SSD 's - Are They Worth It ? ? ?

[bunnspecial]

Something else too on SSDs:

As some around here know, I'm a computer collector, or specifically a Mac collector. I originally started out with PowerPC era systems, went back into 68K stuff(all the way back to one of my prizes, an April 1984 "Macintosh" in its original configuration) and then when early Intel systems started cratering in prices I started snapping them up. A lot of those are still relatively inexpensive. When I was first getting into them, they were actually quite usable as in the mid-2010s the 2008-2009 era systems mostly would still run the then current OSs(Yosemite and El Capitan) and were quite usable as daily computers with SSDs or even hybrid drives. I gave more than a few 2008 era MacBook Pros away, or sold them inexpensively especially after I connected with a recycler who would sell me 10-20 at a time and I'd sort through and sometimes piece together computers or even sell mostly as-is. I had a lot of fun, made some cash that went right back into helping build my collection, and skimmed some nice condition and rare configurations off the top to save.

I mention all of this to say that I'm familiar with the late-2000s Macs and what they were(and really are still) capable of.

One prize for me was getting a first generation(1,1) MacBook Air. If any of you remember, back in 2008 this computer was hyped endlessly complete with a catchy TV commercial showing the computer in an envelope. The specs were poor even for 2008(1.6ghz Core2Duo, 2gb soldered RAM, the awful Intel GMA950 graphics) and it was a premium $2000 computer. For perspective, that same money would have bought a nicely speced 15" MacBook Pro with 4gb RAM, a 2.4ghz or so Core2Duo with a decent nVidia GPU.

One of the biggest hindrances to the first generation MacBook Air performance was that it shipped standard with an 80gb 1.8" 4400rpm hard drive. For those keeping track, this was the exact same drive Apple was then shipping in the iPod. It was a perfectly serviceable drive in that application, and in fact one still lives in the center console of my car and is used periodically. As a laptop drive, though, it was terrible. About its only redeeming qualities were that it was quiet and small. Objectively, the first MacBook Air was a terrible computer. It was marginally better than the then-popular Netbooks and had a bigger screen, but most Netbooks were $200 or so and the MBA was 10x that price.

In all that rambling, I'll mention that Apple did offer it with a 60gb SSD as an option. This was I think a $1600 option, so with sales tax an MBA with an SSD would have set a person back somewhere around $4K. I upgraded my first one to an aftermarket SSD(which was an adventure in and of itself) and then finally found one with a factory SSD. It made a difference, although not much.

I should also mention that the second generation MBA was a much better computer, and in 2010 they introduced the familiar "wedge" with an SSD as the only option. Up through 2013 or so, this was a SATA "blade" SSD with a proprietary connector and I've upgraded a few with mSATA drives and an adapter. Slightly newer ones use PCIe based blade drives that can be replaced with modern large NVMe drives.

 

[JavierH19]

Absolutely I was shocked by how massive the difference in usability was when I replaced my hard drive with an ssd on my old laptop and loaded a clean version of Windows onto it. Day and night difference. Everything was so much faster. Didn't have to wait 10 minutes after boot up for it to become usable sine the drive would show 100% for a long time. Not anymore.

 

[Zee09]

I still have a 60gb OCZ drive that I bought new when I was in college-around 2009 or so.

The thing was horrendously expensive for its capacity-in fact it was one thing I "treated" myself to with a well paying summer job. I should say it seemed expensive at the time-I think it was around $200 or $250.

It landed in a Mac Mini 1,1 that had some niche uses but now is dormant because it can no longer do those jobs. The drive is still good although quite slow compared even to a modern low end SATA drive.

Same here my friend but smaller............

