Does anybody still use mechanical hard drives?

One of the 3 SSD's i own failed recently, and countless USB drives failed on me over the years.

Software RAID.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/36504/how-to-create-a-software-raid-array-in-windows-7/

 

I've had 7/7 of my WD Caviar Green drives fail. I've had numerous 2.5" SATA drives completely fail/slowly fail. I've had 2 SSDs get fried due to an electrical short, but I'm sure they would have lived to 100 years had they not been fried.

I would say SSDs getting bricked is far less common than mechanical failure on a HDD.

 

And if you put another mechanical drive, you wouldn't have this issue now?

 

Which still would've done absolutely nothing in the given set of circumstances...

Maybe, but I've never encountered a situation where the spinning drive vanished before I got to pull data from it...and I've seen many of them fail.

 

I've seen HDDs go from 100% fine to 100% dead overnight. But yes most drives give a warning they are going to poop out, locking up, BSOD, freezing.

 

And SSD's don't slow down over time? Lol...


Sure, they're (hopefully) still faster than a HDD - but that is not guaranteed.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...ncy-test-overall-performance.html#post9577755


The link above isn't meant to show that SSD's are slower than HDD's - no, just showing how variable they are (as a class and per device).


Also, the comment by Jon is enlightening too:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...ncy-test-overall-performance.html#post9578230

 

Well that is why I avoid all SandForce controller SSDs. I scrapped all the SF-1200 SSDs I had and went all Intel for awhile (G1/G2/G3). Then Intel went all SandForce with 525/535 so I went to Samsung's PM800/810/830/840 and had good experiences. I just bought a Crucial M500 SSD for my dad's Studio laptop, cheapest non SandForce controller SSD, Marvell controller.

Older SandForce controller SSDs REALLY slow down when the SSD is at capacity/near capacity. My Intel SSDs never had that, nor my Samsung's.

 

Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean anything. There are millions of SSDs and HDDs on the market, and the experiences of one person don't represent reliability as a whole.

No storage medium is perfect. Back up anything you aren't willing to lose.

 

Really not from my side I currently have 9 WD Green drives and none have failed so far they are used at storage medium not main O/S drives so they only power on when needed. So I can say for the time I had my Green drives my failure rate is 0% but my Blue WD has seen more culput but that was when they were like 7 years old life span of constant usage. So I would say this experience you had unless we know more about the environment it was used in is all hear say at the best and not a world wide phenomenon.

That doesn't have much to backup and electrical hardware will fail overtime regardless of what one may say. At least with HDD I get to hear the click of death and at least get a chance to backup but for SSD since it is all chips and electrical all fail at once IMO.

 

I've had a number of hard drives fail, but only one fail suddenly without being able to backup anything. It was a 120GB 7200rpm Seagate drive in 2003. It was quite new, maybe a month old. After starting up the computer one day, I heard a loud band from inside the case. A chip on the PCB of the hard drive had exploded. I've owned tons of other drives and have known of lots more owned by family and friends, and failures have always been quite rare. After about 2006/7, I only know of a single hard drive failure, but even then my girlfriend was able to copy the entire contents of her drive to an external.

A few weeks ago when I was home, I tripped over the power cord of a 2TB external drive I have had for over three years. After that, it worked very slowly for about a day as I copied off the entire contents of the drive. But then the next day is seemed to be running at full speed and there were no reported errors and it checked out fine. Of course I back everything up, but I have a lot of faith in the reliability of hard drives.

 

Seems like I'm in the minority, but I have huge trust of mechanical hard drives. I still have functional original IDE drives in the 600E and T30, not to mention the other 15 laptops i've had. I've only had ONE mechanical hard drive failure, and that was due to the person repeatedly dropping the computer. I'm not fully convinced with SSDs yet, I'm wary of the write life cycle on them.

 

Well the idea is you won't care in 4-6 years because SSDs will hopefully be much cheaper and bigger and more reliable then. also they can completely transform a laptop performance and battery life wise. breathed in some amazing life in to my XPS M1330.

 

Thing is, that's not completely what's holding them back. While they're great for enhancing the snappiness of the OS of your computer, there's not much more use for them otherwise. So unless there's some new enhanced technology that comes out within that period, SSD with just be a fancy alternative to HDD. Business, would be the exception.

 

the older sandforce drives faced some glicthes just like any other manufacturers at the time. ive not faced issues with the intel 530.

