I installled my first SSD yesturday

[Daniel ~]

I've been wanting to check out the new solid state (Ram) drives but price kept me away...along with my personal finances! ":O}

But this week a 90 gig Corsair SSD came home to me for less than a hundred dollars at Newegg.

To be honest, I'm always a bit apprehensive when it comes to new tech.

In this case there was very little occasion to freak out.

My install was a complete breeze. I set my bios to see new my Sata drive as AHCI;

Because I looked it up in my motherboard manual that's why! ":O}

Used the power supply's Sata hook up and connected the Sata's I/O data cable from the mother board. That's it! Really! Ready to go!

Slapped Mint 13 Cinnamon into my DVD drive and loaded up my OS

My Mother board is only SATA II current and so I probably only see half the speed boost a Sata III motherboard would offer me. But as I'm still quite happy with my plain-Jane P5Q, it may be a year or so before I see Sata really moving data at the speeds it could.

If nothing else it gave me an excuse to reinstall Mint on more time...what a joy! ":O}

[danrok]

What are you putting on the SSD, apart from the OS?

[Daniel ~]

Not much that will really take advantage of it's speed I suspect. (Well 1/2 it's speed , stuck on a Sata II board.)

It cut the transfer time from my thumb-drive of my 12 gig music collection in half. Other than that I don't see a whole lot of difference, boot times seem better...

But now that I've learned the joys of "Suspend" and it's 7 second boot...who cares!? ":O}

Truth is I've never seen my swap file use a single bite! I have 8 gigs of ram and I think Mint pretty much fits inside about 5-10% of it! ":O}

I COULD be wrong! ":O}

This is fairly typical, Music playing and surfing AOA and Mint, while playing with system settings and adding apps. ":O}

[danrok]

The reason why I ask is because there such things as memory wear...
Flash memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I believe it occurs when writing, but not reading.

But, not sure how durable your SSD is, or if this is a real issue in a home computer.

All the same, you might want to set-up in such a way that the SSD is mostly used for reading, and not so much for frequent writing.

[Daniel ~]

This as with so many other things, is something I was unaware of...

Say, how would one go about setting-up in such a way that the SSD is mostly used for reading, and not so much for frequent writing?

[danrok]

You could install applications and the operating system on it, but try to use a HDD drive for data, temporary files, browser cache, and so on.

There are tools for reporting SSD lifetime, but not sure about Linux tools.

[Daniel ~]

Actually Mint 13 comes with one off the better disk utilities I've seen, not saying much am I? ":O}

I've been working on my External Sata back up drive...no use, it's dead, I watched it die as I was trying to save it with a new partition and format, both
Acronis and then utility had the same bad sectors complaint.

Then, the gasp...my bios stopped being able to see it anymore...sigh...

Any way it test and gives you smart drive data as well as the usual tools. Here's a snap of my New SSD drive.

Now after my efforts, Mint won't even list the 1T drive I just lost":O{

[danrok]

That looks good. What does "view SMART data" do?

[Daniel ~]

God I love taking screen snapshots, makes things like this so easy! ":O}

The last one just covers the last few options...

[Daniel ~]

I thought I'd add this for compairson. This is a Middle of the road ATA 320 gig drive vs. My SSD Drive. Access times seem to show some improvement...":O}

[danrok]

Nice!

[Daniel ~]

I awake from suspend in 4, count them, four seconds! My monitor has to be turned on first or I miss boot up, it's over before I can see it start!

And...remember, I just have Sata II Sata III should just about double this performance.

Dan, how do I add a 320 gig to my system as we discussed? Do I just format it, will the utility I'm using (see pictures":O} do this for me?

I haven't messed with adding a drive to be used by the booted drive as storage in long time and remember none of t! ":O}

[danrok]

I can hardly remember, probably because there's not much you need to do.

For SATA just plug-in and power up.

Check the BIOS to make sure the drive is recognised correctly, and the drive boot order is correct.

