SSD Prices In A Free Fall

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I just wish the British market would follow suit, our prices are astronomical in comparison.

Well, yeah! It cost money to send parts over the pond by rowboat!

 

[mike009]

£77 for 250 850 EVO is not so bad.

Supporting -/+ 4000 laptops with 50/50 SSD/HDD only come across 2 failed SSD's and for HDD's 10 = 100% fail, few dozen not fit for use (over the period of 3 years).

 

[MilesAhead]

I only had one SSD. I used it in a docking station for video muxing. But the problems I remember seeing posted seemed to be stuff like the drive not handling Trim correctly or other issues rather than outright failure.

I'm looking forward to never having to heft those 3 1/2" HD. Gimme that lightweight high speed cheap tech anytime!

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

...I remember seeing posted seemed to be stuff like the drive not handling Trim correctly or other issues rather than outright failure...

The trim issue that has everyone in a panic turned out to not be the cause of the problem one commercial server was having using consumer Samsung SSDs in an enterprise situation and, apparently, using a custom configuration of Linux. At this point, it's unsure, albeit unlikely, the SSDs are at fault.

Another panic was created when someone wrote an article claiming SSDs were losing data when stored for short periods of time. That article turned out to be overhyped and SSDs, while not retaining data as long as HDDs when stored disconnected on a shelf, still had data retention times of a year or two instead of the month or two allegedly reported by the article. Anecdotal reports alone disproved the article. I know that two of my SSDs sit idle for months at a time in my notebooks between uses and have yet to lose data.

 

[whs]

The failure rate of my SSDs is no different than of my HDDs - 2 each. I have 10 SSDs by now and 2 of them failed after 2+ years use. The oldest is from 2008 but that one is still going strong. The ones that failed are from more recent years. The good news is that both were replaced by their respective manufacturers ( OCZ and Mushkin).

 

[MilesAhead]

@Lady Fitzgerald and whs thanks for the info. It looks like in the short term the hardware will be what is exciting if I can take advantage. On the software side maybe it is time ti brush up on variants of the vi editor. I keep procrastinating on learning vim. I'll get there eventually. It looks like Linux isn't going to go away. Plus when I get set with desktop PCs I intend to run some with W7.

 

[mjf]

I only had one SSD. I used it in a docking station for video muxing.

I would caution against using an SSD in a docking station. I had a new Samsung 840 EVO in a Thermaltake BacXDuet. The flimsy plastic backing plate to the data connector broke first time on Eject. Samsung would not honor the warranty even though there was no warning such as "not suitable for use in a docking station". Other SSD brands may be more robust.

 

[MilesAhead]

I only had one SSD. I used it in a docking station for video muxing.

I would caution against using an SSD in a docking station. I had a new Samsung 840 EVO in a Thermaltake BacXDuet. The flimsy plastic backing plate to the data connector broke first time on Eject. Samsung would not honor the warranty even though there was no warning such as "not suitable for use in a docking station". Other SSD brands may be more robust.

The one I had was a Kingston 90GB. I had no problems removing it. The dangerous time was insertion. One time I almost bent over all the connectors as the little trap door gave way. After than I was much more careful sliding it in. The drive itself was pretty solid though. Going through USB 3.0 brought the sequential speeds down to a little better than my WD Sata III black drives. But the random access was awesome. When all the mux files were on it I could watch the progress bar slide right along. A lot of fun.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I only had one SSD. I used it in a docking station for video muxing.

I would caution against using an SSD in a docking station. I had a new Samsung 840 EVO in a Thermaltake BacXDuet. The flimsy plastic backing plate to the data connector broke first time on Eject. Samsung would not honor the warranty even though there was no warning such as "not suitable for use in a docking station". Other SSD brands may be more robust.

And on the flip side, I've had no problems plugging and unplugging my Samsung SSDs—one 840 Pro and two 840 EVOs—into 2.5" docks.

 

[RommoR]

SSD Price Drop not happening here in the Philippines

 

[ignatzatsonic]

The US dollar is about 15 percent higher relative to a basket of other currencies than it was a year ago--which works in favor of those consumers using US dollars to purchase imported products such as SSDs.

Mebbe the Europeans could blow up the European Union so that each individual country could devalue its own currency as it sees fit, making SSDs cheaper? That's part of Greece's problem--they can't devalue since they use a common currency.

 

[OvenMaster]

I still haven't seen any advances regarding multi-pass/secure erasure of individual files or folders on SSDs (à la Eraser, Recuva or CCleaner), so I still won't use one for my main OS drive. (I wonder how businesses who care about security deal with this... encrypting an entire SSD raises cain with TRIM and slows the drive down to regular HDD speeds)

Right now, though, a great timesaving use for an SSD would be when I work with screen video captures, and DVD Flick doing its thing combining large video and audio files and ISO writing.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Multipass deletions are no longer considered necessary even for HDDs. The Secure Erase utility that is on pretty much all SSD support software is all you need to completely wipe an SSD (once you remove the charge from a cell, it's totally kaput).

I don't see why you would need to encrypt an OS only SSD. For that matter, I would think encrypting even an OS HDD would either cripple it or prevent it from working, period. All that would really need encrypting would be data folders only. Also, can you cite a source that supports encryption raising Cain with TRIM? This is the first I've heard of that.

You are complete correct that the best timesaving from an SSD is for operations that do large frequent writes and reads that otherwise require an impossibly huge amount of RAM. Quicker boot times and faster program loading is addictive though.

 

[mike009]

Using Bitlocker to encrypt the SSD's & HDD's there is not much visible degradation - SSD still perform much better that 7200Rpm HDD's when both are encrypted.

 

[GokAy]

I thought you can't recover deleted files from SSDs due to TRIM and the discussion led me to seek further info:
Warning: Anyone Can Recover Deleted Files From Your USB Drives and External SSDs

 

[ThrashZone]

Using Bitlocker to encrypt the SSD's & HDD's there is not much visible degradation

Unless a user forgets a password then your left with a encrypted paperweight

 

[MilesAhead]

Using Bitlocker to encrypt the SSD's & HDD's there is not much visible degradation

Unless a user forgets a password then your left with a encrypted paperweight

+1 I never believed in locking myself out of things.

 

[ThrashZone]

Yea I wish win-8.. and 10 did not have bitlocker stuff or is it included in win-7 if it's a pro version too ?
That should be a separate download If a user wants it.
You never know when stuff like that gets activated by accident or via malware/ virus activates it for you

 

[whs]

With Windows 8.1 on so called Instant Go devices, encryption is done automatically when you install the OS. Since there was very little info about that, I wrote this guidance. If you happen to have such a device, it mught help you deal with the situation.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Yea I wish win-8.. and 10 did not have bitlocker stuff or is it included in win-7 if it's a pro version too ?
That should be a separate download If a user wants it.
You never know when stuff like that gets activated by accident or via malware/ virus activates it for you

Bitlocker requires a dedicated device—a TPM add on board or a dedicated USB stick (my MOBO has both a TPM port and a single USB port that can be used for Bitlocker)—to set up and use it. With Win 7, Bitlocker only comes with Ultimate and Enterprise. If the hardware isn't in place, malware won't be able to activate it (then again, malware doesn't need Bitlocker to encrypt your data). Bitlocker requires a few steps to activate so it's unlikely one can accidentally do so.