 

I think SSDs are probably flakier on average than mechanical drives, and they're not ideal for everything, given writing to them wears them out more than a mechanical drive, and I totally agree about responsiveness...modern Windows combined with a modern system with piles of RAM, an SSD mostly just helps with the boot process. Certainly nice, but not really a necessity (whereas more power or RAM may be).

Right now I've got an SSD as my main drive in two notebooks, and a 7200RPM drive for media and the like on my Alienware notebook, but after having a scare following a firmware update on my SSD, I'm not 100% sure I'd have bought another one rather than just going for a 7200RPM boot drive too.

Huh, didn't know there was a 1.5TB notebook drive now! (I know there are 2TB 2.5" drives for external enclosures, but...)

I was a big fan of Seagate's Momentus XT, given it actually cut boot time to much closer to a quality SSD than to a mechanical drive, but had all the advantages of a mechanical drive too...but now I guess they're just going with 5400RPM drives and smaller RAM cache and whatnot. Although like you mention regarding 5400RPM drives, maybe that's not as bad as it sounds.

Western Digital's hybrid sounds interesting too, except the review I read said something about needing to unlock the SSD portion? Or the drive portion? I don't know, for some reason you had to use Windows software to unlock part of it, which sounded lame. Neat idea though for maybe pulling off a boot drive + media drive in the same hard drive slot.

 

holy cow you beat me by 9, i only got 6 laptops right now

why bother to update firmware if it works just fine? its like graphics driver always got issues, and windows update is horrible. btw, seagate/samsung need to hurry up with that 2TB 9.5mm 2.5" HDD.

sandforce had problem with their firmware just before 2.15 iirc it locks up in window and bsod. after the update theres no problem at all. I still got several sandforce SSD and loving it. btw marvel/samsung aren't necessary faster lol, just how the build and design to make benchmark look faster. write a bunch of files outside the DRAM size and you'll get a performance equal or slower than sandforce SSDs, except S301 SLC =)

if you give enough OP space it won't really slow down but just loses space in exchange of performance. samsung SSD just suck imo.. 830 was alright.

 

DUDE! look at the other thread you can already buy 2.5" 9.5mm 2TB drives.

 

In my friends laptop, I hooked her up with a 120gb Crucial M500 for her OS and 500gb WD Black for storage and lesser used apps. For my 8510P I have a 128gb 840 Pro and one day will add a 1tb drive to the optical bay since I never use my optical drive anymore ( THANK YOU ISO's and DIGITAL DOWNLOADS ! : )

It makes more sense to run both if you don't use your optical drive like most people. The SSD's are best for everything except mass storage where a 500 - 1tb HDD in the optical bay just makes sense.

 

In my machine I have a 256 GB SSD as the boot drive and a 750 GB mechanical drive for all of my files. I have a question though. I have always understood that SSDs are better at reading than writing and HDDs are better at writing than reading. If I were to ditch the HDD and go all SSD for everything, how much (if any at all) of a performance drop would I see as far as writing files goes?

 

Any SSD will destroy a HDD as far as performance goes, regardless of whether it's reading or writing data. If you ditch the HDD for an all SSD setup, you will either see no perceivable difference or an increase in performance depending on your workload.

The only thing HDDs excel at compared to SSDs is the price/storage capacity ratio. They have a very low cost per GB. Given that if your workload doesn't benefit from a SSD or if you aren't a speed junky (some members on NBR definitely aren't), a HDD is likely your best option. Us speed junkies and power users will continue to use SSDs in the mean time because we get what we perceive as meaningful benefits from them. I certainly do, hence why I have at least one SSD per computer I own.

 

Thank alot for that info. So basically that setup was recommended more for price per GB storage-wise rather than performance I take it.

EDIT: LOL, you edited your post and posted exactly what I was thinking above.

Thanks!

 

See my edit above, but yeah, you SSD + HDD will in a sense give you the best of both worlds with very little compromises.

 

its the way to go, at least the way intel wants it to go at the moment which is why they don't increase DMI bandwidth :'(

 

unless your 15" laptop doesn't have 2 HDD bays and you want/need your optical drive.

EDIT: wth is wrong with me? even with an IDE optical drive a it would still work well enough for games. but, if get an IDE blu ray player won't bluray movies lag if i make it a USB external optical drive? maybe with a USB 3 expresscard it wouldn't lag?

 

I think complete solid state is the way of the future, but i could never justify the current price of an SSD above say 256gb when you have the option of a HDD. Maybe in 3-5 years when we're looking at 500Gb SSD drives for $100-150. But until then, i think a well maintained HDD that is propperly defragged and cleaned should be fine for most people.

