I've been buying cheapo 32GB Transcend drives for a couple years now. Speed isn't an issue to me either. I need them for environmental reasons. High Temps and lots of vibration. For the most part they have performed well. I've had a few drives fail but either they were bad out of the box or died within a few days of install. Transcend doesn't even ask questions. You do an online RMA, send the drive in and they send you a new one. Most are running in slower pc's running nt, 2k and 98. XP will run slower but there are things you can do to the OS to improve performance. I even use one as the boot drive for my ESX Host at home and for a win7 laptop and it just screams.
-----Original Message----- From: Matthew W. Ross [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, March 01, 2010 11:12 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Which is more reliable ? (WAS: Which is faster ?) I'm curious on what the list thinks of the _reliability_ of the newer SSDs? Anybody know of hard data supporting a longer MTBF than the mechanical disks? For me, Speed isn't everything. If I can have a SSD that will fail half as often as a mechanical drive, I consider that a win on a critical application server. That being said, only now are the prices dropping enough to consider... --Matt Ross Ephrata School District ----- Original Message ----- From: Steven M. Caesare [mailto:[email protected]] To: NT System Admin Issues [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:33:35 -0800 Subject: RE: Which is faster ? > Never suggested you don't with mechanical disks. > > > > I am suggesting that the experience you get when installing > $APPLICATION$ on day 1 is not going to to be the experience you have > as the drive gets full. And that's not just "currently full", it's as > the available blocks have been allocated over time (as the drives > favor initially deallocating blocks rather than reusing them, a drive > that's only 40% full could be approaching having had all of its blocks > allocated at some point during it's lifetime) > > > > In some cases, this degradation can make SSD's slower than HDD's for > some write situations. > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages > > > > -sc. > > > > From: Ken Schaefer [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, March 01, 2010 10:07 AM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: RE: Which is faster ? > > > > You will get degradation with mechanical drives as well (because you > need to wait for the platters to spin around to the few remaining > empty spaces, not to mention writing a large file in lots of fragments). > > > > Whilst SSDs will degrade if the disk is very, very full (TRIM will > ensure that you won't have problems with drives that are only 70-80% > full), the write performance of SSDs is so far beyond mechanical > disks, it doesn't matter. > > > > As mentioned, I installed Exchange 2010 (three times - all with hub, > CAS and mailbox) the past weekend in 7 minutes, 7:35 minutes and 7:xx > (I didn't keep the last result) in a Hyper-V VM (on an SSD that was > already running another VM hosting WSUS and SCOM 2007 R2). I highly > doubt that would be possible on a SATA drive. > > > > Cheers > > Ken > > > > From: Steven M. Caesare [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, 1 March 2010 10:16 PM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: RE: Which is faster ? > > > > SSD write performance can drop significantly as the disk gets full. > > > > TRIM support well help this some, but there is still a degradation... > > > > -sc > > > > From: Ken Schaefer [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, March 01, 2010 8:14 AM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: RE: Which is faster ? > > > > Got some stats? > > > IIRC any modern consumer SSD (based on Indilinx controller) will blow > a mechanical drive out of the water. I installed Exchange 2010 (CAS, > Hub Transport, Mailbox) in a VM in 7 minutes running on an SSD > (G.Skill Falcon II - Indilinx controller). Not sure I'd be able to do > that with any SATA based mechanical drive. > > > > Of course, if you buy some really old SSD, or something cheap, then > performance will probably be rubbish as well.. > > > > Cheers > > Ken > > > > From: Martin Blackstone [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, 1 March 2010 9:01 PM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: RE: Which is faster ? > > > > For reads yes. For writes they can be slower. > > > > From: Ken Schaefer [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, March 01, 2010 4:38 AM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: RE: Which is faster ? > > > > WD Raptors are expensive. If OP is investigating the use of 10K RPM > SATA disks, then they should look at buying SSDs... For speed, SSDs > blow any mechanical drive out of the water. > > > Cheers > > Ken > > > > > > From: Andrew S. Baker [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, 1 March 2010 8:29 PM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: Re: Which is faster ? > > > > Tested doing what? > > There are only some very specific workloads where the performance > difference will be noticeable. > > Video streaming and editing is a very different workload from > manipulating lots of small, randomly distributed files. > > I'd favor cost rather than theoretical performance here, barring other > information. > > > -ASB: http://xeesm.com/AndrewBaker > Sent from my Verizon Smartphone > > ________________________________ > > From: "HELP_PC" <[email protected]> > > Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 07:25:47 +0100 > > To: NT System Admin Issues<[email protected]> > > Subject: Which is faster ? > > > > > > How can I decide if a Hard disk WD 10000 rpm 16 mb cache will perform > better than a WD 7200 rpm with 64mb cache Looking fore somebody that > already tested > > TIA > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ > <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
