Someone long ago told me that in the long run it’s much better that customers grumble about the price of a repair than grumble about needing to return to get a job done right.
I spent 20 years of my varied career as a purchasing agent for a couple of major manufacturing companies. The (only half kidding) mantra that management preached was "Good-Fast-Cheap, pick any two.
I think the same is true in the automotive parts business. If you want it good and fast, it won’t be cheap. If you can wait several days for delivery, Rock Auto might save you some dollars, and I think their parts are good. If you want it fast and cheap, it may well be of low quality.
I dont remember using NAPA when I was growing up. We had Hi/Lo taken over by Oreillys. I’ve used a local one called BAP/GEON. They had 2 but I think they are down to 1 store. Now, I usually get parts from the dealer or whoever is closest. I have Advanced, Oreillys, and Autozone near me. I prefer to use Oreillys if I have to use one of those.
I generally use a SS drive that is a little upscale from the standard units. The Kingston HyperX has been shown to FAR outlast its rated spec and I can get it locally. I also use a lot of Samsung 840 and 850 Pro units which are good and have also used a few enterprise grade drives too. I can’t count how many people I get who have dropped a laptop and now have a failed hard drive. ANY SSD will outlast the norm in this type of case. I agree with you that some of the lower end SSDs have pretty dismal endurance specs.
I agree that it is better for someone to grumble about the price of a repair than to have them come back and complain about it failing later. There are a couple of local shops that will reallocate like 10 percent of a hard drive to mask all the bad sectors. Sure, they fix it for cheap but they are usually on the way out and some fail within weeks, others last longer.
As for cars, I always get the lifetime parts if they are available and the longest warranty ones otherwise. I do a lot of gravel road driving and the lifetime control arm/ball joint assemblies from AutoZone seem to last about a year. I can tell they are loosening up once again and will repeat the job in the near future. They are repackaged Dorman if that means anything.
“They are repackaged Dorman if that means anything.”
It does
It means they are cheap and low quality
Dorman makes the kind of cheap parts that you would install, if you want to fix a problem, and then get rid of the car
That stinks! I figured the lifetime warranty meant something. At least they don’t complain when I bring the junk ones in for exchange. It takes me about 15 minutes to change them now.
I agree with you that some of the lower end SSDs have pretty dismal endurance specs.
It’s not really a case of durability…it’s a case of how many writes can be perofrmed. SS drives have a limited amount of Writes that can be performed. There is no limit with hard drives.
@MikeInNH a case of how many writes can be perfomed
Not to be argumentative, but isn’t that a measure of durability with a SSDD? Part of the reason you shouldn’t defrag an SSDD.
I’ve been using SSDD’s in my personal computer upgrades for a while now. I use them as boot drives to store the operating system and programs so they load quickly. Never had an SSDD failure but the pace of change has me replacing them at about 2-3 years with larger and faster ones in the $130 range (my pain-point).
My removed desktop drives end up in my netbook for impact protection. They will take a bigger hit than a spinning drive without damage.
I use spinning drives for file storage on my desktop and backup drives because of low cost and high reliability. Access speed is just fine with good quality 5400 rpm drives.
Some of the more budget SSDs have a write endurance of only 1000 cycles. Most have 3000 cycles while the enterprise ones last 10,000 cycles. Destructive testing has shown that most drives exceed their rated writes by a factor of 3 or more. This may not sound like a lot but it is. I suspect that in many cases, the “unlimited” writes of a traditional hard drive will die sooner than an SSD due to mechanical failure. I have never seen this in comparison.
On thing is for sure about the “lifetime” suspension parts I bought… They don’t hold up well on bumpy roads.
This makes me think about the onboard entertainment and navigation systems on many cars these days. How is this information stored? I cannot see a traditional hard drive being used in a car because of the temp extremes as well as hitting bumps unless it is specially designed and buffered against mechanical shock. This seems like a situation where an SSD would win out.
We have lots of volunteer firefighters and even police in this area. When they get a call, they just toss their laptop in the vehicle wherever it will go and don’t put too much worry about beating it up. I have seen several hard drives killed by this and I usually replace them with SSDs.
The larger city and county departments all used a Panasonic Toughbook with the Samsung 840 pros.
While the typical write cycle count for SS drives is currently in the 10,000 range, there are additional considerations:
- It is standard practice for SS drives to have ample amounts of unused capacity on a drive. The drive’s software watches the write count to cells on the drive and if they begin to approach the limit, they move the data in those cells to new unused cells (and mark the old cells to not be used).
This has nothing to do with a drive’s quality. Some of the more expensive enterprise drives have a reserve capacity of unused cells equal to the drive’s capacity. (e.g., if you have a 1 gig drive, it would have 2 gig of capacity.)
