SSD on the chart hot / crazy

Being a supporter of solid-state drives ...
- The State of Solid State Hard Drives (October 2009, Eng.)
- Revisiting Solid State Hard Drives (October 2010, Eng.)
... I feel ethically and morally obliged to devote you to the dirty little secret I have discovered in the last two years of using solid-state disks. Solid state drives die. In huge quantities. And not just die. I'm talking about the terrible breakdowns, " My God, what happened to all my data ." And this is not cool.

I bought three Crucial 128 GB solid state drives for October 2009 for myself and two other workers at Stack Overflow. As of the previous month, two of them have already died. The other day I talked with Joel during the recording of the podcast, and he said that the Intel solid-state drive at his Thinkpad, bought at about the same time, also died.

A friend of the company and just a cool guy Wills Portman can tell stories more terrible. He became infected with the religion of solid-state disks after my post of 2009. During these two years, he bought eight discs and they all died .
')
- Super Talent 32 GB SSD, dead after 137 days
- OCZ Vertex 1 250 GB SSD, dead after 512 days
- G.Skill 64 GB SSD, died after 251 days
- G.Skill 64 GB SSD, died after 276 days
- Crucial 64 GB SSD, died after 350 days
- OCZ Agility 60 GB SSD, dead after 72 days
- Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, dead after 15 days
- Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, died after 206 days

You might think that now I would scold the SSDs and call them unreliable, unstable technology. Especially considering that I am the main backup expert in the world (English).

Well, you are mistaken. I just went and bought a new hot OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, the best drive among the latest generation of drives that appeared this year. The edition of Storage Review (Eng.) Called it the fastest solid state SATA drive that they have ever seen.

Solid-state disks are so incredibly productive and the work on them is so different from ordinary disks that I do not care that they die on average once every 12 months . I can no longer imagine a computer without an SSD. It is like returning to a dial-up Internet connection, or a 13 inch CRT monitor, or to a single-button mouse. Just over my dead body, man!

This may seem irrational, but ... it seems to me that this phenomenon was best explained in the TV series “ How I Met Your Mother ” by Barney Stinson’s character, brilliantly played by computer geek Neil Patrick Harris.

Note: This is the 5th series of the 3rd season, the very beginning of the series.

Barney: It can not be that she was above the line on the hot / crazy chart.

Ted: She's not even hot / crazy on the chart. She's just hot.

Robin: Stop. Schedule hot / crazy?

Barney: Let me show you.



Barney: You can be a girl as crazy as she is hot. Therefore, if she is crazy here, she should be here by passion. If she is crazy here, she must be hot here. The girl needs to be above this line, also known as the “Wiki Mendoza diagonal”. I once met this girl, she constantly crossed this line. She shaved her head, then she lost five kilograms. She pricked me with a fork, then increased her breasts. [pause] I should call her.

The thing is that the solid-state disks are so burning hot that I am ready to put up with their madness. Look, over the past two years, their performance has doubled. Doubled up! And the fastest solid-state drives can even load existing SATA interfaces (English), they need new 6-gigabit interfaces. Neither a memory upgrade, nor a processor upgrade can come close to such an increase in performance in real-world applications.

If you are using an SSD, just make sure you have a good backup system. I hope that the reliability situation will improve in the next two generations. Nevertheless, for the last two months I have scrupulously figured out where the solid-state disks on the chart are hot / crazy, and believe me, you want to buy one of these Vertex 3 drives right now.