SSDs have a 'bleak' future, researchers say

Agree, you can't OC CPU or RAM enough to get even close to the performance you get from a SSD.

The SSD life expectancy for the average user is 10-20 years or more.
There are independent write testing going on now that back up these claims.

ICit2lol said:

What I don't understand is how they wear out by writes and rewrites I mean nothing actually moves except the charge on a few million caps?

The "Write" process causes degradation of the memory location.

Wikipedia
Flash memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Another thing most don't realize about static memory type drives over mechanical drives is temperature changes being constantly seen over years. A mechanical drive has metal platters self contained in an air tight/moisture tight protection seal inside the drive casing where some of those old 20mb and 50mb hard drives from the late 80s early 90s are still in working order!

Would you trust the old 386's simm memory modules to be still good for refurbishing another old 386 after all these years? likely not! would be the answer most would give. SSDs are using the upgraded form of the same principles of flash memory and it's own vulnerabilities over time. Mechanical drives on the other hand may end up seeing bad sectors and a worn armature slapping up against the main spindle if it fails.

What the article is pointing to is what you end up discovering with any technology being the Pros and Cons, limitations as well as any gains, etc.

While going to look up some other information I ran into this blog from the University of Phoenix to add in here.

Information Systems and Technology Articles


Flash memory: When will standard hard drives disappear?

By UOPX Writer Network

| March 4, 2011
College of Information Systems and Technology

Nearly 20 years ago, Seagate® and Hewlett-Packard® launched the first 2.1GB standard hard drives. Considered monstrous at the time, these hard drives were at the cutting edge of technology, offering more storage than ever before. Decades later, portable flash memory is available in sizes of 4 gigabyte (GB) to 340GB and larger.


Whether you're storing music files, photographs, videos or your thesis written in Microsoft Word®, flash memory has become a preferred alternative for transporting files and storing data. In fact, with some forms of flash memory steadily dropping in price, technology researchers are wondering when standard hard drives will disappear.

The full article can be seen at https://www.phoenix.edu/colleges_div...disappear.html

profdlp said:

There's no comparison. I'd drop my overclock to stock and give up half my RAM before I'd trade in my SSD.

As for longevity, when was the last time you bought any hard drive with the expectation of still using it ten years later?

TITCR...
I've only OC'd my memory and OC'd the CPU in the past but setting up a 3 SSD striped array is by an order of magnitude the best thing I've ever done. Going from a 7200.12 to a Spinpoint F3 to a RAID 0 SSD setup has been amazing.

No one is in disagreement about faster access times when running an SSD. Most will often elect to upgrade from one build to something newer within a 3-4yr. time frame as well usually going with a new OS drive as well if not simply moving drives into a new case for reuse.

The thing I look however is long term storage as well as capacity for work space on the OS drive and why a 1tb servers the purpose over a small SSD since prices for anything larger are still inflated. Flash drives use the same basics as an SSD would and I use those for various tasks despite their smaller capacity over a much larger hard drive even for running various OSs.

The cpu used here was initially tested and oced out to 6.3ghz and where it could still run stable but isn't needed since the stock speed was found to be adequate as well as the amount of memory and memory speed looked at when first building this case. If a 1tb SSD was seen for a reasonable price when first built a look at one for the OS drive would have been considered then.

Well I am in the # 1 group but I must say that my boot times are lousy. 50 seconds to get to desktop on a P8P67 Pro .

I built a few machines and The fastest time to desktop I have gotten was about 20 seconds with a P8P67 using a corsair GT 120GB.

I have about the same boot time with my Lenovo Y70 that I swapped with a an M4 C400 256gb

I have 3 SSD 2 being 120 GB vertex 3 on a P8P67 Pro and using 2 Caviar Black 1 TB with another Vertex 2 60 GB.

Go figure

Initially when getting this case together I had 7 on one of the two WD Black Ed. Sata 3 drives but had to reinstall Windows over once the brand of memory was swapped out and ended up back on one of the two Sata II Black Ed. drives instead.

Did I take a performance hit? None seen! When 7 was in development MS took all these recently new hardwares into account as well as "trimming the fat" out of Windows so to speak. If you were running those back and forth with a previous version you would likely notice it more however.

Regardless of which drive or which version is run it still takes a full minute once you are at the desktop to see everything fully loaded, even more when you have numerous apps installed. For each system even when having the exact boot drive the start up times will automatically vary since two different machines will have two totally different sets of programs installed!

When swapping drives with clean installs you may have missed a change in what other programs went on first to some extent. And how well they went on is another item. You can reinstall Windows and all programs 10 times on the same drive and end up seeing at least a slight difference for each install.