This is awesome - I remember 10 years ago or so a 1GB SD card was still a pretty big deal. Now we have one being released with a thousand times that capacity - shit, if they release a 1.5 TB in a couple years it'll have a million times the capacity of those weird floppy disk things old people used to use
Yeah, I've always taken the subtext of the Birther movement to be, "The rules don't count here! This is different! HE'S BLACK! BLACK, I SAY! ARE YOU ALL BLIND!?
- Raw Shark
Destiny and fate are for those too weak to forge their own futures. Where we are 'supposed' to be is irrelevent.
They're more expensive (significantly) and slower in terms of read/write speed (by an order of magnitude). Also more fragile, and more susceptible to corruption and damage.
Elheru Aran wrote:I assume the same issues are present with flash drives? Or is that a different type of memory storage?
It's all a matter of engineering trade-offs. SSDs are faster, and more expensive, but perhaps a bit more prone to failure in the long-term than HDDs (spinny disk drives). Most mass market drives are tuned to optimize one-two things at the expense of one-two others.
Elheru Aran wrote:I assume the same issues are present with flash drives? Or is that a different type of memory storage?
It's all a matter of engineering trade-offs. SSDs are faster, and more expensive, but perhaps a bit more prone to failure in the long-term than HDDs (spinny disk drives). Most mass market drives are tuned to optimize one-two things at the expense of one-two others.
I dunno if the modern SSD is more prone to failure when the HDD will literally break if you drop it. SSDs can survive a couple of falls without compromising any of your data and the cost is really coming down.
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
Elheru Aran wrote:I assume the same issues are present with flash drives? Or is that a different type of memory storage?
It's all a matter of engineering trade-offs. SSDs are faster, and more expensive, but perhaps a bit more prone to failure in the long-term than HDDs (spinny disk drives). Most mass market drives are tuned to optimize one-two things at the expense of one-two others.
I dunno if the modern SSD is more prone to failure when the HDD will literally break if you drop it. SSDs can survive a couple of falls without compromising any of your data and the cost is really coming down.
I suspect he's talking about *data* failure, not *physical* failure.
Terralthra wrote:
It's all a matter of engineering trade-offs. SSDs are faster, and more expensive, but perhaps a bit more prone to failure in the long-term than HDDs (spinny disk drives). Most mass market drives are tuned to optimize one-two things at the expense of one-two others.
I dunno if the modern SSD is more prone to failure when the HDD will literally break if you drop it. SSDs can survive a couple of falls without compromising any of your data and the cost is really coming down.
I suspect he's talking about *data* failure, not *physical* failure.
It's pretty much a non issue for a modern SSD.
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
General Zod wrote:
I dunno if the modern SSD is more prone to failure when the HDD will literally break if you drop it. SSDs can survive a couple of falls without compromising any of your data and the cost is really coming down.
I suspect he's talking about *data* failure, not *physical* failure.
It's pretty much a non issue for a modern SSD.
I suppose they haven't been around long enough to do an endurance test like say putting identical amounts of data on a HD and a SSD and waiting a couple of years, then seeing what degradation has occurred?
Are there any computers out there that use SSD type memory? (like I said, I don't keep up with this kind of thing)
Elheru Aran wrote:
I suppose they haven't been around long enough to do an endurance test like say putting identical amounts of data on a HD and a SSD and waiting a couple of years, then seeing what degradation has occurred?
Are there any computers out there that use SSD type memory? (like I said, I don't keep up with this kind of thing)
I don't know what you mean by SSD type memory. Are you talking about ram or just hard drives? Because my laptop is running with a 256gb ssd hard drive.
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
SSDs have more drop resistance than modern HDDs, yes. However, their typical-use lifetime is still lower, though not by much. It's arguable whether or not it matters for typical use, since the typical user replaces a hard drive with a new computer well before the median time to failure of either.
Elheru Aran wrote:
I suppose they haven't been around long enough to do an endurance test like say putting identical amounts of data on a HD and a SSD and waiting a couple of years, then seeing what degradation has occurred?
Are there any computers out there that use SSD type memory? (like I said, I don't keep up with this kind of thing)
I don't know what you mean by SSD type memory. Are you talking about ram or just hard drives? Because my laptop is running with a 256gb ssd hard drive.
Well that pretty much answered my question right there. I guess I meant hard drives... 'flash drive' type memory which doesn't physically move, versus the old-school spinny-disk type hard drives.
Though that does make me think of something; should your computer get fried, it might be harder to recover memory off SSD type units, while HDD disks could be pulled and run. Is that right?
That depends on what you mean by "fried". If you mean ESD or a power surge of some sort, anything that's bad enough to damage an SSD is liable to also damage the controller PCB on an HDD as well.
Terralthra wrote:That depends on what you mean by "fried". If you mean ESD or a power surge of some sort, anything that's bad enough to damage an SSD is liable to also damage the controller PCB on an HDD as well.
Essentially by 'fried' I mean 'extensively damaged' as in 'unusable but data possibly recoverable'. I don't mean like 'set off thermite on case' or 'lightning strike explodes monitor' (not that *that* should happen, usually...).
Like if some lout decides to drop your laptop out of a third-story window onto a concrete sidewalk. Something like that.
General Zod wrote:
I dunno if the modern SSD is more prone to failure when the HDD will literally break if you drop it. SSDs can survive a couple of falls without compromising any of your data and the cost is really coming down.
Yeah the drive is mor edurable against impact damage. However the individual memory cells begin to die at an early point, and keep dying. Eventually this will corrupt the drive, and long before a comparable rotary drive would die like that. Reformatting from time to time can extend SSD lifespans though, on reformat the drive will ignore all the bad cells for good.
SDD lifespans have vastly improved over what they were four or five years ago though. It's no longer a major practical consideration, if you get a high quality one, and if you aren't using it for a server. The best warrenties are now for 10 years for 40 Gigs read/write per day the entire time. Though keep in mind lesser usage may not extend the lifespan by much because of the ways the cell breakdowns occur are not entirely dependent on use.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Elheru Aran wrote:Though that does make me think of something; should your computer get fried, it might be harder to recover memory off SSD type units, while HDD disks could be pulled and run. Is that right?
The only advantage I can think of for HDDs in terms of memory recovery is that, should all else fail, you can get the platters removed and analyzed. Of course there are techniques to reconstructing damaged or unreadable flash memory, but they're rather more expensive than the equivalent services for HDD platters.
That said, at that point you're looking into hiring expensive services who will be working on your data storage in a clean-room laboratory regardless of if it was an HDD or SSD before it got fucked up.
I suppose if you had a lot of money to throw at it or if the data was particularly valuable some recovery can be possible so long as the platter isn't completely ruined (i.e. damage doesn't quite cover all of it). But that's just a guess based on a few stories from my dad, where people he's worked with have lost or nearly lost security clearance because they didn't ensure that they belt-sanded the platters of disposal-marked HDDs before sending them to be sent to a chipper, though the company he works for has since switched to a chipper located on-site capable of accepting entire drives and reducing them to a coarse dust instead of having to send them elsewhere for disposal; now they just send the resulting dust and fragments to the disposal center, thus eliminating the risk of someone making off with the platters or the drive's memory buffer. Last I heard they still use the belt sander for CDs though.
