@MikeInNH…I agree. I have been repairing computer for about 31 years. It’s just a hobby now…(friends and family) since I closed my computer repair business several years ago. One of the most common reasons for hard drive failure was because of heat. Many customers simply had their towers enclosed in a lower part of the computer desk, had very poor air flow or airflow that was restricted because of pet hair in the air vents. Laptops have very poor airflow by design and their hard drives fail much more often than in desktop PC’s.
When flash drives got large enough and cheap enough…I started watching my DVD movies on them. They are much more stable than spinning discs and I believe the quality is better. I no longer own a dedicated DVD player because my newest HDTV has several USB inputs that allow for flash drives. I just transfer the VOB files from my DVD on to a flash drive and watch them that way. SSD hard drives will eventually replace all disc type hard drives and the computer world will be the better for it. I also do the same thing with my music CD’s. The sound quality is better, I think and they don’t get scratched up in my vehicles like CD’s do. It’s a win-win situation.
They are much more stable than spinning discs and I believe the quality is better.
As long as your DVD or Blue-Ray were working properly and the disk isn’t scratched…then it’s IMPOSSIBLE for the flash drive to be better…Bits are Bits. Flash drives do lend less chance of scratching obviously since there’s no way to scratch it…
I think you are missing my point here. I have a 60in Smart TV and when I play a movie in a Blu-Ray DVD player…the picture is not as stable as when I play the same VOB files on a flash drive. I tried several DVD players and came to the same conclusion. We will have to just disagree here because you’re going with theory and I’m going on experience and my own personal senses. There is a difference…believe me.
I agree that bits or bits but there is an explanation for this situation where the video looks better on a computer vs. a DVD player. The reason is that DVD players are pretty much set on one codec or decoder for the compressed video. There are too many software based codecs to list. My gut tells me you would see no difference playing the video from a spinning disc (hard drive or DVD drive) inside the computer using the same software based player and hardware as if you simply use the flash drive. While solid state drives are 10x the speed of even a good hard drive, a traditional hard drive should be able to keep up with any movie on a computer. This may not be true for some of the bargain basement models as these barely have enough power to even boot up sometimes.
I also feel that solid state drives will eventually drop in price and become the norm in all but the bargain basement models. I have two Intel Core i7 machines with 1.5TB of solid state storage. It is pretty nice to hit the power button and pretty much be ready to go. Besides being fast, they are also more reliable as they have no moving parts like a mechanical drive. They use less power and generate less heat, don’t fail when subjected to mechanical shock, and are more resilient to dusty and dirty environments. The only problem is that there is a maximum number of write cycles but this won’t matter for most people out there. I have an eMLC drive which is supposed to be good for 10,000 writes. This drive serves as my OS and programs drive. This is a high-end version although there are better if you really want to spend the money. Mid-grade drives are typically rated at between 3,000 and 5,000 writes. My data drive SSDs are all this kind. Some of the lower end versions use a triple layer memory cell rated for 1,000 writes. Samsung 840 and 840 EVO drives use this. The pro still uses the old two-layer MLC technology which I think is better. I have seen reviews and tests that indicate these far exceed the ratings and normal users should have no worries. I have also heard that 2k-5k drives typically last 3x as long as do the eMLC versions. I guess the manufacturer rating includes a very large safety margin.
The really good flash memory is SLC or single layer. I have never owned one of these but understand they are good for between 100,000 and 1 million writes! They are also expensive as you can imagine!
In case you wonder, I have my OS and programs drive as a PNY Prevail Elite 480GB which uses the eMLC nand flash and my data drive as a Crucial Micron M500 960GB drive what uses eMLC. The Crucial M500 as well as the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB drive are the only 1TB class drives that are somewhat affordable. The Samsung 840 EVO uses the TLC (triple layer) flash and is only rated for 1000 writes. It is also more expensive and rated as a faster drive but I opted for the Crucial. Again, I don’t think most people would wear out a 1TB drive as it would take forever to overwrite the entire drive 1000 times. I was caught up between buying one of these and the Crucial but a sale popped up on the Crucial and I couldn’t pass it up.
A good DVD or BlueRay player will be optimized to play video. The d/a converter software should be as good as it gets in a decent DVD or Blueray player. If you seeing better quality videos playing on your home computer…then you need a better home audio system. Playing Blueray movies on my home theater is as good as it gets in my house. None of my home PC’s can come close to matching the video. As for audio…the margin is about 10 times wider. Even my Son’s gaming computer can’t match the video of a good Blueray player.