 

hard drive running games would be no problem, I think for the most part other than loading applications don't really need an SSD. SSD is failing only in write endurance and capacity thats about it, and maybe heat.

 

turns out Blu Rays do play over USB 2.0. might have to get a 2tb drive and an SSD.

 

uncompressed 1080p is about about 6MB/s iirc, so usb 2.0 is plenty.

 

I will never use a non-SSD as the primary hard drive in a laptop. I wouldn't mind a secondary HDD (for space), but I will never run an OS off an HDD again. It is definitely one of those "you will never go back" things for me. Same goes for an IPS display.

In my desktop right now I run the OS off of an SSD, and I store most of my stuff on a 2 TB HDD. I could see a similar thing going on in a laptop, though a laptop with two hard drives is gonna have to be a little on the big side

 

I setup a system (MSI AIO) a few weeks ago and here are my thoughts (relevant here because of notebook parts: especially WD Blue 5400 RPM HDD):


Short version:
Total time to setup system (i5, 8GB RAM Win8x64) from plugging in the power cord to being ready to use it after all WU's was just shy of 18 hours. On an internet connection that can download the Win8.1 upgrade (~3.5GB file) in about 12 minutes). Without Office installed. Just the O/S finally ready to respond to MY needs, not its own.

This is with uninstalling the Norton built in virus as step #1 (no; it's not A/V to me).

This also speaks volumes about people's insistence that a higher density HDD is better/faster than a lower density with a faster spindle speed (they're very, very wrong). Higher density HDD's have always been slower in my experience - the exceptions being mostly (some) Hitachi Travelstars.

At the end of this ordeal, I short stroked the C: drive to 50GB (1/20th of the capacity) and the responsiveness was instantly increased. The true performance though (such as installing Office 2013 full version from USB) was not enhanced (this is the blight of high density drives: very slow to lock onto the smaller tracks) and the Office install still took over 75 minutes with all WU's installed.


Compare this to setting up an Intel NUC with Win8.1x64 Pro (from USB 2.0 'key') with 16GB RAM, an i3 cpu and an M4 or M500 mSATA SSD:

Install Windows: Less than 10 minutes.
WU's: less than 30 minutes.
Install Office: less than 2 minutes.
Office Updates: less than 10 minutes.

System ready to be used from 'parts' to fully setup: less than 1 hour.

More than a 20x increase in productivity and this speed/performance enhancement is available over the life of the system.

Forget about program launches and startup/shutdown speeds. That is not what Win8.1 and an SSD are about (even the HDD was comparable after being short stroked and especially after being defragged properly with PD).


The real productivity enhancements are realized in the maintenance side of owning/using a computer system;

Today's O/S's have much higher requirements of the hardware (even if they can run on something from a decade ago). Software too is designed to leverage the SSD's a user might (should) have in a modern system.

Thinking (only) that capacity is > than performance is very, very short sighted and will waste years for anyone needing the most stable/up-to-date setup each time they sit down to do work with their system(s).

Even a secondary drive (HDD) in a notebook is not in their best interests, imo. This is/speaks to the 'durability' side of the HDD vs. SSD equation.

Do I use mechanical HDD's? Yes.

In my NAS units.

Will I switch those dozens and dozens of HDD's in the NAS to SSD's? Yes.

When I have 10GB Ethernet ports on my whole network (right now; link aggregation with 2, 3 or more GB ports is working well).


When I setup the almost $2K AIO and saw how it worked (20+ hours later...) - I cannot see how these sell at all. Not when a $350 (on sale) Asus T100TA gives more than 10x more usable performance (even if the capacity is less than desired at 64GB total) and they're both touch enabled too.

I just know that some of my clients 10 years down the road will be saying to me 'SSD's are the only drive to buy for a new system today' - and I'll just smile and tell them no; *rSSD's is what they should be buying - SSD's are ancient tech that simply slow me down to a crawl.


* RAM based SSD's (or their successors).


Anyone not using SSD's today simply doesn't know what they're missing: their precious, never to be seen again, time (unless they have an IT department backing them).

 

I'm really not sure what your problem is or how it is even possible to take that long. Not even paying close attention to the installation, I installed Windows 7 Pro on three laptops at different times over the past month and they all took less than 2 hours, including manually installing all the drivers and downloading and installing the copious amounts of Windows updates after SP1. It is mind boggling how you can come up with such nonsense as simply installing the base Windows OS taking 18 hours. You are off in you own little world here.

