i3,i5 or 965BE......

SSD's have a limited lifespan - has this slipped anyone's mind? HDD's are supposed to have a MTBF of 47 years with proper usage.
 
FlatspinZA said:
SSD's have a limited lifespan - has this slipped anyone's mind? HDD's are supposed to have a MTBF of 47 years with proper usage.
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This is not true, hard drives have a shorter lifespan than With wear-leveling, SSD's last longer than HDD's.

They're still way expensive though.
 
Synaesthesia said:
This is not true, hard drives have a shorter lifespan than With wear-leveling, SSD's last longer than HDD's.

They're still way expensive though.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I lied - it's 57 years. After some research I discovered that a HDD has a higher percentage chance of failure after 7 years. Apparently the MTBF of a HDD has been highly exaggerated: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6404. Surprise! :D

So I checked on SSD's. http://www.dvhardware.net/article6148.html "Although most common Flash chips have around 300,000 write cycles, the best Flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block". How does that equate to every day usage, say, for someone like me that uses his PC 24/7?

"# Flash-memory drives have limited lifetimes and will often wear out after 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 write cycles (1,000 to 10,000 per cell) for MLC, and up to 5,000,000 write cycles (100,000 per cell) for SLC.[26][27][28][29] Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device, called wear leveling.[30]
# Wear leveling used on flash-based SSDs has security implications. For example, encryption of existing unencrypted data on flash-based SSDs cannot be performed securely due to the fact that wear leveling causes new encrypted drive sectors to be written to a physical location different from their original location—data remains unencrypted in the original physical location. It is also impossible to securely wipe files by overwriting their content on flash-based SSDs."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

Does that mean my drive is going to get smaller & smaller as it gets older?

I don't know. I've read somewhere that an SSD has a lifespan of about 5 years. Up to 10,000 writes per cell, once it's used up your data gets moved to another cell, making my disk smaller in capacity.

I'd definitely buy an SSD for the speed, not for reliability. HDD's have been around for yonks. I guess we'll have to have this discussion when SSD's have been on the market for at least 5 years.

HDD's are affected by all sorts of things, true. Mechanical failure is common, though in my experience I've never had a HDD fail on me. That could be because I've never kept drive long enough for it to fail so maybe the sucker who bought my drive after me had a failure?

SSD's, on the other hand are GOING TO FAIL, unless of course they find a way to increase the number of writes per cell.
 
Who keeps a hdd for 47 years?

I love how people say ssd's are expensive while blowing 2-4k on cpu's, mobo's, ram all of which pail in comparison to the speed boost you get from a ssd :D. SSD's are not that expensive anymore and a decent 120gb can go for 3k. I understand people look at normal drives and see how cheap they are but have you guys seen how cheap celerons are? Damn i7 965 and i5 are very expensive compared to celeron :D. Not worth buying an i7 cpu over a celeron is it?

SSD's have not failed, i don't want to go into another argument but ssd's are mind blowing. Nothing i have ever bought has given my pc such an immense speed increase.
 
FlatspinZA said:
Sorry, I lied - it's 57 years. After some research I discovered that a HDD has a higher percentage chance of failure after 7 years. Apparently the MTBF of a HDD has been highly exaggerated: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6404. Surprise! :D

So I checked on SSD's. http://www.dvhardware.net/article6148.html "Although most common Flash chips have around 300,000 write cycles, the best Flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block". How does that equate to every day usage, say, for someone like me that uses his PC 24/7?
Click to expand...
In a recent article on write endurance published in STORAGEsearch.com, editor Zsolt Kerekes provided theoretical computations on the longevity of solid state flash drives deployed in enterprise server applications. His test solid state drive had the following specifications: total capacity of 64GB, sustained write speed of 80MBps and a write endurance rating of 2 million cycles. By assuming that data is written in big blocks and there is perfect implementation of wear leveling techniques, Kerekes estimates disk endurance at 1.6 billion seconds, which translates to 50.74 years.

Thus 1 million write cycles will mean 25 years. Pretty long!

...
Does that mean my drive is going to get smaller & smaller as it gets older?
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No, there is space already allocated for that. So a 120gb SSD is actually 128gb, with 8gb allocated to the wear leveling
HDD's are affected by all sorts of things, true. Mechanical failure is common, though in my experience I've never had a HDD fail on me. That could be because I've never kept drive long enough for it to fail so maybe the sucker who bought my drive after me had a failure?
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Hard drives fail all the time. You've been lucky. It can happen anytime. Keep backups.
SSD's, on the other hand are GOING TO FAIL, unless of course they find a way to increase the number of writes per cell.
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Read this:
http://daringfireball.net/2010/03/ode_to_diskwarrior_superduper_dropbox
Here's what he says.
Hard drives are fragile. Read as much as you can bear to about how they work, how incredibly precisely they must operate in order to cram so many bits onto such small disks. It’s a miracle to me that they work at all. Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.
 
I have 1.82TB of HDD space in my PC. Just backed everything on my .82TB onto a 1TB drive. I am getting another 2 1TB HDD's which I will then be mirroring all my data on. I am very worried about losing my data (most of my data is all on DVD anyway) luckily I can put 6 SATA drives in my PC.

I read that article, thanks Synaethesia.

