HardwareBanter - View Single Post - "Why I Will Never Buy a Hard Drive Again"

**Flasherly[_2_]** · November 20th 18, 06:47 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt

On Mon, 19 Nov 2018 19:06:19 -0800 (PST),
wrote:

So the moral of the story is basically:
Wait till your SSD dies ?
Or in any other words:
The real frustration of SSDs might still be coming ! =D

I don't know exactly when, since it's been kicking around since 1978,
that a SSD got truly affordable. My first was $40 for 60G, but that
was relatively late and lots of people already had them. Everything
then being essentially MLC, so it's only in the last year that you're
seeing a TLC cost effectiveness reshaping the SSD market.

This last one I bought a few weeks is also MLC. Cost is $33 for 256G:
Hewlett Packard's oddball or loose stock they're getting rid of.
Called planar MLC, mine's old-school, one layer of memory, whereas TLC
is 3D or (a simulacrum of) stacked chips on top of one another. Part,
a very bare minimum but requisite of faster memory, or cache, is for
indexing the SSD, and that's what I have, that minimum. Add more
cache memory, realistically, between the SSD controller and its main
memory (MLC/SLC/TLC), then that DRAM and the SSD performance
specifications improve.

At a minimum my, say, "cheapest SDD made" will edge out a mechanical
drive, marginally and up to a point of overloading the [non-existent]
cache, where pure MLC memory speeds correlate more closely to the
mechanical drive. In fact it's a likelihood of the possible to see my
HP SSD fall below mechanical performance when adversely stressing its
specification thresholds: for example, overloading the storage
capacity without over-provisioning, for how it's formatted and how
small, for all small files then placed on it, to bring the controller
chip into its worst possible performance.

On the other hand, optimized for larger files and sequential
read/writes performance, it'll average two to three times faster than
a mechanical drive. You wouldn't by in large be looking at these
considerations, of course, as would most people simply pay more, up to
twice as much, for a better class SDD in TLC rather than MLC.

Some TLC, however, will be rated for lower Terabytes Written, before
it's projected by a manufacturer to fail due to the memory circuitry
wearing out, say, in a server situation where it's always written to
night and day. That was not a consideration of emphasis on earlier
MLC and SLC SSDs, as a ratings matrix and consequent warranty stipend
on present TLC graded quality.

There's no real "frustration" for you to anticipate, anymore than a
mechanical drive. They're the same in concept design and intent:
storage. But then, a SSD need not be physically a same material
construct nor, in characteristic nuances, between soft and hardware,
as a mechanical drive. A mechanical HDD, under 2TByte, spans back 15
or 20 years before the last controller issues with an INT13 and drives
over 500G. SSDs are nowhere near mainstream in that regard. What Joe
Mainstream needs to get hot and bothered about is a 128G SDD, for a
laptop, for $20US -- not a $250 2TByte top-consumer-grade-tier SSD.

Your situation of never having had a hard disk problem works the same
as telling your insurance agent you've never had a car crash and can't
understand why should you pay anything at all.

"Well, then, buddy-boy," he will be required to inform you, "that just
about makes you due for one, doesn't it"?

Same deal applies with a twenty-dollar-bill, which will get you a SDD
to play drive with. I personally wouldn't own a SSD, not without a
mechanical drive first, although that's not necessarily what the TLC
SSD market is about. Not for $20, anyway.