Solid State Drives

[KungFooMasta]

Has anybody ever experienced corruption of data on a solid state hard drive? I've never had any of the data on my flash drives go bad, and was thinking about putting my game dev projects onto it so I could easily switch between development between my laptop and tower, without having to commit/update.

So I guess I'm mainly asking:

- How often have you had data on your flash drive get corrupted? (assuming frequent read/write access)
- Does this idea seem like a bad one?
- What are the cons of this idea? (I don't know access times for flash drives, haven't looked it up)

[tau]

@KungFooMasta: did u actually experience the data corruption?

SSD are usually more secure the HDD, however, the technology is a bit new because they are trying to squeeze to many bits onto a chip... all new iPods are coming with flash drives and I did not hear anything about corrupted data there...

If you put your SSDs in RAID, it will virtually keep your data safe even if one of the disks will kiss its own ass goodbye...

[NimBoss]

I have worked with USB stick memory (sort of solid state) for a couple of years without any bigger issues (except plug out without proper unmount )
USB even 2.0 flash sticks are slower than pure hard drives so if you compile often this will be a bottleneck. (there are ways in Windows to disable secure write/read to a USB memory stick and get a real boost in performance,but to the cost of security)

Developing (continues rewrite) against a flash drive I don't have any experience of BUT this I know:

Commercial grade of flash memory have a more limited rewrite lifespan so If possible get a industry grade drive, these have a lot bigger MTBF (but are expensive).

Another way around: Are there limits on the laptop and tower regarding space?
Because running a sync to the flash drive after work on the laptop or tower will grant you a backup on at least one machine if all goes downhill and you lose work on one of the machines or the flash memory.

[sinbad]

The latest (cheap) SSDs have a MTBF of about 1/10th of previous drives, because they're using a bit more of a hack to store extra data in the same space - basically instead of using each cell as an on/off switch containing zero or 'some' electrons, they judge several 'levels' of electron charge in each cell to store more bits in the same place. Over time the ability to set and tell the levels apart accurately diminishes and so the SSDs that use this approach fail quicker than the simpler on/off ones - the more you update the data, the quicker it wears out. So I wouldn't judge older flash drives as a good guide to reliability here. Personally I wouldn't trust the new cheap SSDs with my critical data, I'm waiting for them to iron the kinks out and get the MTBF up. It's the 'write endurance' that's the problem.

The trouble is that the older more expensive (for size) SSDs had a MTBF that was better than HDDs, so there's a perception that the new tech is the same, but it's really not. Very recent ones are bigger but less resilient. Also it depends how you use it - if you update infrequently but read loads, the MTBF will be better, if you do lots of writing (say, a desktop disk), the 'write endurance' is more of a problem, especially with the newer 'level based' models. I'd give it a year myself.

[cybereality]

Maybe a dumb question, but why not just use a portable 2.5" HDD? They are dirt cheap now and pretty reliable.

[syedhs]

I think the better idea is to have regular backup because you are not really supposed to depend on the so called MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure). MTBF is just an indicator of how robust your storage is. As long as MTBF is not a matter of months or so, you should be fine.

And again, because MTBF is just a mean value, so there is a possibility that the hard drive (whatever kind that is) still go kuckoo the next month. So if it were me, I will just buy standard external USB harddisk with regular backup - write a script if too cumbersome. And to be extra paranoid, you can also upload your files to somewhere online - my suggestion is using Gmail Drive Extension.

[ekt]

I had the same scenario (develop on a laptop when travelling, develop at home on my desktop). Solved in this way:
- I use VisualSourceSafe
- The VSS database is on an USB stick, which is always with me
- Every 'developing station' does checkout/checkin from this vss db

I'm very happy with this solution. No performance issues (checkin/checkout a file is cheap, even with crappy vss). Implicit sources redundancy.

Every once in a while i backup the whole vss db but i'm not too worried. In case the usb stick is destroyed, i would just lose some history (since the latest backup)

I never suffered any usb stick damage.

[Kojack]

I had my fairly new (well, less than a year) Corsair GT 8GB drive corrupt a file today, but that's probably because I pulled it out of my QNAP too early. Tried again and left it longer and it worked. But on thursday it corrupted several files. Hmm, annoying, hope it isn't dying. My 40GB iriver decided on the train tonight that the harddrive wasn't connected, so I had no music. It corrupted files last week too. I hope it keeps working, iriver don't make big harddrive players anymore.

[Brian Adsboel]

just a note,

i looked up reviews of affordable SSD discs and they are very VERY slows compared to similar HDD drive. For instance you can still buy 2x 10000rpm raptor drives and get superior to most SSD.

I am not conservative nor pro raptor, i just say its not yet within range of common people.

[betajaen]

My laptop has a SSD built in as the main disk.

I installed Debian on it (from scratch) and customized it quite a bit to avoid disk writing i.e. redirecting /tmp to RAM, turning off last accessed flags and so forth. Although modern SSD's do have wear leveling built in I feel it's a necessary thing to do. As for speed; the laptop boots up in around 45 seconds, which isn't to bad considering it only has 512Mbs of RAM and a 570Mhz Celeron processor.

One day; I can see myself replacing operating system drive which is a raptor, with a more quieter SSD drive. But only when the prices go down.