 

[y_p_w]

Something else too on SSDs:

As some around here know, I'm a computer collector, or specifically a Mac collector. I originally started out with PowerPC era systems, went back into 68K stuff(all the way back to one of my prizes, an April 1984 "Macintosh" in its original configuration) and then when early Intel systems started cratering in prices I started snapping them up. A lot of those are still relatively inexpensive. When I was first getting into them, they were actually quite usable as in the mid-2010s the 2008-2009 era systems mostly would still run the then current OSs(Yosemite and El Capitan) and were quite usable as daily computers with SSDs or even hybrid drives. I gave more than a few 2008 era MacBook Pros away, or sold them inexpensively especially after I connected with a recycler who would sell me 10-20 at a time and I'd sort through and sometimes piece together computers or even sell mostly as-is. I had a lot of fun, made some cash that went right back into helping build my collection, and skimmed some nice condition and rare configurations off the top to save.

I mention all of this to say that I'm familiar with the late-2000s Macs and what they were(and really are still) capable of.

One prize for me was getting a first generation(1,1) MacBook Air. If any of you remember, back in 2008 this computer was hyped endlessly complete with a catchy TV commercial showing the computer in an envelope. The specs were poor even for 2008(1.6ghz Core2Duo, 2gb soldered RAM, the awful Intel GMA950 graphics) and it was a premium $2000 computer. For perspective, that same money would have bought a nicely speced 15" MacBook Pro with 4gb RAM, a 2.4ghz or so Core2Duo with a decent nVidia GPU.

One of the biggest hindrances to the first generation MacBook Air performance was that it shipped standard with an 80gb 1.8" 4400rpm hard drive. For those keeping track, this was the exact same drive Apple was then shipping in the iPod. It was a perfectly serviceable drive in that application, and in fact one still lives in the center console of my car and is used periodically. As a laptop drive, though, it was terrible. About its only redeeming qualities were that it was quiet and small. Objectively, the first MacBook Air was a terrible computer. It was marginally better than the then-popular Netbooks and had a bigger screen, but most Netbooks were $200 or so and the MBA was 10x that price.

In all that rambling, I'll mention that Apple did offer it with a 60gb SSD as an option. This was I think a $1600 option, so with sales tax an MBA with an SSD would have set a person back somewhere around $4K. I upgraded my first one to an aftermarket SSD(which was an adventure in and of itself) and then finally found one with a factory SSD. It made a difference, although not much.

I should also mention that the second generation MBA was a much better computer, and in 2010 they introduced the familiar "wedge" with an SSD as the only option. Up through 2013 or so, this was a SATA "blade" SSD with a proprietary connector and I've upgraded a few with mSATA drives and an adapter. Slightly newer ones use PCIe based blade drives that can be replaced with modern large NVMe drives.

The new ones have no upgrade path though. They’re purely appliances.

 

[benjy]

interesting to me + although my cheep 17" HP lappy works good enough a SSD for it would be nice + as noted the SSD is not the issue its saving + moving things you want to a new drive. asked a tech @ staples about it + he replied we do that, but wondering if the cost is worth it or just get another cheaper HP lappy with a decent SSD. i have very little stored that REALLY matters its just the hassle finding all of all my favs + registering AGAIN. on that note i guess getting a SSD lappy + transferring all might be a better option, comments appreciated!

 

[Fordiesel69]

I refuse to use regular HDD's now that I got a taste of them in 2014. Been hooked ever since.

I use a SSD as the system drive and have 8TB NAS to pull from that still uses spinning disks.

 

[y_p_w]

I decided to test my 13" mid-2012 MacBook Pro with a 1TB WD Blue SATA SSD for startup time. It was approximate time from a shutdown condition to the login screen coming up. I was getting 20-25 seconds after a few tries. Part of it could have been the accuracy of my timing, but each time there could be little things that actually take more or less time. However, when I was using a 7200 RPM hard drive (a WD Black 750 GB) I was still getting times around 90-120 seconds for the same thing.

However, that in and of itself isn't all of it, but just a convenient benchmark. There's also all the stuff that has to be fully loaded before I can do anything. It might take a few seconds to be able to access the file system. The time for applications to start became much shorter. And one really painful thing for me was that I'd often get that MacOS "spinning beach ball" where it was stuck when I tried to quite an application, and often that would result in difficulty accessing any other application. But these days if there isn't something like a hung program, exiting an application universally takes less than a second.

