Solid stae hard drive questions

They are far faster, very immune to impact damage (like you dropping your laptop) and magnetic fields. They are superior in all respects, except they cost a bit more per gigabyte tham magnetic media and usually have less capacity.

I have one in my laptop and some servers, such as for MySQL database of algebra.com, where speed is of the essence.

i

the media wears out the more times you write to the same spot. it then becomes unwriteable, so gets remapped. over time if you do lots of writes to it, the entire disk would be bad.

there's a difference in consumer and commerical ssd's for this reason. you get more writes to a commerical ssd, so that's what they put in server farms, for instance.

western digital names these type of ssd's red disks. consumer WD ones are called green ssd's.

look for mtbf specs on what you are buying. they're vastly different for different lines.

Much faster for reading, which is what you do mostly with a computer disk. A bit slower, MAYBE, on some large contiguous writes. Probably still faster for writes of many small files.

But, there are some problems. Some drives just fail for no reason. Some get scrambled when powered off abruptly, while doing internal housekeeping. because of wear leveling, they have the ability to remap where any block is physically stored, if this remap table gets corrupted, the whole drive is garbled.

Yes, the name brands seem to be a bit better, but reliability reports from large users (like server farms) still show some drives fail without warning, even with sophisticated users.

I got one for my laptop, and so far, so good!

Jon

The math is in your favor.

Even writing continuously to disk, which almost never happens, will give you a very long time to wear out disk cells, if proper wear leveling takes place.

I buy only Intel SSDs.

i

i work for a computer company. until recently, we haven't sold these because they don't have a long enough mtbf. our computers stay running for 5-10 years at a time, and if it's a swap disk, or on a server farm, they wore out too quickly.

Thanks Ig, Jon, and everyone elso who responded. I am going to buy an Intel SSD today. It seems like that's the best bet. Eric

Yes. Security of a used drive. The solid state ones have a limited number of writes per location, and are designed to keep moving the writes around the drive so you don't get that many per location. This means that pieces of your information are scattered all over the drive, and there is no practical way to low-level format the drive to clear the information off of it. If you feel that your information is sensitive -- and the drive dies, or you just move up to a bigger one, plan to use thermite to turn it into a puddle. Same if you get rid of your old computer and can't use the drive in the new one. Go ahead and give the computer away -- or trade it in -- or anything else. But

*don't* leave the drive in it. And yes, the data can be extracted (by those who know how) from a "dead" drive.

AFIK This is not specific to any brand of drive.

I believe that they are typically faster than electro-mechanical drives.

Good luck, DoN.

After some research it looks like the Intel drives are OK. I ordered a

160 gb drive for 90 bucks, free shipping, and paid 12 bucks for a two year warranty, so the drive really cost 102 bucks. I will still back the drive after it is installed and on a regular basis. Thanks for your input. Eric

Greetings DoN, If I give away any computer with personal info on it they go without the hard drive. It just isn't worth the risk. Eric

I too never let a hard drive out of my possession without first personally destroying it.

A minute of vise and hand sledge time is all it takes... or if I or someone I know wants the magnets, it's disassembled to extract same before whacking.

Yea, there may be better ways, and there may be someone who 'might' be able to grab a snippet of info... but it'd be fantastically expensive & time consuming.

I heard they're going to take a stab at recovering data off that Lanza kid's HD... I saw an account claiming he'd removed and busted up his drive before leaving... it'll be interesting to see what if anything they learn, and how much it costs.

Erik

PS, Reminds me... some years back I was in one of those 'thrift' stores... it was a huge one. There was a whole aisle devoted to computer 'stuff', and there on the floor were 3 5 Gallon paint buckets just heaped full of hard drives. I bet they would have sold the whole lot for $10 or less. God only know what those drives contained. It sent chills up my spine.

For SYSTEM drives they are ideal - as they are virtually permanent (no repeated writes) and they boot fast. For data drives the spinning disk is still king (for a while yet, anyway)

I wouldn't just stuff a SSD into a computer. Depending on the OS, you can do some simple things that can dramatically decrease the writes to the drive. I've been told that some versions of linux detect a SSD and do it automagically, but that source tends to make stuff up on the fly. Some relevant google searches noatime EWF partition alignment

Good!

There are quicker -- and perhaps more satisfying -- ways. Assuming that you enjoy shooting, and have a place where the disk drives can be set up downrange. Set up a stack of them along a horizontal line, and perform penetration tests. See how many drives a particular round can punch through -- and take the survivors to a final set of shots using the best performing round.

So -- he knew about computer security. Yes, it will be an informative exercise.

You know -- aside from something like the pile of thermite turning the drive into modern abstract art -- what I would consider to probably be the best would be to take it apart, separate the platters, and treat each side of each platter to a visit form an orbital sander. :-)

Ouch! I wonder what (interesting) was in them.

I got one Sun Blade 2000 off eBay (one of two in subsequent auctions) which still had a drive in it. All the others were removed, but this one had a corner bent which biased the system board enough so it could not see the drive (a Fibre Channel drive, FWIW), and they apparently just connected a keyboard and monitor, and looked for a drive that way -- rather than fight the bent screw securing the side cover on the machine.

It turned out to be from Symantek -- one of the machines that they were using in house for developing some programs or others, and

*very* poor passwords. (I put the drive in another system, and ran "crack" on the password file to see how good a security company was on their own security. :-) Something like three users, and three very quickly cracked passwords.

Once I transferred that system board to another box, it behaved perfectly, seeing the drives which I put in it with no problems.

In their favor -- it would not have been visible from the outside net unless NATed by their firewall. And I suspect that it was a totally private internal net that it was on.

Enjoy, DoN.

Weeeelllllll

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

Geeks.com had one on sale yesterday. I think it was a 'Kingston' brand SSD.

I installed a SSD in a laptop. I thought it would make it drop proof although I haven't dropped it yet as a test :-)

The computer has a dual core 2.2Ghz processor and 4 Gb of memory. The SSD is reported by the system as having 298.09 Gb. so it was likely labeled as 300 G, or thereabout.

To be frank, I really couldn't really see very much difference in speed over the original 160 Gb conventional hard disk. It certainly didn't make enough difference over the original that I noticed any faster operation.

Various makes have different access times. It might pay to do some research before buying.

It's easy to look at the shock numbers and decide it's better. I see a lot of laptops at garage sales and swap-meets. Dropped laptops are far more likely to have a cracked display than a hard drive with errors.

Decades ago, I had to do shake table and drop tests on electronic test equipment. The stuff got bolted to a table and we shook it on three axes. Then we dropped the table. I expect that's the way drives are tested and not at all the way laptops hit the ground. The display is the weak link.

I've just gone thru this with a friend remotely via videochat in a similarly spec'd laptop. I was unsuccessful in talking him out of it. He's impressed with the improved boot time, but it's not a great time saver. He has a vague feeling that it's somewhat faster in normal operation, but I question whether it's worth the investment. Asking won't get a true metric...he's invested.

I really don't remember exactly when I bought the SSD but it was at least a year ago, and probably longer. At the moment I have Linux Mint installed on the lap top and I am not really excited at how fast it boots.... it doesn't seem to be any faster than any other computer I have.

For myself, I don't believe that unless I was building a computer to throw off the back of a truck that I'd buy another SSD.