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Bob Morales posted:There's a reason why we all have SSD's and not hybrid drives or even silly caching contraptions. They are nowhere as good. Not even in the same universe. Well there's comparing SSHDs to SSDs and then there's comparing SSHDs to HDDs. Sometimes a SSHD costs just as much as an equivalent HDD.
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Apr 23, 2015 22:47
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Shaocaholica posted:Well there's comparing SSHDs to SSDs and then there's comparing SSHDs to HDDs. Sometimes a SSHD costs just as much as an equivalent HDD. Except instead of getting a good HD or a good SSD, you are getting crappy versions of both. Then you then have 2 sets of parts that can fail instead of one. They made sense 3-4 years ago when SSDs were a lot more expensive, but as SSD prices have fallen, they are very affordable. They will continue to fall, and this SSHD thing will be another passing fad that no one cares to remember.
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Apr 23, 2015 23:20
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Are SSHD failure rates so bad?
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Apr 23, 2015 23:45
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Shaocaholica posted:Are SSHD failure rates so bad? Not outrageous, but worse than their single-purpose counterparts. Current Samsung/Intel SSDs are likely to outlast any other part in your computer right now. The failure rates of an SSHD are largely dictated by the HDD it is built around, plus the added SSD, as any component can fail independently. If you want a single drive for your games, you'll be far happier with a good SSD, and if you want to buy drives for storage, you're better off keeping it simple and buying just a disk drive. Your worst case scenario is you get an SSHD, find it lacking, and a year later get an SSD to replace it. Better off to just make the full transition now.
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Apr 23, 2015 23:56
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SSHDs are just relatively very fast HDDs, where did you get two drives from? Are you thinking of the WD Dual Drive, which literally appears to the OS as two separate volumes (a SSD volume and a HDD volume)? Why would you think SSHDs have greater failure rates when they are the same base HDDs, just with more NAND for a cache. Every HDD you buy has a NAND cache. Edit: I'm not suggesting that people get SSHDs instead of SSDs, but for secondary HDDs they are competitively priced compared to standard HDDs and they are fast where HDDs are slow, like access times and random reads. BurritoJustice fucked around with this message at 11:11 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 10:57
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xcore posted:You are obviously not a gamer, but I wouldn't call PC gamers a "vanishing market". You would fill an SSD with 3 copies of GTAV. The price/storage capabilities of SSHDs seems appealing. Yeah, I had a Seagate Momentus XT 750GB (8GB SLC NAND) for my Steam drive for a while, although recently I upgraded it to a Seagate 2TB SSHD (8GB MLC NAND, don't buy the 4TB version which spins at a slower rate) which is just a very fast drive in general. I need a large, fast drive for all those enormous games, which quickly becomes ridiculous on an SSD. GTA V is 60.4GiB alone on my system, for example. I also have all my Steam games installed. I do have two 256GB Samsung 830 SSDs in my system, so I'm not cheaping out on that front, but SSDs still have a little way to go in price terms before I could justify buying one just for games. Edit: as for the guy who was saying they have increased failure rates, that's bollocks. Seagate warranties the newer 3.5" SSHDs for 3 years, and my old Momentus XT came with a 5-year warranty. It also only specifically caches reads, so if the NAND ever dies, it's supposed to fail gracefully back to just being a hard drive. These aren't magic drives or anything, and they need more NAND, but if you can't swallow the cost of a 1TB SSD for your Steam games, and you just want a fast HDD for that use, why not? HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 12:44
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HalloKitty posted:It also only specifically caches reads, so if the NAND ever dies, it's supposed to fail gracefully back to just being a hard drive.
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Apr 24, 2015 15:11
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td4guy posted:Haha, good luck with that. http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead quote:Among the ones we tested, only the Intel 335 Series and first HyperX remained accessible at the end. Even those bricked themselves after a reboot.
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Apr 24, 2015 15:23
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HalloKitty posted:Yeah, I had a Seagate Momentus XT 750GB (8GB SLC NAND) for my Steam drive for a while, although recently I upgraded it to a Seagate 2TB SSHD (8GB MLC NAND, don't buy the 4TB version which spins at a slower rate) which is just a very fast drive in general. I need a large, fast drive for all those enormous games, which quickly becomes ridiculous on an SSD. GTA V is 60.4GiB alone on my system, for example. I also have all my Steam games installed. I do have two 256GB Samsung 830 SSDs in my system, so I'm not cheaping out on that front, but SSDs still have a little way to go in price terms before I could justify buying one just for games. I think I specifically said why not. If you have no money and desperately need a bit more read speed for playing games, by all means, but you'll eventually be replacing it with an SSD, and probably within 1-2 years.
