Internal Harddisk recommendation

Highly recommended to get rid of the superdrive and upgrade it with an SSD. In fact, replace the HDD in the future too to an SSD. That's exactly what I did this time

 

Poison alert! Lich people talking!!

 

SSD has dropped significantly over the past month. A 240GB drive is less than 1k now compare to 6 months ago. I used to pay that much for a 74GB Raptor!

 

Yeah, and it will keep dropping in price. Who knows, 480 GB SSDs will actually be affordable by the end of next year!

 

But the bad news is, the NAND will be more and more unreliable, or should I say shorter life span as the die shrink. Luckily I managed to grab the decent speed and yet more reliable 34nm NAND.

 

That's probably why I avoid any brands other than Intel, Samsung and Toshiba who are known to manufacturer reliable SSDs.

So now, I'm running on an Intel 320 Series and a Samsung 830 series SSD

 

Excellent choice! Too bad we can't get Samsung 830 here.

 

Yea. Which was why when I saw it at a pretty good price on Amazon while i was in US, I jumped on the opportunity and ordered it.

 

No wonder. I thought you got it from SG.

 

Can't find it in SG too. In fact, not sure if we can find it anywhere here around our region.

Couldn't get myself to purchase a OCZ or Corsair SSD even though it's significantly cheaper.

 

Ahhh.. That's the problem as they shrink the die. 25 nm MLC NAND is now down to 5,000 P/E cycles, from 10,000 in the previous 34 nm MLC NAND. Half the lifespan... no joke.

They can mitigate it with smarter controllers, e.g. the SandForce controllers that do on-the-fly encryption, and additional provisioning, but it's only going to get worse as they shrink the die. I wonder if they can ever get SLC NAND prices down...

 

I think the enterprise versions are also moving to cherry picked MLC NAND instead of SLC NAND. So I don't think you will see anymore new SLC NAND based SSD.

The moment I saw the write cycle was reduced after the die shrink, I bought the older X25M drive immediately, as I know write cycle will be the main cause of the life span of the drive.

All the raw sequential speed, and even the random access time is not going to make a huge difference. The improvement of the boot time can only be measured in milliseconds.

The new drives might be priced lower, so is the reliability.

 

Hmm.. However you cherry pick MLC NAND, it's never going to reach 10,000 P/E cycles, as far as I can tell. Not sure if enterprise users can accept such low lifespans. Maybe they can increase the amount of overprovisioning, but then that would kinda defeat the purpose of using MLC NAND flash - lower cost.

 

So, conclusion is, it's cheaper so more people will buy, and it dies faster so more people will have to replace it sooner. They make more money in the end.

They are not going to overprovision, in fact, some drives are underprovisioned now. So you can see where they are heading.

Enterprise may not be too concerned about long term life span since they are most likely running on multiple redundancies, and normal HDD dies equally fast too, and more unpredictable.

 

LOL! You are scaring me now... 20 GB of writes per day isn't a lot. I reckon we would burn through these newer SSDs faster than 5 years.

 

My drive has used up 2.35TB after almost 1 year of usage I think. I moved some swap files like Winrar and Photoshop to my HDD, but I left the Windows page file on the SSD.