In the process of acquiring a new laptop. Considering an SSD drive.
Any downside to a solid state hard drive ?
They generally don’t have as much storage space as a regular drive.
higher cost/gigabyte, though the normal (SATA) ones are IMO worth it. I will never go back to a spinning disk.
Cost is the main downside.
SSDs used to have problems with long-term endurance. The flash memory technology they’re based on has a finite number of erase/write cycles per cell, and that number used to be low enough that the SSD would begin to suffer discernible capacity loss in a few years.
Now, SSDs have huge numbers of extra cells with write load-leveling so that they can realistically be expected to last as long as spinning-rust drives (with their tendency to electromechanical failures of moving parts).
About the only outstanding downside left is the much higher cost per gigabyte, but the disparity is much smaller than it used to be. Nowadays it’s about 4-to-1 (SSD costs about 4 times as much as comparable-size HD). My recollection was that it was more than 10-to-1 back when I built my first SSD-equipped computer, which is why it has an 80-gig Intel as a boot volume but a whole terabyte of normal HD, and I paid about the same amount for each.
Next computer I build will probably be all SSD; I can offload “data” (photos, docs, etc.) to network-based storage, and that’s the only thing I’d keep spinning rust around for otherwise.
Also if you use the drive for heavy read/write cycles, spinning disk is your better bet.
Also i dont think data can be recovered from a dead SSD in many cases if its a failure of the memory modules themselves.
For me myself, SSD does not have enough speed advantage to make up for the downsides.
It doesn’t do anything enough faster to matter to me, 7200 rpm platters are fast enough, and terrabytes are cheap in platter form, not so much in SSD.
The real answer though is going to depend mostly on your needs and use.
For a laptop with a hard drive up to 250 GB I think SSD pretty much a no-brainer now. The extra cost of an SSD of that size is a small proportion of the cost of the machine, and a laptop is obviously something where physical trauma like dropping is that much more likely. 1 TB and up the cost difference is still significant.
What do you mean by “heavy read/write cycles”? SSDs are perfectly fine for laptops and desktops even if you have a swap space (page file) on it. In fact that’s where you get the most benefit out of an SSD. If you are talking about enterprise database servers and data centers, that’s a whole different matter.
Also if you are ever thinking about the ability to recover data from a damaged drive, you need a better backup strategy.
yep. Tech Report ran an experiment a few years ago, testing how much data you could write and erase from SSDs before they started degrading.
verdict: A hell of a lot.
SSDs and HDDs and even USB drives in general, do not keep writing over the same spot over and over so the reliability is fairly high. I’ve had as many SSDs fail on me as HDDs in the past 20+ years.
For those who want to know, the drive is broken up into sectors, and the data populates the sectors sequentially. When one erases/deletes, the sector (or file to be specific) is marked as deleted, but, the new data continues to populate the following sequential sectors. It’s not until they are all filled do you start overwriting the first sector and so forth the process begins again. This technique is used by all storage media as far as a I know aside from CD/DVD/BR.
Hence why you have a chance to recover deleted files and forensics types can find all manner of info on you if they so desire.
ANY WAYS, I’d totally go for an SSD for a laptop. Faster, less power consumption, and, as there are no mechanical parts they are more robust and if there is a MTBF a HDD and SSD will probably even out.
I’m not sure I understand this last bit. There’s always a Mean Time Between Failures. What changes is just how long it is.
Things may have changed now, but I bought a laptop with an SSD maybe five or 6 years ago and it is now almost unusable. It came with 128 GB, now below 110 and is always giving me a nearly full disk message. Had I bought a spinning disk, it would have had at least 512 GB and still be going strong. The thing is that OSs grow, program sizes grow (my latest install of Latex took a couple of hours and involved over 4000 files downloaded) and disks degrade a bit. At this point, I won’t buy anything with less than a TB.
Imagine my first computer had no hard drive, 64K of memory, and a 160K one sided diskette drive. And my first hard drive held 10MB.
I still use spinning disks for server storage, but on my desktop I’ll never go back to that. The quiet alone is worth it. I use an M.2 drive that’s about 4x faster than a normal SSD, but even the plain SATA drives are a huge improvement. 1 TB drives are <$300 so cost is barely a factor these days.
The best solution is:
- At least one SSD to run your OS and any programs that need speed (e.g. games)
- At least one large HD to hold data
This option may be limited on laptops, but is easy to accomplish with desktops. You could also use an external HD, though you sacrifice speed. For my primary computer, SSDs do not provide the space I need to actually hold enough data at any suitable price point. A sole SSD might be fine if it were not my primary computer.
The maximum size should not shrink. But you do know that hard drives (traditional and SSD) are sold by the gigabyte, but OSes measure gibibytes (base 10 vs base 2)? 128 GB = 119.2 GiB. Therefore, the OS will always show it being smaller than advertised.
This was me, not so long ago, but the last couple times I got a new computer, I realized that basically nothing is really installed on them any more. Virtually all my games are in Steam’s cloud when they’re not actively being played, my media is all in somebody’s cloud or other, my data is all on OneDrive, DropBox, or iCloud Drive, my photos are all out there in the sky…
I can fill arbitrary amounts of space keeping local copies of that stuff for performance, but these days getting a new box for me is pretty much a matter of entering some credentials, copying a small number of files I don’t trust in the cloud, and installing apps (and even those are downloaded). I’d be hard-pressed to use a system with less than 100 GB of disk, probably, but space after that’s just optimization for me. And I generate an absolute ton of data.
You can also (on your primary computer) set up your smaller, but more expensive, SSD as a cache device for your huge, but slower, HDD, and let the algorithm take care of things rather than manually deciding what to store where.
As for storage capacity, GB, TB, PB, etc always refer to powers of 10. I know some popular operating systems display the units as “GB” instead of GGB, or GiB (or whatever), but that is non-standard and just serves to confuse consumers, as exemplified above. Except for technical purposes there are few reasons to count in base-two, so it is a bizarre default.
btw 100 GB does not count as an “absolute ton of data” in 2017 
I have close to 14 TB of data, it just doesn’t sit locally. That’s more or less the point I was making: the disks can be relatively small, because the big stuff is off in the cloud.
Meant to add: the cloud works too, for some. You can swap out your Steam games if you choose, but some people might also play multiple games at the same time, it depends on your style.
It doesn’t work well for me, but YMMabsolutelyV.
Maybe in 2007. 1 TB or more drives have been common for 5+ years
A single modern game is 70+ GB, and the OS is ~30 GB. Even with swapping, anyone even slightly interested in gaming needs 256+, and even that is painful.