You are very wrong. There are plenty of benchmarks out there showing a battery of performance tests between hard drives. None of them agree with you. I also speak from experience. I have been buying hard drives for a long time, always searching out the best performance of price, performance, and capacity. For example, my latest 5400rpm 2.5" hard drives feel just as fast, if not faster than my 7200rpm 3.5" hard drives from just a few years ago. If you think higher density drives "have always been slower," then how on earth do hard drives keep steadily getting faster?

 

I see you still don't read for comprehension: I didn't install the O/S - I simply did the updates on Windows 8 all the way to Windows 8.1.

Your experience speaks of your inexperience.

I'm comparing HDD's from the same generation (not newer drives being faster than older drives; duh).

And nowhere have I seen a 3.5" HDD being slower than a 2.5" drive from the same generation. Ever.

The simple fact of the larger drive's greater circumference and thereby greater speed simply leaves the smaller drives in the dust in actual workloads. Every time.

And the battery of tests that show I'm wrong? I laugh at them all.

Not because they're not right (i.e. the numbers/scores are accurate, I'm sure) but because they have no correlation to real world usage.


I don't deal in the theoretical; I deal with what gives me a real advantage and makes me real money.

You? I think you just like disagreeing with me.

 

Reading comprehension? Regardless of whether you call installing Windows 8.1 an upgrade or an installation, there is no way you can sit there with a straight face and tell me that it took you 18 hours.

Hard drives from the same generation have the same density, so I'm not really sure how it is possible for you to not compare newer and older drives. Drive space varies based on the number of platters used and sections of platters not being used. Comparing drives from the same generation with varying data densities is a little hard to do. The defining feature of a new generation of drives is the higher drive density and accompanying bump in performance. For you to say that higher density drives are always slower is ridiculous.

Proof positive that you invent nonsense in your mind and pass it off as a "fact:"

Me neither.

If the smaller drive's data density is higher, the same amount or greater of data can pass by the read heads within a certain amount of time. This is can be true even if the larger drive's tangential velocity on the outer rim of the platter is far greater than that of the smaller drive.

You post nonsense that goes against my experience, the experience of other people, and also plenty of tests people have done (which are NOT theoretical), and you don't understand why I wouldn't disagree with you? You know that most of these tests you "laugh at" are all doing very real things and measuring the time it takes to perform them, right?

 

that's what they were telling me at work, when i said a i got 5400 rpm 1tb. they said the density is high it would probably perform closer to a 7200 drive. it boots up in a decent amount of time.

 

if many things are equal, higher density drive is slower, hold true for sequential

take barracuda 3TB and 2TB for example. 3TB and 2TB both read/writes max at 180MB/s to 80MB/s for most outer and inner platter. average speed to read/write entire drive is 130MB/s now 3 TB spends more time writing with slower speed cause the last 1 TB will be spent on the slowest portion of the drive, while you get a 2nd 2TB and it starts fresh writing from the fastest part while the first 2TB already filled up.

and if you raid 0 them..

2 years old 2.5" 1TB velociraptor is faster than fastest 3.5" newly released enterprise SAS/SATA HDD

sadly this world runs mostly by money. this is why if people ever want to know storage performance I'd recommend people not to go on thessdreview, they are terrible at it..

regarding to experience and experience of other people etc.. usually the smartest aren't from a group of people but alone, holds true through out the history, einstein, newton etc etc. and what I am trying to say is, I will only ever refer tweaktown. for anandtech, tomhardware level isn't quite there yet, for storage reviews.

 

I'm a gamer. I care about having more space to store my game collection than how fast I can boot Windows. 256 ssd boot drive with terabyte mechanical drives is how I do usually.

In laptops where to keep up with the pace of gpus in their yearly release schedule sacrifices have to be made. I'm going to spend the majority of my funds on the high end sli gpu versus a big ssd. It all comes down to priorities.

Sent from my SGH-T999 using Tapatalk 2

 

heres a good example of tweaktown being great. SanDisk Extreme II 240GB 6-Drive SSD RAID Report - Secondary Volume Benchmarks - PCMark 8 Extended

@tilleroftheearth, look at 2nd last page and last chart, more OP = faster random data written, power of enterprise drive.

 

Yeah, I've read that link earlier today. It might take a while for the world to catch up with what I'm doing, but eventually it does. lol...

Thanks for finding it and posting it in this thread though.