Agreed that SSDs are more shock-resistant than mechanical drives. Faster? Most definitely. I replaced the healthy mechanical drive on a beater laptop running XP with a SSD. It went from booting in 2.5 minutes to 9 seconds! Reliability? That remains to be seen. I have seen many flash drives fail for no apparent reason and SSD is a relatively new technology, kind of where mechanical drives were about 25-30 years ago. One bad thing about SSD is when they do fail, or are damaged in a catastrophe, your recovery options are more limited. You can take a mechanical drive and burn it to a crisp, but if the platters are still there, you can usually get the data back. Kind of like a flight recorder. With an SSD, there’s either nothing left to recover from, or no easy way to access what is left. (Unless you’re the NSA perhaps) Right now, cost reasons aside, I would want my important data on a mechanical drive, but an SSD as a boot device or in applications that require high-throughput, such as fast servers.
I am not biased against WD. (well maybe a little these days) I’m just going from observations taken over the last few years. Older Dells used to run hot; newer ones not so much. (discounting what the drive itself generates, but if a drive generates enough heat to cook itself, that is a design flaw also) We have had more WD drives (blue and black label) fail than all others put together. Seagate a close second. Rarely a problem with a Toshiba or Hitachi laptop drive, though some Hitachi desktop drives used to be abysmal. Especially not impressed with Seagate’s “Momentus Thin” line of drives. All manufacturers make a bad batch or poor design once in a while it seems. It may be telling that after a rash of blue-label failures, that we started receiving only Toshiba drives as warranty replacements from Dell, and their tech support people began asking a lot fewer questions when we’d make a warranty claim on a WD drive.
It went from booting in 2.5 minutes to 9 seconds! Reliability? That remains to be seen.
A good SSD is much more reliable. 10-20 times more reliable. Tests have proven that. Our company has proven that. Mechanical devices are prone to failure. Electronic devices when built either work or don’t work. Our service calls for the systems we design and build have dropped precipitously when we switched to SSD’s. Some of our systems have 10-20 drives that run 24/7. Over a 2-3 year period you get failures. With the SSD’s we’ve installed over the same period…ZERO failures. Companies that have critical servers are switching to SSD’s.
I know Apple is switching over to flash storage for its new computers.
My mom just bought a new Chromebook laptop and it came with a 16gig SSD hard drive with 100GB of cloud storage free for 2 years(sales clerk didn’t know what it would cost after 2 years, though), it also has an SD card slot you could use to expand drive space(or transfer pictures from your digital camera).
She didn’t want Windows 8, and Apple is out of her price range. I offered to use my old Win7 disc if she bought a windows laptop, but they had sold out of the $250 laptop on sale; the chromebook was $300.
The salesman didn’t earn any points when he said he was sorry when I told him I owned a Macbook.
@MikeinNH: A good SSD is more reliable. That still remains to be seen. I suppose emphasis should be placed on “good”. I will believe it when I see one a decade old that has no problems, but right now we’re still in the early days of this tech. You need only look at the user reviews of SSD replacement drives to bear this out. That doesn’t mean that I won’t be purchasing them instead of mechanical drives for my equipment–there are just too many benefits overall compared to mechanical drives.
I also have yet to see one of the compact fluorescent bulbs I’ve purchased live up to the 10K hours promised. I’ve had quite a few fail within a year of purchase. In theory yes, an electronic device with no moving parts should last longer. Look at the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes–certainly it’s achievable! (and these have mechanical tape drives for data storage BTW) But in the real world, with static electricity, poor solder joints, buggy firmware, and all sorts of other weirdness, YMMV. Again, this tech needs to get some years under its belt before I will believe it to be infallible. And just because the hardware may actually not fail, it still doesn’t mean your data can’t get corrupted somehow. I just reflashed an Android tablet I own that had the file system corrupted. How was it corrupted? I have no idea. One day it worked, next day it would go into a loop of reboots.
“Electronic devices when built either work or don’t work.” I suppose that could be said of anything that works until it doesn’t any more, for whatever reason…
@oblivion…Just a quick comment on compact fluorescent bulbs. I have several that have lasted for almost 5 years. They were shipped to me free from my electric utility. The one on my front porch (controlled by light sensor) has worked every day without fail. It passed the 10K guarantee a couple of years ago. The problem with a lot of bulbs that blow is actually the light switch itself. If you have switches that “snap” when you turn them off or on…replace them with the “silent” type. The bulb brand is 14watt Longstar bulbs. The most amazing thing about them is the fact that they are made in China. @db4690…Yes, this discussion started off about batteries but has evolved into a life of it’s own.
