Juan talks us through the magic of installing an SSD to give an older (but still usable) computer a serious kick in the performance ass. We talk Windows 8 and iPhone 4S battery problem updates. And we take some awesome listener calls, including an opinion on the AppleTV entertainment center solution and a killer steampunk iPhone case recommendation.
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Almost completely meaningless coincidence: An old hardcore band called SSD has an album called “How We Rock.” Sounds like SSDs do rock.
An SDD is the most noticeable upgrade a mid tier computer can get. Awesome bang for your buck. I really need to get one.
The most memorable SSD thing I can remember is that guy who did the experiment with a daisy chain of SSD’s, he ran something in the neighborhood of 40 applications on his computer at once… AND was able to run a live video feed at the same time with no stuttering or frame rate drop!!! :eek: It was a very popular Youtube video.
But then when SSD’s were finally becoming available to the consumer market I started hearing horror stories about SSD’s. The most notable was that the flash memory in them made them only good as a ‘read’ drive, in other words that they were awesome as your master drive; where it was only running your OS and programs and apps. But that they sucked for use with large files and data that would be consistently modified, because the flash memory was prone to errors if the memory was repeatedly rewritten in a particular area too often. I imagine that this problem is no longer an issue with the newer DRAM drives.
The other was that they were inconsistent in quality because they were so new. And the one that made me really nervous about getting one was the story from an IT person who talked about the high failure rate of them in the laptops his staff were installing them in. As high as 70%! The only ones that did not fail were the more expensive INTEL drives. However the same brand of drives that were failing in the laptops were working just fine in the desktop computers they had been installed in, this created quite a conundrum… They finally decided that the reason the INTEL drives were surviving whereas the cheaper ones were not was because the INTEL drives were internally cushioned, and so were protected from the day to day bumping and thrashing of a salespersons laptop while they were on the road. Once they installed rubber bushings on the drive mountings the failure rate plummeted.
So I am still hesitant to buy a SSD, maybe in a few years the tech will be mainstream enough that all of the kinks will be worked out. I even waited a while when the standard drives had reached the TB range before buying one, I was worried that the new threshold was still too new to risk buying a TB drive. It seems to be the best bet with any new technology, wait until the next model or two before jumping in and getting one.
Like the poor souls who ran out to buy the first Playstations only to have them start smoking and turning to slag in their entertainment centers… Or the early CD players for your car, only to have them skip every time you hit a bump. And so on…
I love tech and I love performance but I have been burned too many times to run out and get the newest thing opening day. Wait and get the ‘new and improved’ version. In other words the phone that doesn’t burn a hole in your pocket.
Yeah, I’m growing ever-more impressed with the performance of these things. My Mac Mini feels faster than when I had the quad-core hackintosh as my desktop, and faster than when I had all 8GB in this thing (dead stick, back to 5GB for now). Disk I/O appears to be the big chokepoint in today’s desktops.
I understand your hesitation, however, we’re several generations into these things now, and they seem to be fairly reliable. At this point, they’re no more failure-prone than a spinning disk, and in use cases such as laptops they’re actually more reliable than hard drives because of their total lack of moving parts (when I worked at the computer store, the amount of dead laptop hard drives with a cause of physical failure was ridiculous). The write issue is no longer a problem, and most are generally rated with a longer MTBF than many hard drives. In some respects, it would be like denouncing Android because none of the devices support Netflix, or Windows XP for not having a firewall enabled (as was the case in all pre-SP2 installs) - it simply isn’t the case anymore.
As for the anecdote about dead SSDs in laptops being a cushioning problem, I’m not sure that’s really the drive itself to blame, as internally there’s no moving parts, so any wear and tear would have to be on the physical connector. One theory would be that the drives may have been a different height than the hard drives they were replacing (spec for 2.5" drives does vary slightly) could have resulted in some small movement of the drive inside the laptop (depending on the mounting bracket), creating quick physical disconnects that eventually caused damage to the drives. Either way, I doubt it was the drive itself being prone to physical jostling.
As with all purchases, just make sure to do research; get the SSDs that have high IO’s per second, and stay away from the value-brands (i.e. OCZ Solid or Agility vs. the higher-end Vertex) that are using less-than-ideal memory, and things should usually work out just fine.
Ever penny spent on the PC since the year dot has been for performance enhancements, forget my Raptors it seems I’ve found the next component in the never ending quest to remove those small but significant pauses:)
Chuck! You would make a great Todd Ingram!! Please post some pics if you got any!
I strongly recommend that anyone considering a switch to an SSD take a listen to this episode of the Typical Mac User podcast. It’s an interview with a storage recovery/forensics specialist and discusses how flashmemory and SSDs work in a technical, yet accessible way. Basically, the point is correct that using flash memory degrades the device. Newer devices mitigate this somewhat by building in extra capacity that is swapped for failed sectors, as well as wear leveling algorithms that spread the damage across the device.
As with much else in life, you get what you pay for with computer storage. More expensive drives are more likely to ge more reliable.
Juan do you ever check your messages?
Call the podcast line and ask this–he’ll get back to you. 