- Not all drives are written frequently. There is an enormous amount of storage out there that is written once or infrequently and then read quite often. Think of webpages or archives.
SS drive capacity can be increased significantly at the cost of write count durability. As a result, drive manufacturers will intentionally sell high capacity SS drives with low write count durability for such “infrequently written” environments.
Not to be argumentative, but isn't that a measure of durability with a SSDD? Part of the reason you shouldn't defrag an SSDD.
Yea…a Selling point is how many writes an SSD can do. But the reason it’s a selling point is because there actually is a limit. There is no limit for hard drives.
You don’t defrag a SSD because you don’t need to. Reason to defrag on a hard drive is to put files contiguously on the disk, so it doesn’t have to search for fragments. With an SSD…there is not searching or latency. Each byte/block can be accesses at the same time.
Most have 3000 cycles while the enterprise ones last 10,000 cycles.
3000 cycles for a disk that contains a heavily accessed database is not very long. Lucky to last 2 years. For most home use 3000 is perfectly fine. Our disks are up around 10,000…and while it’s expensive…they don’t crash…and we don’t need to send a service engineer out. One service call will pay for the cost of a SSD.
So…it sounds like ‘defragmenting’ a SSD could be detrimental? Any reason to do it?
NO! There is no reason to defragment an SSD. It is a true random access media unlike a mechanical disk.
Yes, I know that hard drives have no limit to the number of writes. We also all know that hard drives are mechanical and eventually wear out. I figure the average actual practical failure rate of a hard drive has to be somewhere near that of an SSD life or lower in some cases.
The average person who travels with their laptop gets a consumer grade 3k SSD, often a Kingston HyperX. I have seen some torture tests where 2 PETABYTES of data was written to one of these drives before any serious failures developed, FAR outlasting its rating. This drive does use some overprovisioning which helps with the wear leveling.
For business users, I generally suggest a 10K enterprise drive unless it is strictly an office computer for accounting, documents, and the like. For graphics and video, I always suggest enterprise grade. When the people say “Put the cheaper on in” when I feel they would be better with a better unit, I let them know that my service charges will about equal the cost of the better drive when I have to come out another time. I also let them know that being without their computer any time at all could be a lot more expensive than the better drive. Most garages use Snap On tools and not Craftsman or Harbor Freight for this reason! The premium is well worth it.
For laptops, an SSD seems to be a no brainer. I see more busted laptops with failed hard drives from being dropped! I always like to replace these with SSDs. Also, they use less power for longer battery life.
So...it sounds like 'defragmenting' a SSD could be detrimental? Any reason to do it
Yes…and 100% NOT needed.
We also all know that hard drives are mechanical and eventually wear out.
Yes…But an SSD may reach it’s limit write limit before a HHD mechanically fails. But really depends on what the SSD is used for. As a developer and manager my SSD’s get a lot of use. We’re seeing a 2 year lifespan of SSD drives for my developers. Not really a problem since we swap out their systems every 2 years anyways. We actually wait for the SSD to fail…then just get them a newer/better system.
For graphics and video, I always suggest enterprise grade.
If they’re doing a lot of deletes and adds then yes. But if just using it for storage and retrieval…then not necessary. The only SSD’s we see fail in 1-2 years are SSD’s that have active databases on them, where there’s a lot of read/writes/deletes.
For laptops, an SSD seems to be a no brainer.
All my developers (including myself) have laptops. All have SSD’s. Nice to go on a business trip with a 4 hour flight and don’t have to plug in the laptop. HHD’s use significantly more power then a SSD.
I am sure running an active database on SSDs will wear them out quickly. AS for power on hours, I would suspect that with light to moderate use, an SSD would far outlast a traditional drive. The mechanical parts of a hard drive are often on when nothing is going on unless in sleep mode.
Just curious, what model(s) and size(s) of SSDs are you using?
The mechanical parts of a hard drive are often on when nothing is going on unless in sleep mode.
They may be on…but not active. The only thing that will be active is the spinning disk…but the heads will be retracted and inactive.
For developers…the new Laptops come with the Samsung SSD 850. 500gbs. Each laptop will have two of them. We remove the dvd player and buy a caddy for the second SSD.
Our production SSD’s and the ones that go in our telecom equipment - Not sure. Not involved with that part of the process. I think they’re Western Digital.
Samsung 850 Pro or Evo? The Evo is TLC and not rated as well as the Pro for endurance. That being said, the Pro is a good drive and will be hard to wear out. I personally have 1x 1TB Pro version here and have been very happy. You guys are definitely putting these things to the limit as these are the flagship drive of pretty much all of them out there.
Pro. I think the cost difference was only $60.