SSD on the chart is hot / crazy

Original author: Jeff Atwood
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Being a supporter of solid state drives ...
- The State of Solid State Hard Drives (October 2009)
- Revisiting Solid State Hard Drives (October 2010)
... I feel ethically and morally obligated to initiate you into a dirty little secret that I discovered over the past two years of using solid state drives. Solid state drives die. In huge quantities. And not just die. I'm talking about terrible breakdowns, " my God, what happened to all my data ." And this is not cool.

I bought three 128 GB Crucial SSDs in October 2009 for myself and two other Stack Overflow employees. As of the previous month, two of them have already died. The other day, I talked with Joel while recording a podcast, and he said that Intel's solid-state drive in his Thinkpad, bought at about the same time, also died.

A friend of the company and just a cool guy, Wills Portman, can tell more terrible stories. He became infected with the religion of solid state drives after my post in 2009. During these two years, he bought eight discs and they all died .

- Super Talent 32 GB SSD, died after 137 days
- OCZ Vertex 1,250 GB SSD, died after 512 days
- G.Skill 64 GB SSD, died after 251 days
- G.Skill 64 GB SSD, died after 276 days
- Crucial 64GB SSD, died after 350 days
- OCZ Agility 60GB SSD, died after 72 days
- Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, died after 15 days
- Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, died after 206 days,

you might think that now I will scold solid-state drives and call them unreliable, unstable technology. Especially considering that I am the main backup expert in the world .

Well, you are mistaken. I just went and bought a new hot OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, the best drive among the latest generation disks that appeared this year. Edition of the Storage Review, (Eng.) Has named it the fastest SATA SSD that they've ever seen.

Solid-state drives are so incredibly productive and work on them is so different from regular drives that I do not care that they die on average once every 12 months . I can no longer imagine a computer without an SSD. This is the same as returning to modem Internet, or a 13-inch CRT monitor, or to a one-button mouse. Only through my dead body, man!

It may seem irrational, but ... it seems to me that this phenomenon was best explained in the series “ How I Met Your Mother ” by the character Barney Stinson, brilliantly played by computer geek pet Neil Patrick Harris.

Note: This is the 5th episode of the 3rd season, the very beginning of the series.

Barney: It can't be that she is above the line on the chart hot / crazy.

Ted: She's not even on the chart hot / crazy. She's just hot.

Robin: Stop. Is the schedule hot / crazy?

Barney: Let me show you.

Barney Stinson

Barney: A girl can be as crazy as she is hot. Therefore, if she is crazy here, she should be here by passion. If she's crazy here, she must be hot here. It is necessary that the girl be above this line, also known as the "diagonal of Vicki Mendoza." Somehow I met this girl, she constantly crossed this line. She shaved her head, then lost five pounds. She pricked me with a fork, then expanded her breasts. [pause] I should call her.

The thing is that solid-state drives are so scorchingly hot that I am ready to put up with their craziness. Look, over the past two years, their productivity has doubled. Doubled! And the fastest SSDs can even load the existing SATA interfaces (English), they need new 6-gigabit interfaces. Neither a memory upgrade, nor a processor upgrade can come close to such an increase in performance in real applications.

If you use an SSD, just make sure you have a good backup system. I hope the reliability situation improves in the next two generations. Nevertheless, for the last two months I have been scrupulously figuring out where the solid-state drives are on the hot / crazy graph, and believe me, you want to buy one of these Vertex 3 drives right now.

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