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Apr 24, 2015 15:24
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td4guy posted:Haha, good luck with that. Then again, it's only a Steam library, so it's not exactly critical, eh?
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Apr 24, 2015 16:16
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HalloKitty posted:Then again, it's only a Steam library, so it's not exactly critical, eh? It's not, but the point is that the failure rates are almost certainly additive, and in that case, a dedicated SSD or HDD would be better, simply from the perspective of 'not having to gently caress around with this once it's in'. Any single drive, even SSD, should be considered long-lived RAM in terms of data redundancy.
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Apr 24, 2015 16:30
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You can generally get a Seagate SSHD for the same price as a WD Red, and they are massively faster. If SSHDs where significantly more expensive the "just buy an SSD argument" would hold more water, but why not have your secondary drive be faster for the same investment. Also considering that nothing is stored solely in the flash memory long term, it is just used as a buffer, the NAND would need to fail in the short period of time between data being written to it and mirrored to the platters for it to cause a data loss with buffered writes. If it is just buffered reads, there is precisely a 0% increase in failure rate in having the NAND there. You seem to be confused here on what a SSHD is. It is just a dedicated hard drive. I'm not saying that people should forego the usual SSD primary + HDD bulk combo for a SSHD, but instead that SSD primary + SSHD bulk makes a lot of sense. Edit: what do you mean by "having to gently caress around with it"? Plug it in like any SATA drive and just use it, it is a single simple volume.
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Apr 24, 2015 16:40
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I'm not confused at all. I'm not talking about worrying if the data is lost, I'm talking about the likelihood of the failure of the drive controller for the SSD portion failing in such a way as the HDD becomes unreadable. I am suspicious that the failure mode is not so well handled as you have suggested. Also, the SSD parts on those SSHDs are going to be crappy SSDs, not good ones, so they will fail much quicker than a good Samsung/Intel SSD. The drives are also only faster for reading small chunks of data within the cache. The whole point of having a large drive is to store large data there. If you are reading out something larger than your cache, it becomes useless. If the caches were much larger, and had better quality parts, it might be worth a look, but the market for such a device is small, and will only get smaller as SSD and mSATA drives continue to plummet in price. As for what "having to gently caress around with it" means, it means "open case, take out failed drive, put new drive in, restore data/download steam games again". This amounts to 1-2 hours minimum, which I would rather not do, and will pay a premium to avoid. You can decide separately how valuable your time is.
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Apr 24, 2015 17:18
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I will say though that for all the use cases, a dedicated steam drive is probably the best use case for a SSHD. Having it as your boot drive would mean that the cache almost certainly is filled with OS files so very little games would be cached. However, if you were focused on a single game for a time period, I could see it being almost completely populated in the cache. But, then, if you are going to focus on one game for awhile, you are probably better off just going with the smaller storage and not installing everything you own.
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Apr 24, 2015 17:57
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bull3964 posted:I will say though that for all the use cases, a dedicated steam drive is probably the best use case for a SSHD. Having it as your boot drive would mean that the cache almost certainly is filled with OS files so very little games would be cached. However, if you were focused on a single game for a time period, I could see it being almost completely populated in the cache. Even then, the major complaint is that games like GTA V are huge and can't possibly fit on an SSD (bullshit), but by that very argument, most SSHDs won't really help much either, as the game is far larger than the cache could hold. The cache also only helps for content that is being read more than once, but not being kept in RAM. Or the item being read is too large to keep in cache at all. Only way to find out the exact performance characteristics would be to benchmark a given game. Likely, really large ones would not benefit much from an SSHD, only very small games that do not cache stuff in RAM well and instead constantly read small files from disk. With and SSD, you have a floor value for ALL reads of "very fast", and it doesn't matter how the application reads data.
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Apr 24, 2015 18:55
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Apr 24, 2015 19:50
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BurritoJustice posted:SSHDs are just relatively very fast HDDs, where did you get two drives from? Are you thinking of the WD Dual Drive, which literally appears to the OS as two separate volumes (a SSD volume and a HDD volume)? Why would you think SSHDs have greater failure rates when they are the same base HDDs, just with more NAND for a cache. Every HDD you buy has a NAND cache. HDDs use a DRAM cache and SSHDs (at least the Seagate ones I looked at) use both a DRAM cache and a much larger NAND cache, not that I think this should particularly matter much from a reliability standpoint.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:06
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Wouldn't a larger cache mean less wear and tear on the mechanical part of the drive and a longer MTBF?
