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Is SSD really this much faster than HDD?


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I've watched this debate with fascination, since about 8 years ago, I migrated my whole PC to SSD operations and so far (touch wood) I have had only one failure, an old HDD on my older PC, not used for SL.

Back in 2009, I did have an SSD fail on me, but that was largely due to non-SL operations.

To date for me, SSDs and latterly PCI-e SSDs have operated smoothly and rapidly in SL for me.

I never worked out how to create and operate a RAMdisk but that has not been relevant in recent years.  Perhaps I have been fortunate not to have failures but I rather suspect that such failures as are mentioned above are things of the past.

One thing that is certain is that the "old" spinning-platter HDD is no longer very relevant in such applications and I see pretty much all laptops being sold today with fully solid-state internals.

Oh, I should add that the use of SSDs for SL has improved the experience vastly.

Edited by Aishagain
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3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I've hammered the fire out of a few cheap SSD's and been very surprised by their actual performance and longevity, of course they aren't a patch on more expensive drives, but they are worlds better than a spinning platter and despite my best efforts, I've not managed to kill one yet (although I have managed to kill quite a few HDDs).

A $20 quick scratch drive is a no-brainer, especially when it can be used as a dumping ground for IO intensive junk that saves wear on the better more expensive drives.

Buying second hand ram is a minefield, there is a lot of bad ram kicking about and the fix is to hawk it on eBay and make it someone else's problem.

I have a lot of computers, ranging from new high end to vintage junk. eBay ram is the bane of my hobby.

You also have to factor in typical SL hardware, it's mostly mid range & business laptops running well beyond their capabilities and service life. 

Apparently, we do not share the same experience on these topics...

I got HDDs that are over 10 years old and still spinning just fine (granted, they were not cheap HDDs either), even if others did die over time (I've had especially bad experience with the IBM ”Deathstar” in the distant past, and with a triplet of Seagate 7200.11 in a RAID5 more recently). I can't speak about my experience with cheap SSDs since I never bought any, but seeing how much data has been written already on my older (MLC) SSDs, the cheap ones would have long hit their max write cycles and exhausted their NAND provision, and faster than even the lame 7200.11s have died for me.

As for second hand RAM modules, I bought quite a few over years, to upgrade old computers... From old SDRAM to DDR3 modules. Never got any issue with them. As long as they pass the memtest I always submit them to on arrival, there is no reason for them to suddenly die (and if they don't pass it, just return the module as faulty to the seller)...

Edited by Henri Beauchamp
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I have replaced 6 failed SSDs.  Not one of them had a FLASH device failure.  All 6 of them had controller chip failures.  There were 1 Corsair, 4 Mushkin and one so poorly labeled I don't recall the brand.  All of the failed SSDs were less than 2 years old.  All of the replacements I installed were of Samsung's EVO 850 line and all are still working years later.  3 are in computers that regularly run Second Life viewers, 1 is in a video editing workstation that has recently been repurposed as an operating system previewer and 1 is bare on a shelf as it out-lived the rest of the computer is was bought for.

Buy "good enough" SSDs and they should serve you well.  Please ensure the SSDs you use have DRAM cache in them.  It makes a world of difference when writing to the device and improves the overall life of the FLASH devices in it.

Most people that say a product sucks had higher expectations than the quality and/or condition of the unit(s) they tried merited.  Knowing the merits of the product is the best way to know which to buy.  Alternatively you can take the advice of someone that has a good opinion of a product they have been using for a long enough time that their opinion is justified.

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4 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

I've had especially bad experience with the IBM ”Deathstar” in the distant past, and with a triplet of Seagate 7200.11 in a RAID5 more recently).

Wow, you have indeed had experiences with the worst of the worst.  I have replaced a metric ton of each of those within 3 years of their dates of manufacture.

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After 5 years I've always considered a mechanical hard drive as end of life and no longer reliable and ready to go to that great e-waste pile in the sky or off to Goodwill if it can be secure erased. I have never had a 2.5" ssd but I can definitely see how they can overheat and die rather quickly. I have 7 nvme ssd's 5 Samsung, 1 Inland and 1 WD (slowest of all of them) all TLC drives and never a failure on any of them ever. All except my oldest Samsung (97%) show 100% health.

For SL cache(s) I always use a Ramdisk that doesn't save data when closed. I have to wait 60 seconds for my inventory to reload (big deal...) but I never have to worry about corrupt cache issues ever.

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As with any other computer hardware, these days, SSDs are not always what they seem. The big fake hardware has been GPU cards, and there are SSD brands which I have never heard of before. I have been careful, and I do get decent results for SL caching. There are a lot of traps in how the caching works, but the bulk of the data arrives at a rate limited by your internet connection.

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