Experience with Sandisk Ultra II? Also using SSDs as mass storage?

[HassTheMass]

Does anyone have experience with these SSDs? I picked one up on sale but it's in delivery right now, I'm wondering if it has a decent quality?

Also does anyone use an SSD as a mass storage device. I want to pick up a 1TB SSD soon-ish as a storage device even if it is more expensive than an HDD, since they seem to be getting cheaper all the time. Pros are obviously, they're crazy fast in comparison, but what kind of downsides are there? My main issue is probably longetivity. If they last a solid five to seven years then that's likely to be good enough for me.

[Agrippa]

What kind of mass storage? If we're talking a basic "write once, access often" storage pattern, then pretty much any SSD will last you a lot longer than five to seven years, barring manufacturing faults and such of course. I still have a OCZ Vertex II in use as a scratch disk, which I bought in 2010 (I believe) and it's never given me any cause for concern. I've no experience with the SanDisk in question, but I doubt you'd notice any difference at all between any two modern SSDs during general usage.

Price is the only obvious downside, but prices are expected to drop sharply over the coming year, with SSD expected to reach price and size parity with standard hard drives in 2017 (according to industry analysts). Hence now is not really the best time to shop.

That being said, if I could make do with a single 1TB drive for storage, I certainly wouldn't think of buying a traditional hard drive. As it is, I expect the recent upgrade of my rotating platter drives to be the last one and to swap them all out for SSDs in three years time or so.

[watercooled]

Potential downsides could include how SSDs respond to unexpected power loss vs HDDs. More and more SSDs are designed to cope with this gracefully, but if you're unlucky a drive without properly functioning power-loss protection may end up with a large part of the drive being corrupted after a power loss. With HDDs, data at-rest is mostly safe, you might just lose anything being written to the drive but journalling file systems should also limit the damage caused there.

Obviously NAND wear is another one - near the end of its life data retention (the ability for the NAND to keep data stored over time) decreases. It shouldn't be a big concern in general use but personally I'd be careful using SSDs for long-term offline storage, but that's mostly because they're not as well proven in this role. There was a story making the rounds a few months ago making claims about poor data retention on SSDs but it turned out to be mostly a misinterpretation of the presentation slides which were actually referring to heavily-worn NAND.

There are also firmware bugs. They're less common than they were but there have been firmware bugs which have led to catastrophic data loss. Again, data-at-rest on HDDs tends to be fairly safe but a bit of bad code on an SSD controller is capable of destroying its entire contents in a matter of seconds.

In other words, although claims are made about SSDs being 'massively more reliable' than HDDs, it's not telling the whole story. They're far more resistant to mechanical wear and shock, but have different problems of their own.

It's always good practice to keep backups regardless of storage medium used, but I'd err on the side of caution with SSD storage and be doubly-sure you're backing up important stuff.

Of course, there are some roles where the trade-off is more than worth it if you want low-noise, fast storage.

[HassTheMass]

Potential downsides could include how SSDs respond to unexpected power loss vs HDDs. More and more SSDs are designed to cope with this gracefully, but if you're unlucky a drive without properly functioning power-loss protection may end up with a large part of the drive being corrupted after a power loss. With HDDs, data at-rest is mostly safe, you might just lose anything being written to the drive but journalling file systems should also limit the damage caused there.

Obviously NAND wear is another one - near the end of its life data retention (the ability for the NAND to keep data stored over time) decreases. It shouldn't be a big concern in general use but personally I'd be careful using SSDs for long-term offline storage, but that's mostly because they're not as well proven in this role. There was a story making the rounds a few months ago making claims about poor data retention on SSDs but it turned out to be mostly a misinterpretation of the presentation slides which were actually referring to heavily-worn NAND.

There are also firmware bugs. They're less common than they were but there have been firmware bugs which have led to catastrophic data loss. Again, data-at-rest on HDDs tends to be fairly safe but a bit of bad code on an SSD controller is capable of destroying its entire contents in a matter of seconds.

In other words, although claims are made about SSDs being 'massively more reliable' than HDDs, it's not telling the whole story. They're far more resistant to mechanical wear and shock, but have different problems of their own.

It's always good practice to keep backups regardless of storage medium used, but I'd err on the side of caution with SSD storage and be doubly-sure you're backing up important stuff.

Of course, there are some roles where the trade-off is more than worth it if you want low-noise, fast storage.

Does a surge protector help with power loss issues?

[kalniel]

Does a surge protector help with power loss issues?

Nope.

[f350]

Had 2 Sandisk SSDs fail within 6 months. Never had issues with Crucial or Samsung. With SSDs you really do get what you pay for.

[watercooled]

I've seen people say the same about Samsung and Crucial and personally I've had a string of bad luck with Kingston (think it's 5 DoA products in a row) but I'd still buy them. Tiny personal sample sizes say next to nothing about reliability.