SSD 's - Are They Worth It ? ? ?
- Thread starter Warstud
- Start date
My data might not be the best to work with; most of the HDDs were Seagate ST2000DM001 released in 2011s. By the time I got here in 2016 they were towards the end of their lifecycle/failed/slow so they were replaced. A few Crucial MX/BX200, Intel, and Samsung S951 had to be replaced. A couple MX300s prematurely died in some older laptops but I've had no SSDs fail in the past 4-5 years. I have a bunch of users still on their 2016 laptop with MX300s working good. No HP OEM SSD failures since they got rid of the Samsung S951 too.
All-in-all, I've got a big bin of failed HDDs starting from around 2010ish (from what I can see) compared to <10 SSD since I've started.
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I have a mid-2012 MacBook Pro - aka the last "Unibody" model that they manufacturered until 2016 and the last where they don't consider DIY memory and drive upgrades to be unauthorized modifications.
For various reasons I was lazy about upgrading anything on it, including 500 GB 5400 RPM drive and the 4GB standard memory. I was afraid of touching anything inside because the cover had screws. Then I suffered a lock up condition (probably from a bad USB cable insertion) where it was clearly not working but also clearly not turned off, and I couldn't turn it off with any buttons. So I took my chances by opening it up and then pulling the battery connector and putting it back in. Did the trick. It was in some sort of zombie state where it wasn't really on or off. But then I saw what was inside and figured it wouldn't be too hard to replace the memory or drive.
I did replace the drive once with a 750 GB 7200 RPM hard drive after the factory drive failed, but soon after I got a 512 GB SanDisk Ultra 3D (that capacity was a Best Buy exclusive) and everything got so much better even with only 4 GB of memory. I've talked to several people who indicated that there's no more effective performance upgrade. Even if it was strapped for memory, the SSD could actually partially replace the memory - I think it's called virtual memory or something like that. I did eventually max out the memory but it didn't come close to improving the performance compared to the SSD.
Zee09
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I have so many computers here that I can tell the difference and use many SSD drives as well. That old computer still boots rather quickly even though it is a standard drive.
Mine are desktops and I had a good boost on another desktop that has a SSD buy upping the memory from 8gb to 32 gb..
I dislike the one laptop I have so no experience there.
I think part of my problem was that Apple kept on continuing support for newer operating systems but they were likely optimized for SSD use. And I upgraded thinking it would be fine.
Boot time to login used to be less than a minute with the OEM hard drive, but with newer operating systems it got close to two minutes. With an SSD that went down to less than 20 seconds. But the most maddening thing was to do a right click for an alternate application to open a file. Like maybe a PDF or a JPEG where I'd have any number of different applications and one default application. It used to be fairly quick with a hard drive, but with the newer operating systems it could take up to a minute before I saw the options, and I had to hold the cursor there or else it would stop. With an SSD there's no lag at all. And the worst thing was sometimes with the hard drive I couldn't even close some applications. If I was lucky it would take a few minutes to quit. More often it would stall forever, or eventually it would declare that it crashed and ask if I wanted to report it. I don't know exactly why it was doing that, but once I had an SSD that didn't happen.
But I'd recommend an SSD to anyone although I hesitate to recommend any off-brands. Maybe Kingston, Silicon Power, PNY, A-DATA are fine, but I have more faith that a big company will do it right.
I believe most of them have been Intels. These are the micro PCs, which probably doesn't help either as the fans aren't very good and they never get cleaned out until they decide to overheat and stop working for the staff. Hospital and clinic PCs tend to lead a rough life.
Oh yes, we went through HDDs as well, they needed replaced at about the 4-5 year mark in most of the PCs when they were still the standard. But at least with the old spinning discs we would get a bit of a warning before they decided they had enough and could swap them out with another PC before total failure. The SSD just die at random with no warning at all. Then we get the tickets of "Computer is making loud beeping noises, had to unplugged from power as it will not stop and won't boot into Windows." Every time I see something like that, I know its another failed SSD.
Yeah, it makes a difference even on old computers. I have an old Dell laptop that is still running WINXP for my old OBD1 tuning stuff and I put an IDE SSD in it as I got really tired of the HDD failures on the old drives. Boots up in less than half the time with the SSD. And if its thrown around or dropped, the SSD doesn't care. Had a number of times that HDD read arms got stuck or jammed after a trip to the floor.
I’m running an M1 Mac Mini with an internal SSD and startup is lightning fast. The only think I store on the internal drive is the OS and all my applications. Files are stored on a 4tb external HD. If you store A lot of photos, videos or music files SSD can get pricey real fast. The most processor intensive thing I do is Photoshop and once the image is loaded into RAM the physical HD speed doesn’t really matter.
For a boot drive, SSD is my preference. For storage files, I prefer a conventional 7200 rpm rotational drive.
Depends. I've got a 4 GB external bus powered hard drive myself, but there are increasingly cheaper SATA SSDs. I could get a 1 TB SSD from a big brand for maybe $75 and then use one of my enclosures. It might not be the highest performance level, but most external drives aren't used in any way that creates a lot of erase cycles. I personally wouldn't use a specific USB external SSD. I'd rather have something I can drop in to another enclosure if the interface or port fails. I think some people are even making their own external drives out of M.2 form factor SSDs. Something like this:
The hardest part is getting transfers at USB 3 speeds. I have a USB micro-B drive to USB-C 3.1 cable, but most people might try using standard USB-A 3.0 cables and an adapter and not all will pass it at max speeds.
Lite On is a "contract manufacturer" who build SSD for a lot of companies, they likely buy a "turn key" solution (i.e. controller and supported nand) from another company and do the manufacturing with it. Kingston is another one big in contract manufacturing and I have seen them help a large company build their SSD for them.
My failed SSD was a 50GB OCZ Vertex 2 that lasted me 7 years as a "work" drive, I use it not for my OS but my source code drive where I run compiling on. Going from a 7200rpm HDD to 2 SATA MLC SSD in raid cut down my build time from 1.5 hr to 45 mins. My other failed SSD was a refurbished Toshiba enterprise SSD with 120GB, it worked fine till I kept it powered off for 2 years and I think the data was lost on it due to data retention not designed for powering off that long. It was a refurb with 90 days warranty so I can't complain after it worked well for 3 years and then die after 2 years in storage.
Surprisingly the most durable data I have on my HDD was from a 2003 Seagate 7200.7, they were reliable back then and my 120GB was still able to spin up with 0 bad sector today.
I still have an old Seagate external drive that I often use to transfer files on old computers that don't play well with newer USB drives. Still works to this day.
And while I rarely fire up my old 486 anymore that HDD is still working as well. No bad sectors either.
