Solid State External Hard-Drives

[murrayout]

A mate says that these will be the next big thing, in regards to memory storage because the life is massively longer than the usual external hard drives which can break far more easily.

Is this true?

Got a mate going to China soon and she can get one for really cheap in comparison to over here. Is it worth investing?

[TouchSAFC]

Yep

Solid state = no moving parts = faster and more reliable

[murrayout]

Originally Posted by TouchSAFC

Yep

Solid state = no moving parts = faster and more reliable

She got one last year for her son for half the price that it is here too

[bonsai]

Be awhile before we see these as main stream for external hardrives as the price is very high,you could get a 2TB external drive for the same price as a 64GB SSD.

[gregthomas02]

Originally Posted by murrayout

A mate says that these will be the next big thing, in regards to memory storage because the life is massively longer than the usual external hard drives which can break far more easily.

Is this true?

Got a mate going to China soon and she can get one for really cheap in comparison to over here. Is it worth investing?

Depending on the quality of the SSD you could see them not lasting as long as a drive with moving parts, reason being when you write over the same memory block over and over it'll eventually become unusable, eventually all memory blocks will become unusable.

[Doctor Diesel]

Originally Posted by gregthomas02

Depending on the quality of the SSD you could see them not lasting as long as a drive with moving parts, reason being when you write over the same memory block over and over it'll eventually become unusable, eventually all memory blocks will become unusable.

You're technically correct but I've had a 2GB memory stick for the last 7 years and overwritten it hundreds of times, and it's still fine. It's not a renowned brand.

[gregthomas02]

Originally Posted by Doctor Diesel

You're technically correct but I've had a 2GB memory stick for the last 7 years and overwritten it hundreds of times, and it's still fine. It's not a renowned brand.

I agree with what you're saying? I've got a reliable 16GB. I did have a 1GB that eventually died, I assume due to over-use.

[Hetzkes Ballet Teacher]

It'll be half baked Chinese shite that doesn't work properly, that they normally sell on ebay.

There's generally no need to have an SSD external drive because you don't tend to use it enough to benefit, and you usually connect it by USB anyway (which is too slow not to be a bottleneck for a normal hard drive, never mind an SSD).

But as an internal drive they can't be beat, as long as you get a decent brand with one of the modern controllers (Marvell, Sandforce or the latest - not earlier - Samsung). Worth every penny. Putting one in my notebook was the best thing I ever did, it was like I'd upgraded the whole thing with a turbo model. Everything's instant.

As well as the raw speed increase, you also benefit from the lack of a physical hard drive head that has to be moved around, which massively improves multitasking. That doesn't get mentioned much in reviews, but it's beautiful - I can run a sector by sector backup of my SSD in the background, while working on fairly disk intensive things in the foreground, and you can't even tell the backup is happening. On an HDD it would slow things to a crawl, as both workloads keep pinging the HDD read/write heads all over the place.

Originally Posted by gregthomas02

I agree with what you're saying? I've got a reliable 16GB. I did have a 1GB that eventually died, I assume due to over-use.

USB flash drives don't have sophisticated flash controllers inside them. If you repeatedly write over the same area of the flash (eg. keep rewriting the same files), you may wear it out.

SSD's have very clever controllers though - they have sophisticated methods of rotating writes all over the flash memory (amongst other things), to spread the wearing effect out, making them last much longer - many years in normal use.

It's very unlikely you'll have a write fail of that type in the lifetime of an SSD. And even if it happens, you don't lose access to your data - read still works (unlike HDDs when they break).