Anyone Up On SSD Drives?

[player]

I have to replace my 250 gig SSD drive ASAP. My current drive may or may not be flaky, but I have had some glitches. I also need more capacity, so I will go with a 480-512 gig drive.

I have been wading through reviews and specs, so I thought I would consult here. There seems to be a lot of rapid changes in the technology...

Anyone current and knowledgeable? What drive(s) should I look at / do you recommend?

 

[schwarzmuller]

SSD's tend to fail very fast compared to a normal harddrive. Old school is reliable but slow.
luckaly there is a compromise these days. You can get ssd speed with the reliability of a rotational hard drive if you buy a hybrid drive.
in my opinion that's the best choice.

 

[SignMeUpGraphics]

Samsung 850 Pro series have a 10 year warranty if you're looking for longevity, otherwise a good deal are the Sandisk Ultra II range. You can pick up a 480 or 960GB drives cheaply these days.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

Say no to hybrid drives for our industry as there is very little benefit. Also SSDs don't wear out fast at all, I have a 60gb ssd I bought in 2010 that has been used as a scratch drive for the last 3 years and its still going strong with only minimal performance loss (5%) and 100% space availability with no errors.

That being said the new Samsung 850 drives are amazing for the price, the new Intel's are the best for the buck. Look in to getting a pcie interface card for the most speed in both file transfer and I/Os.

 

[Brink]

The Samsung 850 PRO is about the fastest large drive you can get right now.

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/ and http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Samsung-850-Pro-512GB/Rating/3478

Redundancy is key, make backups to hard disk regularly. No matter how good the warranty, they will only replace your defective drive, not get back your missing data.

 

[ChrisN]

SSD's lack of longevity is mostly a myth. TechReport.com did a long-term torture test of 5 different SSDs. If you are curious, the final article is here: http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead The end result was that all the SSDs surpassed their official endurace specifications by writing hundreds of terabytes of data, with some even writing into the petabyte range. A normal user will not write near that much data, so there is no reason to be scared of the lifetime of an SSD. Even hard drives have lifetimes. As long as you stick with a reputable manufacturer such as Samsung, Kingston, SanDisk, etc., you should be fine.

 

[DerbyCitySignGuy]

If you can't afford the bigger SSD drives, you can always get a smaller one for your OS and whatever programs you use frequently, then store all your data on a regular HDD.

 

[visual800]

back up 3 times, back up 4 times. A Cadillac is still a POS manufactured by GM, dont be fooled by all of these claims about these new hard drives coming out. Nothing but hype. If you want the absolute best reviews in the world by everyday people look your item up on amazon and go down to reviews/ do not trust the "google hype"

 

[SignBurst PCs]

I have found SSDs to be be very reliable. As with anything, there are good ones and bad ones. In general, Intel's 730 series and the Samsung Pro are both great choices. If your motherboard is new enough, your BIOS is updated, and you are willing to put in a little work, Intel's 750 series PCIe NVME SSDs are awesome!

I am a big fan of a good UPS (battery backup) as power outages and surges are any drive's Achilles heal.

Backup is a MUST in any situation, SSD or otherwise.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

back up 3 times, back up 4 times. A Cadillac is still a POS manufactured by GM, dont be fooled by all of these claims about these new hard drives coming out. Nothing but hype. If you want the absolute best reviews in the world by everyday people look your item up on amazon and go down to reviews/ do not trust the "google hype"

While reviews can be useful, unfortunately there are too many "fake" and "paid" reviews for products on Amazon, Newegg, etc. This goes for positive reviews, usually paid for by the product manufacturer and negative reviews, paid for by the competition. It is often hard to tell what is real and what isn't.

 

[jfiscus]

We have used the Samsung SSDs here on our workstations since they came out with no issues on 4 workstations.
As we needed more storage capacity we just added additional drives for scratch disk space.

We do NOT save any work on our workstations; everything is stored on our NAS box with multiple backups. (local and offsite)

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Highly recommend quality SSDs for OS and for actual programs.

Program files and other related files for us are stored on the NAS.

Scratch disks are still mechanical drives.

If you happen to run VMs, you would want the VM files to be on SSDs as well.



Storage itself may not be so much of an issue nowadays, but when we first got into SSDs, the write life of some of this aren't like what they are now, so keeping that down (at least back then) was important. Also, don't defrag (or at least that was the case back then) as that could cause excessive amounts of writes as well. And since that's what the life of SSDs are (or at least were) measured it, that may not be good.