SSDs have a 'bleak' future, researchers say

[Night Hawk]

The one advantage of the SSD to add here however would be the lack of need for opening up the casing in order to access data from one that suddenly went out of commission. There are no drive platters to hook up under special conditions in order to rescue data.

Sure SSDs have no platters.

How do you access the memory chips if the controller has c****** itself?
Surely it will have to be opened up to allow access to (or removal of) the old controller.

Now for the actual disadvantages of data retrieval from SSDs they actually have more vulnerabilities then people are even aware of. One page seen at a data recovery service outlines just what those are. Solid State Drive Recovery | SSD Data Recovery

I do agree with this though.

I read an article about "data deduplication" on SSDs, which indicated that your data is actually more vulnerable!
Obviously that doesn't just apply to SSDs though.

No but SSDs have their closest relative or little buddy connecting through the USB bus namely flash drives or memory cards as another technology based on basically the same principles in general but different type of connection.

The NAND chips inside a flash drive of course are much smaller in size naturally but work on the same hardware platform in that sense. What happens to data you might place on a flash drive if that foobars on you?

The only safe medium that would uneffected by electromagnetism would be optical or tape. Who wants an 80s tape drive? Not many! (some pc museum for display maybe!)

Regardless of whichever technology appears or one already present(ATA or SSD) there will always be some type of drawback along with the Pros and Cons dept. as a new technology is further developed.

One thing is for certain regarding the opening up of the casing for any hard drive is there are no "user friendly fixable" components on the inside! Mechanical requires perfect isolation from everything as far as one speck of dust or one drop of moisture. SSDs are surface mounted ICs or often referred to as NAND chips.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Ah, I see.

Regardless of whichever technology appears or one already present(ATA or SSD) there will always be some type of drawback along with the Pros and Cons dept. as a new technology is further developed.

Indeed.

One thing is for certain regarding the opening up of the casing for any hard drive is there are no "user friendly fixable" components on the inside! Mechanical requires perfect isolation from everything as far as one speck of dust or one drop of moisture. SSDs are surface mounted ICs or often referred to as NAND chips.

OK I see what you were alluding to now.
The reference to opening up the case confused me.

Recovering data from HDD platters requires special environmental conditions/considerations (as you say).
Obviously that means that it "is going to cost you".

 

[Night Hawk]

That's why there are professional data recovery services where you bring in any drive(s) along with blank dvds or another drive or two to receive any data recovered "For A Price"! Businesses are the usual customers as you can imagine being part of the "cosr effective" alternative.

The environment does have to sterile and totally particle free when opening up any mechanicaldrive since all parts are precision ground within thousandths of an inch where one dust particle, piece of debris, or moisture would trash a drive! The moving parts are snug inside a drive to begin with. Oxidation is the worst enemy as well as any dirt!

With the SSD on the other hand you would most likely 'have to" send the drive into the manufacturer if not finding one of the few recovery services adequately equipped to recover data for you again for a service charge.

And we all know what can happen to any optical media if that option is used for data storage and a disk gets scratched or bent where it splits, finger marked, etc.. :shock:

UPDATE: I just caught another "bleak future" report with the title Are SSDs doomed? Researchers say "yes" -- by 2024

That goes into discussion on the throwing a monkey wrench into the works regarding the shrinking of chips used for the flash based storage in order to increase capacity at the cost of performance.

 

[fseal]

The really dumb thing about the articles are the "SSDs are doomed" title when "SSD" merely stands for "Solid State Drive". The articles should really say "NAND Flash Based SSDs are doomed" (And even then that's doubtful) THe original papers are probably more specific and call out a need to develop better NVRAM chip tech, but the stupid tech rag wags... Ugh.

Don't people ever seem to get tired of being gloom and doom predictors and always geting it wrong?

10 years fro now we will have EXSANDMX chips (or something)

 

[carwiz]

The really dumb thing about the articles are the "SSDs are doomed" title when "SSD" merely stands for "Solid State Drive". The articles should really say "NAND Flash Based SSDs are doomed" (And even then that's doubtful) THe original papers are probably more specific and call out a need to develop better NVRAM chip tech, but the stupid tech rag wags... Ugh.

Don't people ever seem to get tired of being gloom and doom predictors and always geting it wrong?

10 years fro now we will have EXSANDMX chips (or something)

They already have! It's called "Racetrack" memory.

IBM Unveils New Memory Chip Technology - Technology News - redOrbit

 

[Layback Bear]

The doom and gloom comes from hard drive manufacturers loosing market share. Computer technology will move forward not backwards; it always has. A lot of the market will not be moving or staying in the old hard drive era. It took a while to get to 64 bit but we made it and I predict 128 as soon as hardware and programing can catch up. I would be very surprised if that is not being worked on by Intel and IBM. They will make SSD's bigger and better and the price will get better for the consumer. Darn folks look what you can do with a phone today. I think cell phones have caught on. My grand father started off life in the horse and buggy days and lived to see a man landing on the moon. He never though cars and airplanes would really catch on until he bought his first car and put his mules to pasture. He would of liked the hearse pulled by a matched set of mules instead he got a stretch black Caddy hearse. Progress moves forward not backwards.

 

[Phone Man]

A voice for the other side.

SanDisk daddy sees bright future for flash ? The Register

Jim

 

[Night Hawk]

You're going to find blog pages filled with rederick from both sides of the coin. I just ran into another SSD article seen on the other thread that pointed back to this one.

NAND chips being replaced by some other chip design? Inevitable! would be the answer for that one! When one chip design is no longer found viable and limted a new one will be worked on. That's part of competition for developers seen there.

As for marketing the other drive manufacturers who are not expanding into the SSD area will eventually face the ATA limitations. The old market formula of "expand or die" could well be what some may face as market shares go to some other technology.

The one thing I had waiting to see is when the better brands of memory manufacturers would develop and start marketing SSDs and finally saw a review on a new Kingston model. OCZ, Crucial, Corsair, and others may follow trend if not already seeing their own.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

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?

I am beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea to move over, and if upping the CPU and RAM speed might have done just as well

 

[profdlp]

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?

 

[Dave76]

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.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Degradation

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

 

[Night Hawk]

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_di...when-will-standard-hard-drives-disappear.html

 

[jorpe]

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.rb:

 

[lnav83]

Once you go to SSD boot drive and mechanical data drive it is hard to go back... the pros out way the cons IMO. I like it so much im going the same route with my laptop I just ordered with the same setup as my desktop, about 120GB for the boot drive (this time its a 128GB crucial m4) and a 500GB mechanical data drive, the best of both worlds.

 

[Night Hawk]

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.

 

[Zardoc]

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 :huh:

 

[Night Hawk]

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.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
Most youngsters change their mobile phones more frequently these days than their Underwear -- so why people are so bothered with lifecycle times of SSD's is beyond me.

In the long term SSD's won't survive in their present form but currently if you DO use these the last thing to worry about is the read write cycle lifetime of the device.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[seekermeister]

Some of us are not "youngsters", and even if we were, that wouldn't be a reason to act or think a certain way, just because it was the "in" thing to do.