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Public Education

140 points posted to Education, Desktops and Laptops by infinitelink May 6

While SSDs are increasingly more popular in lay-media, I recommend that Dell ensure that well into the future the traditional HD will be nigh available: reason being that SSDs, far as I know, wear-out very quickly after a certain number of write cycles.

Personally for important data and, well, unimportant data, as it's my data, I want to ensure it'll keep on being available and safe-enough, which the good 'ol platter-drive provides. SSDs are too fashionable and for being soft and quick to die. I wish that the media would make this more known: buy an ipod touch today...expect it to die in, maybe, a few years. : (

I like this order: SSDs backed-up by HDs, and only used in those little gadgets rather than for important stuff; tape to back-up HDs for especially long-term uses (suprisingly the tape holds up quite well when preserved correctly). Note: not saying Dell should (or should even consider) tape, just saying I hope it keeps HDs around for quite a while, even considering that HDs are less reliable than advertised, they're more dependable than SSDs.

Thus it would be nice that, when SSDs become more available at Dell, that education be provided (i.e. pages describing the pros, cons, and these details--more ably than I can!).

aikiwolfie
May 6		 This is nonsense. SSDs are just as reliable, if not more reliable than traditional hard drives. Even the good old original USB pen drive is just as reliable as the traditional hard drive.
phubert
May 6		 Reliable, aikiwolfie? I thought the SSD's _did_ have a relatively short write-cycle lifespan.
Up to that point, yes, they'd be reliable,

Still, this post is a bit silly as HD's are NOT going away any time soon... certainly not for the foreseeable future.
aikiwolfie
May 6		 Not so far as I know. There have been teething problems with a few bad batches. But that's a problem with QA procedures in the manufacturing plant. Remember a hard drive is only expected to last 3 to 5 years these days. The good old days of dusting off a 10 year old HD are gone. We don't see hoards of people abandoning their laptops because batteries are exploding.
phubert
May 6		 The blurb by self-serving Samsung below is interesting, but I'm afraid I'm not yet convinced for high I/O database applications.
One issue I read about was the large blocksize for SSD's... meaning a small file would rewrite a large chunk of the SSD (64KB?).

Below they mention "every hour" ... how about every SECOND???

Here's something from Samsung, but I think I'd like to HEAR from Dell on this, anyway... ****

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/23/samsung-puts-the-kibosh-on-ssd-reliability...
phubert
May 6		 Here is a far better article with Intel... ****

http://www.cnet.com/8301-13924_1-9896566-64.html
phubert
May 6		 It SOUNDS as though the devices might well be useful for laptops... but certainly NOT for enterprise database storage applications.

Still, I'd like to see a better article with real metrics... I'm sure they exist...
phubert
May 6		 Note that Dell's _defense_, mentioned above, refers to NOTEBOOKS... ****

http://www.bmighty.com/blog/antenna/archives/2008/03/dell_defends_re.html
aikiwolfie
May 6		 From a PC/Laptop point of view is how I looked at the issue since that's what I know and that's what the OP seemed to be talking about. Write speed I think is probably more of an issue than durability. If you have a decent multitasking OS and a good amount of RAM in your PC the write speed isn't so important.
phubert
May 6		 And, to some degree, my apology, aikiwolfie, since there's another thread addressing SSD's in the MD3000i, which is more what I was thinking of. But that also is why I included the link to Dell's defense of reliability in notebooks. I'm not trying to support any particular point of view... I'd just like to see better metrics on performance/reliability and if anyone can provide a pointer to such, I'd appreciate it.

I very much LIKE the idea of SSDs, but there's no point in pursuing something near-term that isn't yet practical, either. Yes, I definitely CAN see this technology for notebooks! Perhaps even desktops. I'd love to have something like this for servers as well... especially SAN-attached boxes acting as virtual hosts as their _system_ drives. May be a bit too early yet, though.
aikiwolfie
May 6		 I think if hard drive makers were to release proper metrics for their products performance in real world situations we'd get a few surprises. What is classed by a hard drive manufacturer as a working device and what you might class as a working device are two different things.
phubert
May 6		 It doesn't seem as though the SSD side is any better, though. And, I'm thinking primarily of independent benchmarks... a relatively easy thing to do... whatever happened to the InfoWorld Test Center (Nick Petreley was manager the last I was reading that column...)
aikiwolfie
May 6		 Dunno. My own experience is that the SSD performs well enough in a laptop for it to be the preferred option if you can afford it.
phubert
May 6		 Right. Affording it IS the issue! And, I would agree that, for laptops, as long as you can foot the bill, it's viable.
chopdoc
May 6		 I think the poster is confusing SSD technology with common flash memory. Some people are indeed DIYing SSD from flash memory cards and they to indeed have limited write cycles....something like 100,000 on the better ones. If you look into "real" SSD technology, you will find that is not the case. Of course....that is why "reall" SSD drives still cost so much more than flash memory cards. Look into it and you will see.
jmxz
May 6		 The specs for modern SSDs suggest that they should live 50+ years ( http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html ). The short lifetimes seem to be old data from devices from the 90s. IMHO the biggest drawback is the size - where it's easy to get a 1TB desktop drive, and many-hundred-gig laptop drive, SSD equivalents are hard to find.
chopdoc
May 6		 Size is the issue at the moment. But like other technologies, it will grow. We already see much more reasonable prices on decent size SSDs. Of course, 1TB range stuff will cost you big time (enterprise class SSDs are particularly expensive), but one can put a "real" SSD 32 gig drive in a notebook for pretty decent money these days....less than what the large IDE and SATA notebook drives cost!
aikiwolfie
May 6		 Well 50+ years is a lot better than the 5 years expected of a normal HDD.
phubert
May 7		 Expected, indeed. I believe I ran across an article on the manufacturer's MTBF figures, but don't recall where now (actually posted it at varlinux (which I can no longer access from work, btw))
aikiwolfie
May 7		 How long do hard drives last in data centers?
jmxz
May 7		 @phubert: "(actually posted it at varlinux (which I can no longer access from work, btw))"

Your employer has a rather annoying set of firewalls-and/or-policies :-).
Surely varlinux as more content beneficial to your work than Ideastorm.
phubert
May 7		 Well, jmxz, they SAY varlinux is a (banned) "chat site"

The last time this issue arose, "they" decided it was _not_ a "chat site" ... go figure... at least ONE respected co-worker agrees with me heartily (and with you)
jmxz
May 7		 @aikiwolfie: "How long do hard drives last in data centers?

The two best studies (100000+ drives, good methodologies, relatively recent) on that subject are:
Google's: http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf and
Carnegie Mellon's http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bianca/fast07.pdf.

The answer to "how long" varies depending on if you're asking about mean, median, etc. Some die in a few months, some die if a few years. A short answer is that they don't last as long as the MTTF specs suggest they should; but those two papers are worth reading for the details. But if you want a decent summary, this guy summarized the highlights of both papers.
aikiwolfie
May 7		 Yeah that's what I thought.
infinitelink
May 9		 Note I mean nothing bad toward Dell (nor do I wish to indicate SSD notebooks as totally unreliable: they're pretty cool). Just want to bring-up the short SSD (pre-sales/rhetoric from the manufacturers) lifespan and request that there not be a push toward ridding notebooks of regular HDs. When new model computers come out without HDs as an option...that's disturbing. Personally I think HDs are unreliable enough, but SSDs often have very limited numbers of read-writes before dying. The comment on how USB are supposedly super-reliable was amusing...I've had quite a few USBs from different makers, which I unmount before removing...and they do end up dying (hence, why MS makes USB back-up software) available
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