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SSD vs HDD?

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  • Bozz10mm

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    I ordered a new laptop from Dell a few days ago. As I was looking through their online catalog, I saw a model with an SSD, solid state hard drive. I figured a solid state drive would be faster and more reliable than the old spinning hard drives.

    I did some after-the-fact research on SSD drives, and now I'm not so sure I made the right choice. Anyone have any insight on SSD drives?
    Lynx Defense
     

    Maverick44

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    I ordered a new laptop from Dell a few days ago. As I was looking through their online catalog, I saw a model with an SSD, solid state hard drive. I figured a solid state drive would be faster and more reliable than the old spinning hard drives.

    I did some after-the-fact research on SSD drives, and now I'm not so sure I made the right choice. Anyone have any insight on SSD drives?

    My gaming rig uses an SSD for the OS and certain programs I want to work as fast as possible. I use HDDs for storage. I'm happy with how mine works (250Gb Samsung 850 Evo).

    They are faster, and are supposed to be more reliable. You should be fine.

    Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk
     

    kbaxter60

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    Here's what my understanding is condensed down to:
    * Faster - definitely. Hopefully your research showed you how to use the SS drive most effectively. I think most use for the OS install and system files and from all I have heard, the performance increase is remarkable.
    * More reliable - they DO have a limitation to the number of read/write cycles they can support. So they can and do "fail". At least some parts of them may eventually not work any longer. I don't think that's the end of them, though. They should be able to adapt and work around local bad blocks. I don't recall ever seeing an actual side by side of reliability. But HDD drives definitely fail big time after a while. Why you should do regular backups.
    * Summary - the performance gains are worth it. Most of the new machines have them. They are bound to only get better.
    I don't think you made a bad choice. Do you have it yet? Like it?
     

    Darkpriest667

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    I work at Dell. Regardless of that, SSDs are absolutely more reliable and in almost every case without exception faster. However, they are susceptible to electronic failure due to bad electricity or brownouts. So make sure the voltage from your plugs are very close to 120v with a deviation of maybe 2.


    SSD over HDD all the way with the sole exception of heavy, continuous writing and rewriting like surveillance video storage.

    You should probably read this article: https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/

    This was 4 years ago and the technology has only gotten better. This guy did nothing but write data to SSD 247 for literally years before these drives died. HDDS have moving parts and slower read/write speeds. The only reason you should invest in HDD over SSD is if you run a data center and need long term "cold" storage and cost is an issue.
     

    Dad_Roman

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    What Darkpriest said^^^

    <In laymans terms> I have a new Dell Laptop at work. Its been awful. My IT guy finally said "Well, its got a HDD in it. Lets put a SSD in it."

    That was about a month ago. Been marvelous ever since
     
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    MTA

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    The only time I have seen weakening performance for an SSD is when it is near capacity. I have quite a few older ones inside my computer that have been in there for 4-5 years and they work fine still
     

    m5215

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    I have worked in IT myself for many years and in my opinion SSD is they way to go. The technology in current generation SSD drives has evolved quite a bit since they were first introduced.

    I have a very fast 500GB SSD as my main drive and a secondary 4TB enterprise grade HDD which I store data on. That combination works well for me.
     

    Brains

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    We recently upcycled a couple dozen old workstations by doing nothing more than adding some ram and swapping out the old 5400rpm HDDs with SSDs. For $20 to $80 a workstation, it's been well worth it and allowed us to kick the can down the road a few more years on those particular setups.

    With the exception of bulk storage and video storage, there's very little argument against an SSD.
     

    Bozz10mm

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    The SSD shouldn't see a lot of writes/rewrites IMO. It will be used almost solely for watching movies and TV shows on Netflix and Amazon. Maybe the occasional Google search, youtube video, and email.

    It is a comparatively small drive by today's standards. Only 256 GB. That is still less than the amount of storage space I have filled on the old one in 6 years tho.
     

    pronstar

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    SSD as other have said.
    The speed and immediate boot times are well worth it.

    One thing to consider:
    When an HDD fails, you usually get some warning, and even then, data can be recovered.

    When/if an SSD fails, you won’t get a warning and data recovery from a failed drive is generally much more difficult.

    So backup your data, which should be done regardless of the type of drive you have anyway.


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    m5215

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    Keep in mind that SSD's do have SMART technology which is designed to give a heads up on problems before they get critical. Also if the manufacturer has an app that monitors the SSD like Samsung has for their drives called "Samsung Magician" you will have extra utilities to monitor the heath of your drive and get advanced warnings about potential problems and firmware updates.
     
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    SQLGeek

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    So backup your data, which should be done regardless of the type of drive you have anyway.

    This.

    I run both a local backup to an attached secondary HDD and a cloud backup to Backblaze.

    The boot times can't be beaten running a SSD as your boot drive. The only con with them for me is $/gb.
     

    smschulz

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    Also an IT guy here for 30 plus years.
    For desktops: NVMe M2 SSD (or PCIE) > SSD SATA 2.5" > HDD 3.5" or 2.5"
    SSD technology was a game changer for performance.
    Now the new NVMe M2 drives on the new supporting motherboards are another step up.
    With storage levels up and prices down make them a no-brainer.
     

    Bozz10mm

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    Also an IT guy here for 30 plus years.
    For desktops: NVMe M2 SSD (or PCIE) > SSD SATA 2.5" > HDD 3.5" or 2.5"
    SSD technology was a game changer for performance.
    Now the new NVMe M2 drives on the new supporting motherboards are another step up.
    With storage levels up and prices down make them a no-brainer.

    This is what the spec sheet shows for the SSD: 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive
     
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