 

[supton]

Yes, but… I watched the vid on how to swap an ssd into my daughter’s laptop and I think it might take an hour to physically swap. Cheapest laptop a couple years I guess, installed about the same way as some heater cores. Been putting that off, largely because I forgot how I did the swap on my home laptop.

 

[y_p_w]

Yes, but… I watched the vid on how to swap an ssd into my daughter’s laptop and I think it might take an hour to physically swap. Cheapest laptop a couple years I guess, installed about the same way as some heater cores. Been putting that off, largely because I forgot how I did the swap on my home laptop.

I've done a few swaps on Macs and PC laptops. Every process is different. I've tried taking apart some computers and ended up breaking some tabs.

Possibly the easiest was my 2007 polycarbonate MacBook. The tools needed were a #00/#0 Phillips screwdriver, a T-8 Torx bit/screwdriver, and a quarter. Remove the battery with a quarter to open the latch. Yank out the "sled" with a plastic tab. Remove the drive from the sled with its T-8 screws. Then put back everything in reverse.

My wife's older Lenovo laptop had a door on the side and then it just pulled out. But it had friction fit rubber bumpers.

I had some computers where I could tell the drive was failing, but I looked up the replacement process and decided it wasn't worth it. Apple just buried the drive in their white iBooks. There are many opportunities to break something. And it was really weird because those also made memory replacement easy.

Most of the newer ones use card sockets similar to replaceable memory.

 

[JohnnyJohnson]

The time to run my antivirus went from a hair over 4 hours to 26 minutes.

 

[bunnspecial]

I did this one earlier today. The computer already had an SSD(shown above the new one) but I fitted a newer, faster, and larger industry standard NVMe drive.



Mechanically the installation was straightforward. The computer opens by removing the pentalobe screws in the bottom, and the drive is held in place by a single Torx screw. M.2 drives are physically shorter than Apple's blade SSDs, but a simple passive adapter made just for this application adapts both the drive contacts and takes up the space for a perfect fit. Provided you have the correct driver bits, this is a less than 10 minute job as drive is immediately acceptable once the bottom of the computer is removed.

Unfortunately, Apple's new APFS file system doesn't make cloning the drive easy. I finally dug in and found settings in Carbon Copy Cloner(a Mac cloning program that's been around for years) to make bootable disks, but that took far longer than physically swapping.

 

[PandaBear]

There are pros and cons of SSDs and hard drives with regards to durability. Hard drives can be subject to random failures too. I've had those, including head crashes and bearing wear. I remember one head crash where it was almost immediately apparent that my drive was gone. I suppose it might have been possible to recover it, but I didn't even bother because it would have cost at least a thousand dollars to try and rebuild the drive.

The "failure mode" for SSDs is different. Obviously they're less likely to suffer from damage due to physical shock, unlike a hard drive that could suffer a head crash. But there's the endurance issue and the possibility of the data fading if one just puts one away and hopes that it works in a few years. There's always the worry that there's charge leakage through a "floating gate". But using it will eventually result in the data being erased and/or moved via wear leveling, so hopefully it's "refreshed" before it fades. But yeah - there can be catastrophic random failures, like if the wear level tables get borked. No matter what, there should be a backup.

I remember some sci-fi TV series where a smart phone is recovered from a time capsule after make 300 years. Besides the fact that the battery would have likely leaked and damaged the device, they manage to create a suitable battery replacement using their replication technology. But they also have intact data on a device, and there is no way that the data is still intact after a few hundred years.

There was an article written by the CEO of PureStorage (an enterprise storage company building flash based servers), and their studies show that the biggest problem to SSD failure in consumer grade SSD is actually design problem (component choices, algorithm, software bugs, etc) instead of wear and tear.

Most people other than the recent M1 Mac SSD problem, do not wear out their SSD. They may have run into problem when the power down of their machine got the drive stuck in a certain scenario with half written data, or power surge, or build / design problem, or kept the system off for too long and the drive's data didn't get refreshed in the background, etc. We have seen system up continuously for 5 years and the SSD is fine, and we have seen system failing because of constant power surges or sudden blackout, within warranty, etc.