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Apr 24, 2015 20:14
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Avulsion posted:Wouldn't a larger cache mean less wear and tear on the mechanical part of the drive and a longer MTBF? I wouldn't think so. Isn't most of the wear in starting up/shutting down? It's not like people are 'wearing' hard drives out. I would imagine the components are designed for a certain amount of operations before they outlast their useful life, though.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:33
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Skandranon posted:Not outrageous, but worse than their single-purpose counterparts. Current Samsung/Intel SSDs are likely to outlast any other part in your computer right now. The failure rates of an SSHD are largely dictated by the HDD it is built around, plus the added SSD, as any component can fail independently. If you want a single drive for your games, you'll be far happier with a good SSD, and if you want to buy drives for storage, you're better off keeping it simple and buying just a disk drive. Their use-case is people who want more internal storage capacity than they could afford with an SSD and also don't have room for a second drive. Buying 1TB of SSD will cost you like $350, a 120GB+1TB dual disk is like $140. In practical terms you're not paying much more than you would for those individual components. Are you better off buying an external, or mounting a separate HDD in your UltraBay? Absolutely, but not everyone has an Ultrabay and externals aren't always convenient. For their specific use case they are a pretty solid idea. FWIW I have a laptop that lets me swap out my optical drive for a SATA caddy, so I do separate SSD+HDD, but that doesn't apply to 99.9% of the laptops out there. Those are also the kind of laptops that probably won't outlast a HDD by too long anyway, and they're probably paying a 50-100% premium to have their OEM install their components. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Apr 25, 2015 |
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Apr 25, 2015 01:42
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Also, when I first heard about the 840 EVO performance degradation problem I remembered how hard this thread was jerking off over paying a big premium for the 840 EVO and busted a side laughing. Nowadays there's really no reason not to buy Samsung though, their yields are so high that they're pricing everyone else out of the market. You save maybe $5 per 120GB of capacity if you really look. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Apr 25, 2015 |
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Apr 25, 2015 01:49
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Do Thinkpads have proprietary connections or can I buy one off the Lenovo outlet and throw in an 850 EVO?
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Apr 25, 2015 02:42
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I can see the argument for one of these things in a gaming laptop (duhhhh). On a desktop though, either get more SSD capacity or buy some super cheap good enough for games bulk storage in the form of a big hard disk. You can get a 2TB Western Digital black drive (just get a blue) for five bucks less than a same brand hybrid 1TB drive. The lower price, higher expected reliability, higher capacity and good-enough-to-load-games speed make more sense to me. Also, you're being lovely. Gumbel2Gumbel posted:Do Thinkpads have proprietary connections or can I buy one off the Lenovo outlet and throw in an 850 EVO? This isn't the fake edit: now I'm being lovely
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Apr 25, 2015 02:44
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Gumbel2Gumbel posted:Do Thinkpads have proprietary connections or can I buy one off the Lenovo outlet and throw in an 850 EVO? My W510 has a standard SATA connection, as does every Lenovo and non-Lenovo laptop I've ever seen. Never say never but I'd be real surprised to see a disk soldered in on anything except the cheapest netbook. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Apr 25, 2015 |
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Apr 25, 2015 02:56
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Gumbel2Gumbel posted:Do Thinkpads have proprietary connections or can I buy one off the Lenovo outlet and throw in an 850 EVO? You could have an M.2 slot in there so you can keep the factory drive for movies and poo poo
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Apr 25, 2015 04:00
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Jago posted:I can see the argument for one of these things in a gaming laptop (duhhhh). On a desktop though, either get more SSD capacity or buy some super cheap good enough for games bulk storage in the form of a big hard disk. You can get a 2TB Western Digital black drive (just get a blue) for five bucks less than a same brand hybrid 1TB drive. Who is being lovely? I would never suggest that someone spend a lot more money for a SSHD over a HDD (the WD ones are very pricey). You can get a Seagate 1TB SSHD for five dollars more than the equivalent (often recommended) WD Red, and it is 2-3x faster in a lot of measures. The price is much more competitive with the larger drives, a 2TB SSHD is ten dollars cheaper than a 2TB red and thirty five dollars cheaper than a 2TB WD Black. There is absolutely zero records of lower reliability, so measurably faster and lower price for the same capacity seems like a good recommendation to me? Edit: the WD SSHD is not really out yet and is only being sold through third party resellers, hence the higher price. BurritoJustice fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Apr 25, 2015 |
