[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 05/06/2014 07:22 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote:
>> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
>> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of Kent Borg
>>
>> I don't trust flash, so I am being cautious, but...
> Everything you said is equally true of rust.
>
> HDD's can also die with no warning and no recourse.  The question would be:  What's the probability, and what's the value?  If value is sufficient, then you add redundancy in the form of mirroring, etc.

Go ahead and trust SSDs on par with HDDs. I am going to hold off until I 
see it, let the young industry grow up a lot more.

Things like Linux 3.12 being delayed because of Linus' SSD failure make 
an impression on me. Read about disk drives on Newegg and people love to 
complain about DoA disks or disks that fail within the first few weeks, 
but then the personal impression I have is that disks are behaving much 
the way disks always have.

Yes, "HDD's can also die with no warning and no recourse.", but they 
usually *don't*. They usually start to misbehave first. They usually do 
not go from working to 100% dead in an instant. But from what I have 
heard, SSDs do.  Maybe I am being unfair and SSDs don't deserve this 
reputation, but I have made personal observations and I am going to 
maintain my prejudices a while longer.

Yes, I understand that, though individual flash cells that have low 
cycle count lives, they can be extended by clever firmware. Clever 
proprietary firmware, that might have bugs. Until SSDs can overcome 
their early reputation of having bugs and failing without warning, I am 
going to stay cautious.

I will slowly use SSDs, but I am going to do so cautiously. I am going 
to keep /var and swap and /home on rotating media. Compare me to rust. 
Heck, compare rotating storage to rust.

> But the probability of SATA SSD failing is on-par with HDD.

Go ahead and put swap on SSD if you like. I hear the SSD firmware and 
the redundant chips will save you from chip failures. You should be okay...


-kb, the Kent who doesn't trust proprietary RAID firmware either.