@missileman What is it about the different switches that hurts the bulb? The noise of the snap obviously doesn’t. I have changed out lots of switches for the silent ones, but always for aesthetics.
@David L…I don’t know the exact reason but I believe it has something to to with “thermal shock.” It’s greater with a mechanical switch than with a silent switch but I’m not quite sure why. I noticed this effect with a light dimmer in my dining room. The bulbs there almost never blew out but the one in my bathroom did just about like clockwork. An electrician friend of mine told me about silent switches and after seeing them in action…I do know that they seem to work.
True, I went through a lot of CFL lightbulbs early on. Some barely lasted a few months for me and were a waste. Now that they are getting reliable, they are coming out with LED which is supposed to be better in terms of efficiency and lifespan but EXPENSIVE. Like everything else, the price will come down with time.
As for the SSD’s, I only know one person who has had one die on him. He is a tinkerer and does lots of benchmarks and all. He noticed the performance was decreased on the last test a few days before failure. It was a catastrophic failure where the drive wasn’t even seen by the system. He had been running the SSD on Windows XP for a large part of its life. Windows XP isn’t an SSD aware OS so wear leveling, TRIM, among other features do not work as well or at all as on a newer OS. We figure that running Windows XP on a small (60GB) drive simply didn’t allow it to wear level properly. It died within 3 years of age. I personally think it is time for XP to go and am not unhappy with the decision of MS to stop supporting it. It was a great OS for its time and lasted far longer than anyone imagined but newer OSes are so much better when taking advantage of more RAM and multi-core CPUs than XP. Its time has simply come and gone.
As for data recovery after a failure or accidental deletion, someone made a very good point about it being much harder to recover from an SSD. This is true. While a forensic lab can recover from a HDD, it may be more difficult or impossible to recover from an SSD. The TRIM command essentially wipes clear all free space after a file is erased and there is no going back.
My data backups are still done to mechanical hard drives. I do not require the speed of an SSD for backup purposes and the traditional HDD is much more economical. In fact, I used some of the HDDs removed from my systems during my SSD upgrades as backup drives by placing them in external enclosures.
Yes, it is very true that things can be made to last a very long time if that is required by the design. While cheap consumer electronics may be lucky to last part the 1 year warranty, spacecraft and aircraft electronics are more mission critical. There is no sending for a repair crew by the Voyager spacecraft. This is one very valid reason why some products sold to the government sell for seemingly crazy prices that some feel are a waste. Sure, there is waste but NASA is also sparing no expense to insure that failures do not occur. They still sometimes do occur but the odds are pretty good overall. The two Mars rovers that landed in 2004 have far outlived their planned life. One lasted 20 times its design and the other is still running with no signs of stopping.
Solid state drive makers seem to be offering 3 and 5 year warranties and really standing behind these new products so that they are well-accepted. I am happy about this as I think it is a better technology. This is somewhat like car makers providing a 10 year guarantee on their batteries. People know that is a costly part of their car and want to be sure it will still work 10 years later.
@missilman How is a silent switch not mechanical? The ones I have used aren’t electronic in any way that I can tell. “Thermal shock” (or the lessoning of it) makes sense for the dimmer switch, as it gradually brings the power up. I still don’t get how a silent switch makes any difference. Isn’t it either fully conducting or not?
I don’t quite understand this either. It seems that all new light switches are essentially silent. I figured it would just be a simple on and off also, nothing special. Do they use capacitors or something to cushion the voltage for a few milliseconds or so to prevent the shock?
@David L…I’m not quite sure what the difference is…but there is a difference. The problem is that light switches can last for decades. The next time I’m in the hardware store, I will check out all the light switches displayed to see if they “snap” or not. It might just be a case of the light switch being vastly improved over the old style. I do know that older switches could throw a nasty spark from inside on occasion. The old style silent switches had a mercury switching mechanism but they were phased out years ago. I guess it’s time to take a couple of newer switches apart just to see how they function.
The longest lasting CFL bulbs so far for me have been the ones sponsored by the local utility. They were $1 for 2 bulbs. They are made in China and have an annoying whine until they warm up. But they have outlasted all the others I’ve purchased. Feit Electric seems to make the worst, but I had a pair of GE bulbs die one week apart after only about 6 months of use. My gf had one not just die but smoke and make a horrid smell before expiring.
My original point was that any new technology is going to be kind of flaky for a while until the bugs are worked out, including SS drives. But I’m not some Luddite that’s going to shun them. I’m typing this on a machine I just rebuilt with Mint Linux and a 120GB SSD that was on special at Amazon. It boots ridiculously fast.