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Apr 25, 2015 07:17
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BurritoJustice posted:Who is being lovely? I would never suggest that someone spend a lot more money for a SSHD over a HDD (the WD ones are very pricey). You can get a Seagate 1TB SSHD for five dollars more than the equivalent (often recommended) WD Red, and it is 2-3x faster in a lot of measures. The price is much more competitive with the larger drives, a 2TB SSHD is ten dollars cheaper than a 2TB red and thirty five dollars cheaper than a 2TB WD Black. There is absolutely zero records of lower reliability, so measurably faster and lower price for the same capacity seems like a good recommendation to me? Yeah, I seriously don't understand the problem with the suggestion, apart from the fact everyone on SA has been on "hate Seagate" trip ever since a Backblaze report. I cannot understand how a read-caching only SSHD would have lower reliability. Even if you go after the "oh, but SSDs generally don't fail in expected ways" thing, the fact is, it always writes the data to the platters, so in terms of emergency data recovery, it's no different than a standard hard drive. Skandranon posted:Also, the SSD parts on those SSHDs are going to be crappy SSDs, not good ones, so they will fail much quicker than a good Samsung/Intel SSD. I'd like to see any evidence on this, honestly, my older Momentus XT has SLC NAND as the cache, so I'm pretty sure that would last much longer than the drive's useful life. The newer ones are using MLC, and the laptop sized ones are now 5400 RPM (boring), and the 4TB one is 5900 RPM (dull), but the 1 and 2TB desktop drives are fast drives with 3-year warranties. HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Apr 25, 2015 |
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Apr 25, 2015 08:26
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HalloKitty posted:Yeah, I seriously don't understand the problem with the suggestion, apart from the fact everyone on SA has been on "hate Seagate" trip ever since a Backblaze report. It's less blackblaze than their controllers hiding information about disks going bad. This disk is failing, every access increases the Read Error Rate dramatically and it resulted in the PC it was in locking up periodically. SeaTools says it's fine and passes every test but the data on the disk is getting corrupted and it's around 2 years old (but out of warranty because it was sold in a Dell that didn't get an extended warranty). I've seen two disks of different sizes from different sources but both seagate have this exact same behavior in the last month.  I also had three of the four 640gb seagates I bought in 2008 die by 2013 but they showed bad sectors, unlike the above. It seems to be a more recent change that Seagate has made to their controllers. I'm not saying hard disks can't die or go bad, but they shouldn't be hiding their status on SMART tables and so far I've only seen it happen on Seagate disks.
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Apr 25, 2015 10:32
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What's it hiding? I thought the accepted knowledge was that as soon as a drive starts throwing read/seek errors its failing (Google reported this IIRC), and that drive is throwing a whole pile of them. A lot of programs don't say "failed" just from those, such as CDI and apparently Seatools, but you should never trust a program saying a drive isn't failed when it obviously is. I've had WD drives throw only read errors before failing, and I've had drives throw absolutely no errors before failing. I also really think there would he coverage of such an issue if it was as big as some posters here like to say it is.
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Apr 25, 2015 10:51
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BurritoJustice posted:What's it hiding? I thought the accepted knowledge was that as soon as a drive starts throwing read/seek errors its failing (Google reported this IIRC), and that drive is throwing a whole pile of them. A lot of programs don't say "failed" just from those, such as CDI and apparently Seatools, but you should never trust a program saying a drive isn't failed when it obviously is. I've had WD drives throw only read errors before failing, and I've had drives throw absolutely no errors before failing. It's hiding bad and reallocated sectors. The sheer volume of read errors means there's bad spots on the disk and the controller has had to have tried to deal with them through reallocation but reports 0 bad or reallocated sectors to SMART. It was locking up the system it was in for 10-15 seconds at a time doing active error correction. Usually when I find a large number of read errors and no bad sectors it's a bad cable, but this is the disk failing because the cable has been replaced and a new disk in the same machine has no read errors. I have not personally seen WD drives fail in this way, where they're obviously bad and corrupting data but only showing read errors but no bad sectors, but maybe they do as well. I have also seen disks show no errors and then suddenly die like you have, but that's not related to this situation. This disk has failed and is corrupting data but isn't showing the hard errors it should be.
