ssd SSD Fragility

[TheXDS]

Hello,

Well, I know this particular thing has been discused a lot on almost every tech channel. But, I really want to know if the tradeoffs given by an SSD versus a regular RAID0 array of disk (ignoring the power draw) would matter enough to get one.

Long story short, I bouught an almost *new* SSD from a guy who was upgrading his computer. I'm not sure what computer he had, but I ended up with a Samsung MZ7TE512HMHP-000L2 SSD, which is basically an OEM version of the dreaded Samsung 840 Evo (you know, the one with the horrible slowdowns). As being based on it, my *new* SSD also had those issues. I didn't know about it then. Well, six monthis passed, and I notticed that my computer would slow down considerably, and from time to time the AHCI controller would hang for a minute or so. Of course, I was really worried, and after a whole day clicking on every article and forum I could find about my issue, I realized that my SSD had this problem, and it would be fixable... If only my drive wasn't OEM. There's no firmware tools for my drive, even if it's the exact same thing as an 840 Evo. So, I got in contact with the guy, and he said that he will try to help me out in getting another drive somehow, maybe through warranty or someting.

Well, right now I made myself a RAID0 array of HDD I had laying around, and yes, it's pretty loud, and doesn't really give me the seek performance of an SSD, but It got me to thinking... Is it, from a reliability standpoint, really worth having an SSD over an HDD?

I mean, both can fail and stop working at all, and yes, HDD's are very fragile, but ther are phisically fragile, not datawise. Or at least not that much. If well taken care of, a Hard disk will outlive the rest of the components of a computer, whereas an SSD will last for a few years before it gets to an unusably slow state, or even completely failing.

I'm totally aware that if one of my RAID0 disks dies, my data is gone. But so will if my SSD decided to stop working completely (which was pretty close to do anyways)

So, would you thinkk this theme would do for a good TechQuickie video? I would like to know all the pros and cons of an SSD over a closely performing RAID0 array of disks (again, ignoring power draw).

[GDRRiley]

the fastest 4 hard drives in a raid 0 aray would be beaten by a single old SSD every day.

[m0k]

Well i mean your comparison is kinda flawed in this case...

you bought a used SSD, one that you even acknowledge is knows for slowdowns etc. 
 

[DXMember]

Since we're not talking about physical stress endurance,

 

here's an article on NAND endurance:

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

 

Samsung 840 Evo is the worst thing that exists

a proper SSD over RAID0 HDD array any time except for crazy mass storage maybe...

[dizmo]

SSD's, especially newer ones, aren't that bad at all. For the average user even the cheapest one is still reliable for a very, very long time.

I'd much rather have the speed over the maybe extra year or so on the end of it's life. I'll always upgrade before the drive itself actually fails.

I can never go back to HDD based storage for anything other than archiving.

[TheXDS]

by *new* I meant that it didn't have much data written to it, it was pretty much the OS it came with, the recovery partition and, that's it.

And, in the other hand, I've used and abused 40 GB HDDs even today, and they still rocking like new.

BTW, the issue with the 840 Evo is well documented. A nasty firmware bug lead to several problems while reading, so the performance would literally drop below 10 MB/s in a matter of weeks. Samsung and some other OEM manufacturers released several patches for it, and the last one did solve the slowdowns, but led the drive to constantly rewrite the data, so the lifespan was shortened for reads as well as writes.

I'm not a defendant of the HDD, but at least in my experience, it has been less of a hassle to deal with when they fail.

Edit: Write performance was fine, and newly written files would read fast, but not as fast as the drive should (around ~300 MB/s when it should be ~500 MB/s on a 6 month old drive) and I didn't even write that much to it. It only contained my OS, and a few programs I use a lot, but my documents and my Steam library was on another HDD. Again, I want to reiterate, when I bought it, it was almost new, and I didn't know about the issues with the firmware.