Killa, I'll buy a SSD when the price comes down a bit, erm, a lot. I just don't really feel like forking out R3K ATM for a piddly 120GB drive that will get me into Bad Company 2 just as fast as the next oke because of their 15 second spawn delay.
 
No dude that is why i mentioned an ssd should only be bought if you have cash spare, i use it mostly for my work. Most gamers do not need a ssd, only people who are hooked on speed will buy them.
 
An ssd makes almost everything in your pc faster. Pc starting up and shutting down, virus scans, moving files, programs startup instantly, anything that uses hard drive access.
 
OK so I've basically decided on the following setups:
Intel
Processor: Intel lga1156 i5-750 - Quad core , 2.66ghz box cpu , 3.2ghz turbo *
Mobo: ASUS P7P55D-LE - Intel P55 Chipset*
RAM: TEAM PC3-15000 DDR3 4GB Xtreem Low-Voltage 2x2GB Kit - CL 8-8-8-24-2T*
Price: R4,619.59
or
AMD
Processor: Phenom2 x4 , Quad-core 965 ( 3.4Ghz ) Black edition*
Mobo: MSI 790GX-GD65^
RAM: TEAM PC3-15000 DDR3 4GB Xtreem Low-Voltage 2x2GB Kit - CL 8-8-8-24-2T*
Price: R4366.37

Products from
*Rebel Tech. Are they reliable? Good after sales support etc.. ?
^Prophecy. Used them before, happy with them.

Any suggestions?

**Sorry for cross post. Original thread: Thread Please Use it instead.
 
kelevra said:
So I bought the PCF and saw that they don't advise on buying AMD cpu for gaming.Instead they say you go intel i5 route.Now I'm even more confused.....:confused:
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That magazine is so biased against anything that coms from AMD/ATI. Their reviews are based on highly subjective tests which can be easily manipulated. Last time I looked (3 or 4 months ago) they were still using 1680x1050 as the 'ultimate' resolution. :confused:

Now having said all that, in our country the price difference between an i5-750 and Phenom X4 955 is minimal. So is the difference in performance if you are gaming. You will however get better value (more features) in an AMD board for the same price. Think I've said it before in this thread, if you are only gaming it does not matter if you get AMD/Intel. Just flip a coin. I opted for AMD for two reason: to encourage competition between the two companies, and since it was $40 cheaper for me since I bought it on a business trip.
 
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Going AMD gives you the six core option and you avoid the pci express bottlenecks of going i5.
 
Okay,so this is going to be my system as follows:


Socket AM3 ECS AMD 790GXII
AMD Am3 Quad955 Blk 3.2Ghz
KINGSTON ME-K2G3V13C9X2 KVR1333D3N9K2/4G 1333 C9 2Gx2
LG LC-LW2343T W2343T-pf 23" wide lcd
WESTERN DIGITAL HD-W500S3K32 5001AALS 500GB Sata3G blK 32mb
CC-CH212P Cm Hyper 212Plus alu base+fin
PS-C650HXEM CORSAIR 650w HX Eps12v Modular
Sapphire HD5850 Vapox-X edition , 40nm , HDMi ready , support Eyefinity + DirectX 11 , crossfire-X , built-in HDMi codec+7.1 audio , 1080p HDCP Compliant , pci-e 2.0 x16 , 1Gb 256bit 4 channel DDR5

What do guys think?
 
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kelevra said:
Okay,so this is going to be my system as follows:


Socket AM3 ECS AMD 790GXII
AMD Am3 Quad955 Blk 3.2Ghz
KINGSTON ME-K2G3V13C9X2 KVR1333D3N9K2/4G 1333 C9 2Gx2
LG LC-LW2343T W2343T-pf 23" wide lcd
WESTERN DIGITAL HD-W500S3K32 5001AALS 500GB Sata3G blK 32mb
CC-CH212P Cm Hyper 212Plus alu base+fin
PS-C650HXEM CORSAIR 650w HX Eps12v Modular
Sapphire HD5850 Vapox-X edition , 40nm , HDMi ready , support Eyefinity + DirectX 11 , crossfire-X , built-in HDMi codec+7.1 audio , 1080p HDCP Compliant , pci-e 2.0 x16 , 1Gb 256bit 4 channel DDR5

What do guys think?
Click to expand...

Looks great.
 
kelevra said:
Okay,so this is going to be my system as follows:


Socket AM3 ECS AMD 790GXII
AMD Am3 Quad955 Blk 3.2Ghz
KINGSTON ME-K2G3V13C9X2 KVR1333D3N9K2/4G 1333 C9 2Gx2
LG LC-LW2343T W2343T-pf 23" wide lcd
WESTERN DIGITAL HD-W500S3K32 5001AALS 500GB Sata3G blK 32mb
CC-CH212P Cm Hyper 212Plus alu base+fin
PS-C650HXEM CORSAIR 650w HX Eps12v Modular
Sapphire HD5850 Vapox-X edition , 40nm , HDMi ready , support Eyefinity + DirectX 11 , crossfire-X , built-in HDMi codec+7.1 audio , 1080p HDCP Compliant , pci-e 2.0 x16 , 1Gb 256bit 4 channel DDR5

What do guys think?
Click to expand...

Perfect, though you could say I'm biased ;) Seriously though, its a very good system. Now buy it! Build it! Enjoy it! :D
 
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