 

[y_p_w]

There was an article written by the CEO of PureStorage (an enterprise storage company building flash based servers), and their studies show that the biggest problem to SSD failure in consumer grade SSD is actually design problem (component choices, algorithm, software bugs, etc) instead of wear and tear.

Most people other than the recent M1 Mac SSD problem, do not wear out their SSD. They may have run into problem when the power down of their machine got the drive stuck in a certain scenario with half written data, or power surge, or build / design problem, or kept the system off for too long and the drive's data didn't get refreshed in the background, etc. We have seen system up continuously for 5 years and the SSD is fine, and we have seen system failing because of constant power surges or sudden blackout, within warranty, etc.

I have heard of people hearing that the latest QLC NAND is rated at less than 1000 erase cycles thinking that it sounds really bad, but for the most part it's not that bad.

I bought a 1 TB WD Blue SATA SSD back in 2019, which I'm sure uses TLC NAND with maybe a 5000 cycle rating but with an SLC cache. My drive monitoring software says that it's still at 100% wear level. I'm not concerned that it will ever wear out but sudden failure does concern me.

I haven't had an SSD failure yet, but did have a few hard drive failures. I don't know if it was a chicken or egg thing - whether it was the OS locking up and then my forced power down killed the drive, or the drive failed and then I saw it as the OS locking up. Impossible to tell, but having a backup saved me several times.

I did have one event where I'm sure that unplanned power shutdown corrupted the system. It was my 2007 (Santa Rosa) MacBook Pro with the 800 MHz FSB that Apple only sold new for about 4 months before the next version. But it was great. Still - my wife was playing a game on it once, and this was back in the day when Apple recommended draining the battery down to automatic (graceful) shutdown with save to drive about once a month if it was connected to power almost all the time. So I had it on battery power alone and there was something that was heating it up like crazy and I'm sure it went into a protective thermal shutdown. When I started it up again it had a battery service message saying that the battery should be replaced. When I checked in System Profiler it was reporting a full charge capacity of something like -150 mAh. Yes it was negative. Obviously it was updating the estimated capacity via SMBus and got corrupted. I kept on using it though and it started showing it was normal, then negative again, then normal, etc. I was going to replace it at an Apple Store but they didn't have a service replacement battery in stock. Then I kept on using it until it started swelling. That's when I finally got a service replacement. It's not in great shape, but that machine still works with a 512 GB SanDisk Ultra 3D running Snow Leopard and the battery is normal.

 

[PandaBear]

I have heard of people hearing that the latest QLC NAND is rated at less than 1000 erase cycles thinking that it sounds really bad, but for the most part it's not that bad.

I bought a 1 TB WD Blue SATA SSD back in 2019, which I'm sure uses TLC NAND with maybe a 5000 cycle rating but with an SLC cache. My drive monitoring software says that it's still at 100% wear level. I'm not concerned that it will ever wear out but sudden failure does concern me.

I haven't had an SSD failure yet, but did have a few hard drive failures. I don't know if it was a chicken or egg thing - whether it was the OS locking up and then my forced power down killed the drive, or the drive failed and then I saw it as the OS locking up. Impossible to tell, but having a backup saved me several times.

I did have one event where I'm sure that unplanned power shutdown corrupted the system. It was my 2007 (Santa Rosa) MacBook Pro with the 800 MHz FSB that Apple only sold new for about 4 months before the next version. But it was great. Still - my wife was playing a game on it once, and this was back in the day when Apple recommended draining the battery down to automatic (graceful) shutdown with save to drive about once a month if it was connected to power almost all the time. So I had it on battery power alone and there was something that was heating it up like crazy and I'm sure it went into a protective thermal shutdown. When I started it up again it had a battery service message saying that the battery should be replaced. When I checked in System Profiler it was reporting a full charge capacity of something like -150 mAh. Yes it was negative. Obviously it was updating the estimated capacity via SMBus and got corrupted. I kept on using it though and it started showing it was normal, then negative again, then normal, etc. I was going to replace it at an Apple Store but they didn't have a service replacement battery in stock. Then I kept on using it until it started swelling. That's when I finally got a service replacement. It's not in great shape, but that machine still works with a 512 GB SanDisk Ultra 3D running Snow Leopard and the battery is normal.