Format and partition as needed.

[Daniel ~]

Thanks Dan, I'm pretty sure that once I format it, the system will ask if want to add it...or some such! I'll fumble my way though it! LOL

[Daniel ~]

Duck Duck go had this on SSD :

Update 6/2011

Two years later, and we do have some feelings for this now. However, how they're used has evolved. SSDs are used in areas where outright performance can't be economically met with disks, so comparing reliability is something of an apples-to-pears comparison. For servers that need small storage, they usually don't also need high performance on that storage so rotational magnetic media is still used most of the time.

That said, some comparisons can be drawn. SSD are typically used in large storage arrays as the highest tier of performance. In this role I've heard anecdotal reports that SSDs last a lot shorter than the same disks in those arrays. Like, on the order of 10-18 months. This is reflected in the warranty the big storage vendors allow on SSDs.

This may look like "a lot less reliable", but in reality you have to look at it right. Modern top tier SSDs can handle I/O Operations per second into the six digits these days, reaching the performance of even one drive with 15K RPM disks will take well over a hundred spindles. More mid-grade SSDs can do 30-50K I/O Ops, which is still over a hundred 15K disks. Modern disk I/O systems can't keep up with speeds like this, which is why the big array vendors only allow a few SSDs per array relative to disks; they simply can't eek enough performance out of the entire system to keep those things fed.

So in reality, we're comparing a brace of (for example) 8 mid-grade SSDs versus 250 15K drives. Since this is enterprise storage, give them an 80% duty cycle. In the first year a couple of those 15K drives will definitely fail requiring replacement, possibly up to 20. Anecdotaly, half of the SSDs will fail. When looked at it like this, failure rate for performance given, SSDs still aren't up to HDs. When looked at it from an economic point of view, each SSD is worth 31.25 HDs, SSDs are markedly cheaper for the performance given so the increased failure rate is more acceptable since replacement-rate is still probably cheaper in the long run.

Looking at it another way, a direct apples-to-apples comparison, where you subject the same two devices to identical I/O loads over a period of time, SSDs are more reliable these days. Take a 15K drive and a mid-grade SSD (50K I/O Ops/s) and give them both a steady diet of 180 I/O ops, and it is more likely that the SSD will make it to 5 years without fault than the HD. It's a statistical dance to be sure, but that's where things are going now.

Hard-drives still have the edge in the drive-unit failure rate per GB of storage provided. However, this is not a market segment that SSD are intended to be competitive.

[Daniel ~]

Found this @ Tom's Seems memory wear isn't so bad...":O}

[danrok]

Looks like you'd have to be doing a serious amount of writing before it becomes an issue.

[Gizmo]

With the wear-leveling algorithms in modern SSDs, coupled with the improvements in cell durability, it's really gonna take some serious I/O to hurt them. For normal use by mere mortals, the computer will be retired before the SSD craps out.

[Daniel ~]

Never the less...":O}

Once I got started I wanted to install that 320! I removed then reinstalled the EXT4 partition, then formatted in EXT4 leaving the disk unbootable. No need to mount it, it seems... Any thing you can remember and want to throw my way...":O}

I can add files that appear in my Home directory IF I "go" Home from my 320 drive's directory .

Or I can add files to the 320 that don't show up in home or anywhere else I can find except on my 320. If I just add them to the same page you see with the lost and found folder, which I DON'T have permission to open! ":O}


I'll have to puzzel out how to work with files if I'm going to use this drive....which I'm probably not...as I'm somewhat lacking in a need for more space...
I'm just playing about and trying to stay out of trouble...} ":O}

[Daniel ~]

Originally Posted by Gizmo

With the wear-leveling algorithms in modern SSDs, coupled with the improvements in cell durability, it's really gonna take some serious I/O to hurt them. For normal use by mere mortals, the computer will be retired before the SSD craps out.

Your my man Chris, just what I wanted to hear from the very guy I wanted to hear it from! LOL