SSD or HDD for a 'desktop replacement'?

I was all set to choose an SSD after learning about its vastly superior performance and "better reliability", but I have come to question the latter after reading a couple of articles. I understand that a HDD has moving parts and generates more heat, but what is this I read about how SDDs can only be written to/rewritten to x amount of times and not lasting long for a heavy user?

I didn't even know what an SSD was until a few weeks ago and it's felt like a crash course on computer hardware and software throughout that period, so pardon the obliviousness. I just want to be certain I'm making the right choices when configuring a notebook.

So can anyone shed light on SSD vs HDD when it comes to reliability for a desktop replacement?

 

Heavy user as in server type workload for a consumer SSD, server SSDs are a tad different to account for that. You will change your laptop long before the SSD can't be written to. You can check this out too: SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm, these guys have been abusing their SSDs for the purpose of testing and the verdict is that manufacturers are being conservative in their estimates.

I've been running SSDs for a while now and aside from the controller in one of my SSDs crapping out, never had any issues.

 

I have had the 128gb SSD in my desktop (used several hours daily, reimaged several times) for almost a year now. According to SSDLife, which reads the estimated lifetime from the SMART data, it has 97% of its lifetime left. At 3% per year, that's 30 years of use before the SMART data predicts the drive will die, and based on that endurance test thread, I should be able to expect it to last at least twice as long as SMART says it will.

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get a laptop with two HDD caddys and run both. Put the OS and common apps on the SSD and all your music and other data on the normal HD and have the best of both worlds.

 

Agree w/most of the above comments.

SSDs make a HUGE difference in boot time, time until system is usable after logging in and overall system perf.

As for reliability, most of us here would say go w/either the Samsung 830 or Crucial M4.

Avoid Sandforce stuff. I would also say, avoid SSDs from smaller companies who likely have a lot fewer resources to properly validate drives and firmware along w/those who have no expertise in making flash or SSD controllers. So, that rules out companies like OCZ, Mushkin, Corsair, etc. It's not worth the savings (IMHO).

 

Thank you for the replies. Unfortunately a lot of the content in that "SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm" experiment went over my head, even after reading through 30+ pages of the thread. Googling hasn't helped much either, so here I am again.

"Up to 20GB Host writes per day for a minimum of 5 years" <-- In lay terms, what does writes per day mean? As I understand, some things such as MMOPGs(?) are constantly writing a lot of temporary data. I'm presuming even several hours of this could potentially hit 20GBs, or is this not the case?

What kind of task "write" to the drive? Might even something like an IM conversation be constantly be writing/overwriting unless chat logs were disabled?

Is it quantity of writes or the amount of memory used in a write which is significant? e.g. Creating 1 bitmap vs downloading 1 large file.

Is a drive being "written" to even when idle and nothing is being saved or downloaded?

Does reliability vary at all between 120/180/240/480GBs?

 

For example, from SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm - Page 192, it looks like thru their torture test tools, they've written >2 million gigabytes (or 2174 terabytes) to a Samsung 830 doing nothing but torturing the drive for the last 3 months. The drive still seems to be working.

I have a >2 year old Intel X25-M G2 160 gig SSD that's in main machine that I use every single day, sometimes quite heavily and I've only (per Intel's SSD) tools written only 5.61 TB. I have a spreadsheet where I track the numbers and I'm writing ~7.3 GB/day. However, I also have a 1 TB regular hard drive that most of my other stuff.

The system and processes are writing almost all the time, even when you're sitting idle. If running Win 7, try hitting Ctrl-Shift Escape, go to Performance tab, click on Resource Monitor > Disk tab. You can also use tools like Process Monitor to watch disk i/o activity.

Please read over AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ and bunch of pages that follow to understand flash pages, blocks, writing, etc. The drives we recommended and most currently sold SSDs have TRIM support now, BTW. http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/1 was also good.

Until I heard about the aforementioned torture tests a few months ago, I was super concerned about minimizing needless writes to my SSDs. Now, I'm not so concerned. Even if a drive crapped out from too many writes at say 500,000 GB instead of 2 million GB, let's say you wrote 100 GB/day. The drive should in theory still last 13 years.

I bet the drive might experience some other failure for whatever reason before the 13 years rather than a failure due to too much writing, on a drive w/decent write amplification.

 

Even if your drive fails after 13 years (or maybe even 5 or 10), you'll be able to replace it for a 1tb SSD for a price similar to conventional HDDs today. Just a year ago, the price of a 512gb SSD was astronomical ($600-700 minimum), but I just bought one for $350, and have seen them as low as $310-$315 brand new on eBay.

 

Also, assuming that you completely run out of writes on a SSD, you'll still be able to read data off of them just fine (assuming the controller is still good).

As for Sandforce, I took a gamble on the Intel 330 (SF-2281) and so far I've had absolute no problem with it. Only had it for ~1 month or so, but I'm hoping it'll last. My 320 is still performing beautifully since buying it last summer (albeit slower than the 330, SATAII vs III).