This is the "typical" number I got from the industry (these can change based on erase and program timing, like how accurate you can fill your water bottle depends on how fast you fill and drain it): 500 cycles for QLC, 5000 for TLC, 15000 for MLC, 100k for SLC. So far I heard mostly write once read many SSD uses QLC, write intensive use won't go with QLC any time soon.

Since people don't use more just because they have a bigger drive, the more capacity you have the less "drive write per day" you use and the longer they last (i.e. every 7-15% more capacity would double your durability, also very typical among all manufacturers). We were at about 50 drive write the entire life of a USB drive and therefore the worst quality nand goes to USB drives, and people usually don't use even that (typical is like 10-15).

Most large OEM for prebuild computers would test the heck out of their SSD qualifications, i.e. you can test 1000 drives and you cannot fail more than 5 of them after 1000 hours, 10000 power cycles, at 40C, vibration at certain G, etc. They have to, a warranty claim on a new PC can cost way more than the $2 you save between their OEMs.

 

[chris719]

Any TLC or better drive is fine, regardless of interface. These high speed PCIe 4 drives give nice benchmark scores but real world performance has not improved that much since the original Intel X25M. Random IO and low queue depth IO dominate the user experience and this has not improved in flash based SSDs much since the 2nd gen MLC drives and in some cases has gotten worse. Sequential read and write speeds are sexy but not important for a system drive or anything involving lots of small files.

 

[LDM]

Love the speed of SSDs but reliability can definitely be hit or miss. At work we are constantly replacing SSDs in our Dell desktops that are now in the 3-4 year old range. And unlike the old HDDs, they don't start dying slowly, they just decide to die one day and the PC can't recognize the drive. Probably has more to do with the cheap SSDs Dell used for their OEM supply than anything else.

 

[Pew]

Love the speed of SSDs but reliability can definitely be hit or miss. At work we are constantly replacing SSDs in our Dell desktops that are now in the 3-4 year old range. And unlike the old HDDs, they don't start dying slowly, they just decide to die one day and the PC can't recognize the drive. Probably has more to do with the cheap SSDs Dell used for their OEM supply than anything else.

Yea I'm thinking it's an issue with their supplier. I don't recall replacing any OEM HP SSD yet and only a few older Crucial MX200/300s so far in a pool of 350 computers in 6 years.

 

[y_p_w]

Yea I'm thinking it's an issue with their supplier. I don't recall replacing any OEM HP SSD yet and only a few older Crucial MX200/300s so far in a pool of 350 computers in 6 years.

How would that compare with hard drive failures?

 

[y_p_w]

Any TLC or better drive is fine, regardless of interface. These high speed PCIe 4 drives give nice benchmark scores but real world performance has not improved that much since the original Intel X25M. Random IO and low queue depth IO dominate the user experience and this has not improved in flash based SSDs much since the 2nd gen MLC drives and in some cases has gotten worse. Sequential read and write speeds are sexy but not important for a system drive or anything involving lots of small files.

I participate in a forum where I heard one poster refer to grabbing little bits of data from different locations on a drive as “snacking”. With a hard drive that could take lots of time with the arm swinging constantly to different physical locations. And that is a primary reason why SSDs make a system more “usable”.

 

[Zee09]

Thirteen years ago, I assembled a computer from new garden variety suspect parts.
As a shop computer it has been stellar. No failures and it doesn't have an SSD.
It got a bit sluggish, and I remember it only had 4GB of memory as memory then was gold priced.
Amazon had 16gb on sale at just $20 (2x8) and that juiced it up big time... I have no intention of dumping the old Seagate drive.