cache
11:48 DRAM-Less SSDs
13:39 Wrap

[UncleEbenezer]

In the early days of SSDs, it was widely reported that they had a limited number of read-write cycles. I think that's changed.

Anecdote. Once upon a time (long before there was such a thing as raspberry pi), I had a Nokia N900 which, as a software developer, I used as a platform for test-driving applications such as web servers and services on ARM. Logged into it over wifi from my desktop so as to have a proper keyboard, mouse and screen. But software development with a GNU environment is *very* intensive in read/writes (creates thousands of temporary intermediate files even in a short simple job - maybe hundreds of thousands in a big build - and because development is iterative there are lots of builds. So rather than use the phone's SSD for that, I NFS-mounted a virtual partition from the desktop's hard drive. That of course slowed the process, but spared the SSD.

The phone died all-too-soon of something completely unrelated. I might as well not have bothered.

[servodude]

In the early days of SSDs, it was widely reported that they had a limited number of read-write cycles. I think that's changed.

Anecdote. Once upon a time (long before there was such a thing as raspberry pi), I had a Nokia N900 which, as a software developer, I used as a platform for test-driving applications such as web servers and services on ARM. Logged into it over wifi from my desktop so as to have a proper keyboard, mouse and screen. But software development with a GNU environment is *very* intensive in read/writes (creates thousands of temporary intermediate files even in a short simple job - maybe hundreds of thousands in a big build - and because development is iterative there are lots of builds. So rather than use the phone's SSD for that, I NFS-mounted a virtual partition from the desktop's hard drive. That of course slowed the process, but spared the SSD.

The phone died all-too-soon of something completely unrelated. I might as well not have bothered.

Erase/Write cycles are limited on flash media of any type; reading is not an issue.
I would expect 100k or so though which should be fine for most devices' lifespans if you haven't done anything risky (like use dedicated pages for storing allocation info)

[GoSeigen]

In the early days of SSDs, it was widely reported that they had a limited number of read-write cycles. I think that's changed.

Anecdote. Once upon a time (long before there was such a thing as raspberry pi), I had a Nokia N900 which, as a software developer, I used as a platform for test-driving applications such as web servers and services on ARM. Logged into it over wifi from my desktop so as to have a proper keyboard, mouse and screen. But software development with a GNU environment is *very* intensive in read/writes (creates thousands of temporary intermediate files even in a short simple job - maybe hundreds of thousands in a big build - and because development is iterative there are lots of builds. So rather than use the phone's SSD for that, I NFS-mounted a virtual partition from the desktop's hard drive. That of course slowed the process, but spared the SSD.

The phone died all-too-soon of something completely unrelated. I might as well not have bothered.

make is evil!

GS

[jaizan]

My only SSD failure ever was on a Crucial SSD, years ago.

I then did some searches on Amazon reviews in UK, US and Germany and concluded that Samsung was the most reliable SSD brand.
I've bought several Samsung SSDs since and none have failed.

There are 4 inside my current PC.
2 x Samsung m.2 SSDs, one for the OS & one for data
1 x Samsung SATA drive for internal backup of data (using Robocopy)
1 x Samsung SATA that's not doing much now.

I believe the life is much longer if you keep the drive below 90% capacity, as it spends less time moving data around.

I also suspect the reliability isn't that much different to old fashioned hard drives.

Finally, if you're buying a new desktop, they should at least tell you what spec it is, including the motherboard type. That should specify how many SATA ports you have. Although, if fitting m.2 drives, this can take up a few PCIE lanes & disable some of the SATA connectors. [My terminology might not be totally correct here, but I'm sure you get the idea]

[Breelander]

My only SSD failure ever was on a Crucial SSD, years ago.

I then did some searches on Amazon reviews in UK, US and Germany and concluded that Samsung was the most reliable SSD brand.
I've bought several Samsung SSDs since and none have failed.

I've switched almost all my older laptops over to SSDs now, all have been made by Samsung, though some have been bought as used SSDs from CeX. All have been reliable.

I believe the life is much longer if you keep the drive below 90% capacity, as it spends less time moving data around.

The data in an SSD is not written contiguously, it could be written anywhere. There are wear levelling algorithms in the SSD's internal controller that work best when there's at least 10% free space on the SSD. For those that feel compelled to always fill their drives, you can set aside an unallocated part of the SSD to ensure there's always some free cells left unused. This is known as Over Provisioning.

I also suspect the reliability isn't that much different to old fashioned hard drives.

The lifespan of an SSD is inversely proportional to the number of bits stored in each cell, because the more bits to a cell, the more writes will be needed to change one bit. Enterprise quality SSDs have a single bit per cell (SLC) or slightly cheaper ones are 2 bits (TLC). Consumer grade SSDs are usually 3 bits per cell (MLC) but some really cheap ones are 4 bits (QLC). Mine are all MLC, and according to their manufacturer's specs they can take more writes than I am likely to make in my remaining lifetime

[MrFoolish]

The lifespan of an SSD is inversely proportional to the number of bits stored in each cell, because the more bits to a cell, the more writes will be needed to change one bit.

I would have thought the issue with multi-level cells is the compromised signal-to-noise ratio on reading and the likelihood of getting corruption as the stored voltage levels deviate from the ideal over time.

[Gerry557]

I'm currently scouting around for a replacement desktop that will be able to take Windows 11 when the support for 10 expires in two years' time. Sadly, my nine year old Dell Inspiron won't be supported. Pity, it's good enough for my modest needs. Still, that's progress.

I seem to be seeing a lot of new machines that incorporate 500gb of SSD but don't have a hard drive at all. Having heard horror stories about SSDs destroying themselves without warning, this is a matter of concern to me. Will there normally be a spare SATA connection inside the case for a backup hard drive, or might I have to rely on an external drive via USB?

TIA

BJ

It makes sense to have a back up as even a hard drive can fail. Assume it will and act accordingly. You could stick two ssds in and mirror them.

[Infrasonic]

https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/03/10/b ... 20expected.

Cloud storage provider Backblaze has found its SSD annual failure rate was 0.98 percent compared to 1.64 percent for disk drives, a difference of 0.66 percentage points. It also noted that SSD manufacturers’ SMART stats were not so smart.

Backblaze stores customers’ backup and general storage data in its cloud datacenters. These are composed of disk drive pods and servers that use SSD boot drives. It has published disk drive annual failure rate statistics for some years and has now accumulated enough SSD data to publish SSD AFR numbers for the first time.

The surprise is that SSDs are not much more reliable than disk drives with their mechanical components – the moving read:write heads and spinning platters. Here is its SSD data table:

Cont.

[Infrasonic]

I'd wager many SSD failures are actually component failure issues rather than NAND write issues per se.

The recent WD/Sandisk external USB SSD issues were traced by a specialist data recovery firm to the soldering/glue used on certain components failing on the PCB leading to total data loss. They noted later iterations had more robust solutions so it must have been known about, despite no warnings from WD... Several class action court cases are currently pending over that one...

[jaizan]

The recent WD/Sandisk external USB SSD issues were traced by a specialist data recovery firm to the soldering/glue used on certain components failing on the PCB leading to total data loss. They noted later iterations had more robust solutions so it must have been known about, despite no warnings from WD... Several class action court cases are currently pending over that one...

My most recent failures of storage devices are:
1 WD external hard drive (mechanical). This spends most of it's time locked in a safe and on about it's third outing, it failed. Whilst they were sorting out the warranty claim, I purchased a Toshiba external drive. Never had one of those fail.

2 Sandisk micro SD card.

I don't buy WD/Sandisk products any more.