On Tuesday, January 03, 2012 10:58:17 PM Kirk Wallace did opine: > On Tue, 2012-01-03 at 19:26 -0500, Kent A. Reed wrote: > ... snip > > > The jury still seems to be out on the question of SSD reliability, > > partly because there are so few data points compared to rotating > > disks. > > ... snip > > I just replaced a friend's Samsung 60GB SSD. It stopped booting Windows > XP. I did a Windows check disk and it was able to recover the drive, > then Linux dd to a new hard disk, and she's back in business. As soon as > the new hard drive is broken in, I'll try to stress test the SSD to see > what's up. I have no idea how long the drive was working, I'm guessing a > couple of years. I prefer the older technology, and maybe save some > money to put into a RAID or decent backup.
How long a drive with mechanicals in it lasts is often a crap shoot. I've had several in the 60-500 gig range that have fallen over in what I'd call premature spin times, some in under 6 months, and this is drives with well under 50 power cycles on them. Around me they spin up and generally don't get spun down unless there is a power failure that outlasts my UPS. I do not power down just for the heck of it, I even swapped out my bad dvd drive last night without a powerdown. But I have to get rid of the rest of those red sata cables. That red die eats the copper wire inside the cable like it was battery acid, and has been doing that to cables around me since the rollover to the '70's took all that cable manufacturing first to the J. A. Pan company and eventually to China. 3 years and the copper in a wire with that insulation can be shook out of the end of the insulation as brown dust. I have 5 dead sata cables hanging on a drawer knob behind me just to keep me reminded, and I grab cables of other colors when I can just so I have spares on hand. Right now, I have a pair of the original 3.5" Seagate hawks, a whole gigabyte each, scsi-ii hooked up to a trs-80 Color Computer 3 in the basement. Either of those drives has accumulated 15 + years of spin time, and are apparently as good as ever. Those were $300 drives when they were new and I put them into a full house Amiga 2k, with 64 megs of ram & a PP&S 68040 accelerator card in it plus a good sized wagonload of other goodies. If and when the last one dies, I'll sell the rest of it on the coco mailing list, but I'll shed a tear when I do, that was the original machine that could do anything, and taught me an awful lot of what I know about computers. I once put a coco-2 into the tv station as a substitute for a 20,000$ bit of Grass Valley gear, imitating the E-DISK storage for a 300-3A/B production switcher using software I wrote. 4x faster than the GVG package & gave english filenames to the Tech directors which pleased them no end. With a couple of disk controller failures, it otherwise sat there and did its thing for 13 years. They retired that switcher when I retired, nobody else could fix it, and gave me that kit back a couple of months later, so that is now another coco I have stashed in the basement. In fact, I think I am coco poor. ;-) So now I'm waiting on Houston and the new atom machine. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> C makes it easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes that harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg. -- Bjarne Stroustrup ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ridiculously easy VDI. With Citrix VDI-in-a-Box, you don't need a complex infrastructure or vast IT resources to deliver seamless, secure access to virtual desktops. With this all-in-one solution, easily deploy virtual desktops for less than the cost of PCs and save 60% on VDI infrastructure costs. Try it free! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Citrix-VDIinabox _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