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Apr 25, 2015 11:08
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Hard drives in my experience are basically all trainwrecks waiting to happen, and fail in inconsistent and wonderful ways. I still have a WD Passport portable drive that is effectively brand new, and reports no errors in CDI, but slows down and eventually crashes every computer I plug it into it.
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Apr 25, 2015 11:30
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BurritoJustice posted:Hard drives in my experience are basically all trainwrecks waiting to happen, and fail in inconsistent and wonderful ways. I still have a WD Passport portable drive that is effectively brand new, and reports no errors in CDI, but slows down and eventually crashes every computer I plug it into it. I agree with that. I've seen predictions that 2016 will be the year that SSDs equal hard disks in price and size (and linux on the desktop!). I don't really believe that, because I'm sure manufacturers will keep the prices higher since they're simply a better item in most ways and hard disks are still getting bigger, but it may happen eventually and I'm looking forward to even cheaper and bigger SSDs. That dying 2TB disk was replaced by a SSD and it's the first SSD in the small office I replaced it in (the user only has about 60gb of disk space used so a 250GB 850 EVO was more than enough). The user is already thrilled by it being faster (and of course also not freezing up all of the time). Another client of mine does all of his business work on a Lenovo E530 laptop and he's annoyed that it's a bit slow while booting up and loading programs so I suggested a SSD and he said "yeah hotrod me up!" so that will be happening soon, too. I think that $100-200 for 250-500gb are good pricing even for business users. Lower will be even better.
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Apr 25, 2015 11:44
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Samsung Magician 4.6 is out FYI.
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Apr 25, 2015 11:45
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"Advanced Performance Optimization of Magician 4.6 is only supported in Samsung SSD 840 EVO 2.5” model." Interesting. I wonder why that is.
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Apr 25, 2015 12:09
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td4guy posted:"Advanced Performance Optimization of Magician 4.6 is only supported in Samsung SSD 840 EVO 2.5” model." Probably something to do with this: http://www.station-drivers.com/index.php/articles/1379-samsung-ssd-840-evo-firmware-ext0db6q Details: http://www.ghacks.net/2015/04/24/samsung-releases-new-fix-and-firmware-update-for-ssd-840-evo-drives/ Evidently Samsung is artificially limiting downloads of the new firmware until 4/27, probably as a stop-gap against too many people bricking their drives. I wouldn't update to this until you start noticing a drop in speed. It supposedly triggers a periodic shuffling around of files while the drive is idle to prevent performance degradation, or what you'd see if you clicked the second link and read a lot more  .On the plus side, this version of Magician finally confirms my 750GB 840 EVO as 'Genuine,' so  .
BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Apr 25, 2015 |
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Apr 25, 2015 12:51
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"Download limit exceeded, please retry in 24 hours" when I try to get Magician 4.6 from their site.
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Apr 25, 2015 13:45
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Nam Taf posted:"Download limit exceeded, please retry in 24 hours" when I try to get Magician 4.6 from their site. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30900543/Samsung_Magician_Setup_v46.zip (it's a free Dropbox account, so don't overdo it) BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Apr 25, 2015 |
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Apr 25, 2015 14:53
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Probably something to do with this: http://www.station-drivers.com/index.php/articles/1379-samsung-ssd-840-evo-firmware-ext0db6q Even if you download Magician 4.6 from a 3rd party, don't expect an immediate increase in speed. It looks like the new firmware isn't included with the installer. The French site says EXT0DB6Q is the latest firmware. ghacks and Magician 4.6 say EXT0CB6Q is the latest (and I already had it installed) The latest version on Samsung's site is EXT0BB6Q, from December 2013.
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Apr 25, 2015 17:57
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Paul MaudDib posted:Also, when I first heard about the 840 EVO performance degradation problem I remembered how hard this thread was jerking off over paying a big premium for the 840 EVO and busted a side laughing. Nicholas Nassim Taleb posted:I will repeat this point again until I get hoarse: a mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
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Apr 25, 2015 23:13
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Avulsion posted:Even if you download Magician 4.6 from a 3rd party, don't expect an immediate increase in speed. It looks like the new firmware isn't included with the installer. The 'D' firmware downloaded and installed fine for me about 12 hours ago. e. Through the new version of Magician
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Apr 25, 2015 23:36
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