 

Wow, that is a pretty creative way to try to twist facts around. I guess we should just go back to 120GB 5400rpm drives but pack about 17 of them into a RAID 0 array. Amirite?

Also, data density doesn't equal storage space. I don't know which Barracuda 2TB and 3TB drives you are talking about, but how do you know they don't have the same platter density? If you compare three 2TB drives, one of the current generation with 2 1TB platters, one of the last generation with 3 667GB platters, and one of the last last generation with 4 500GB platters, the one using 2 1TB platters will be faster at everything.

It doesn't take Einstein or Newton to figure out which of two hard drives is faster...

 

Platter density destroys real world performance (except for sequential reads/writes) unless other progress is made elsewhere.

It doesn't take a genius to figure this out; just use two, otherwise identical systems except for the HDD's, and you'll know that.

A new gen HDD with denser platters has better/upgraded supporting mechanical, electrical and electronic components.

It other words; no, all things are not equal.

 

Claims like these need to be supported.

Which is a point that cannot be overstated; but something I think a lot of us keep forgetting.

We don't all use our system the same way; so what works well for User A, may not be the best fit for User B. Lets try not to lose sight of that. Although I don't think there's many that wouldn't benefit from an OS driven SSD. All configuration after that, will definitely vary with use.

I've had that configuration since day one. Blu-ray plays just fine over USB 2.0

 

True, BUT...

On the one hand, there is a lot of laptops still in use with only one HDD slot and no mSATA slots. Some don't even have optical drives to be replaced with additional storage.

On the other hand, SSD prices are just ridiculous in comparison with HDDs and even hyrbids.

Until those two problems ain't solved, there is no way majority of mainstream users use SSDs.

 

SSD prices are not ridiculous.

You buy an SSD for speed, not bulk storage capacity. Nobody buys an SSD to use it as bulk storage media for their 4TB+ collection of BluRay rips.

It's like saying that a $120,000 Ferrari is a terrible car, because it only seats 2 people, when you can buy a minivan for $30,000 that seats 7 people. One is built for speed. The other is built for bulk storage capacity.

 

As far as I see it, SSD is new technology that is supposed to totally replace mechanical drives in nearest future, at least in notebooks.

Only because they are too expensive.

This comparison works only if the minivan is steam-powered.

 

Yeah, in all my notebooks - it already has.

Too expensive is relative - looking back to the $800+ 120GB HDD drives I bought over a decade ago seems like so much foolishness - but it was the best decision at the time when capacity and performance were equally important (and it was).

The comparison doesn't work for me because both can be driven at the legal speeds and both will turn heads (one in admiration/jealously and the other in a thinly disguised 'hmmph').


Besides; with a Ferrari and 6 passengers that is only a great excuse to drive it more! With a minivan? um, ahh... I'll get back to you on that.

 

You are still continuing with this? Now your excuse for why all the evidence in the world says that you are wrong is that drives with higher density platters have "better/upgraded supporting mechanical, electrical and electronic components." Ok, buddy. Care to explain what any of these amazing advances are that more than make up for the increased platter density "destroying" performance? The defining characteristic of each new drive generation is increased platter density, bar none, and this is where the vast majority of performance increases are realized.

Riddle me this, Tiller: How can you possibly know that higher platter density "destroys" performance if drives with higher platter density actually perform better?

Get out of here, please. You are really grasping at straws now.

 

tilleroftheearth, people buy Ferrari because they like the way it looks, possibly also because they think it impresses other people driving that car. There are a lot of fast cars out there, so people choose one for the looks&feels. And a Ferrari minivan would've most likely lost most of Ferrari's charm.

Also, I'm impressed by how can you even compare such sophisticated (in terms of choice) thing as a car with tools.

 

Don't over-estimate the benefit of platter density. It's only good for sequential reads, which account for a very small portion (est. 5%) of the data access patterns for desktop users and gamers.

Meanwhile, for the remaining 95% of the data access patterns you'll run into (random reads), access time is king. A mechanical drive may get 5%, 10%, 20% boost here at best every few years. Meanwhile, an SSD gets 10,000% advantage today, right now.

 

Wow, you are dense, huh?

Don't worry - you're right. Believe in your little world you create for yourself and please don't try to learn anything you don't already know.

Good luck with that.

 

Didn't stop them from creating a four-passenger all-wheel drive hatchback. While it ruffled the purists' feathers, I think the FF is the coolest car they make because of its practicality.

Then you must not have been around many computer-related message boards. Those analogies happen all the time.