Incredible Super SSDs could make hard disk drives obsolete

My work laptop was manufactured in 2018. Why was not getting an SSD even an option in 2018?
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Could be cost. In many systems Dell charges a ridiculous price (3 to 5 times what a SSD of that size would cost to purchase) to swap out a spinner for a SSD.
 
Seagate is solid. Been using them in quite a few builds and haven't had a single issue.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I just can't help but wonder why it was bought like this in the first place.
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At a guess, whoever ordered it didn't bother configuring it any, and the hard drive is a couple bucks cheaper, so is the default option.

Where I work, I wound up being the person specing out PCs for the last 5 years or so and I got the purchasing people to give me a dollar amount I could spend, and then I designed the order around getting the most bang for the bucks I had.

That'd be a lot harder if I had to order hundreds or thousands of machines, though.
 
drescherjm said:
Could be cost. In many systems Dell charges a ridiculous price (3 to 5 times what a SSD of that size would cost to purchase) to swap out a spinner for a SSD.
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They love to overcharge for RAM, too, to the point when I built my last computer for work, I ordered it with 8GB and then snuck in another stick I'd bought myself once it arrived.
 
next-Jin said:
Yeah I actually did something like that, we got “new” Dell Optiplex 8th gen desktops for work. They hadn’t been hooked up to the network yet or imaged. I replaced the spinner HD with a spare I had that was the equivalent size.

When they came through to image them it went without a hitch, no one cared. That hard drive is permanently in there now but at least my work productivity has increase.
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Why would you spend your own money to benefit your employer? If a company isn't willing to put a $50-100 dollar investment into an employee's provided tools to get better productivity that says a lot about the company. Factoring in benefits, etc. you probably cost your company around $50 an hour assuming you aren't "flipping burgers" or something similar. If they won't make a 1 labor hour cost basis investment to have better production for the 40/hrs a week (or more) that you work then that's on them.

Personally, my experience has always been positive when asking for new hardware/software. As long as I can explain how the request will benefit the business the answer has always been yes:
  • Extra RAM, approved.
  • 4 monitors over the standard 2 monitors, approved.
  • 2nd PC setup to pull in work queues so I can keep on working on my main machine, approved.
  • etc.
A good management team will get employees the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Focus on explaining how the company will benefit from your request. Usually it's a win-win, at least in my experience. They get better production, you get a better and less frustrating work day.
 
TordanGow said:
Why would you spend your own money to benefit your employer?
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I don't. I do it to benefit myself, so I don't have to wait for slow hardware.

Edit: or to fine-tune the configuration. Dell, as of today, charges $110 for an 8GB stick on the Optiplex 5070 (price to go from 8GB to 16GB.) I can get that for $27 from the local Microcenter and have $80 to put towards replacing the HDD with an SDD, or moving from a 3000 to a 5000 series, or getting a bigger monitor, etc.
 
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TordanGow said:
Why would you spend your own money to benefit your employer? If a company isn't willing to put a $50-100 dollar investment into an employee's provided tools to get better productivity that says a lot about the company. Factoring in benefits, etc. you probably cost your company around $50 an hour assuming you aren't "flipping burgers" or something similar. If they won't make a 1 labor hour cost basis investment to have better production for the 40/hrs a week (or more) that you work then that's on them.

Personally, my experience has always been positive when asking for new hardware/software. As long as I can explain how the request will benefit the business the answer has always been yes:
  • Extra RAM, approved.
  • 4 monitors over the standard 2 monitors, approved.
  • 2nd PC setup to pull in work queues so I can keep on working on my main machine, approved.
  • etc.
A good management team will get employees the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Focus on explaining how the company will benefit from your request. Usually it's a win-win, at least in my experience. They get better production, you get a better and less frustrating work day.
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Yeah, I've had good luck to, but it's always so slow to get it done :). I got a dual xeon work station with dual 8/16's... 64gb of ram, and a 1tb HDD... who the hell specs this crap. Seriously, I could have done more work with a 6/12 and any 1/2 decent SSD and 32gb ram. I put in for an SSD upgrade and was approved pretty much instantly... the COVID hit, so they gave me a laptop (9980hk + nvidia quadro rtx 3000 and 32gb) that actually has an SSD, so much better.. Hopefully when I get back to my desktop they have the SSD ready to go, it kills productivity when I have to copy around files or reboot. I have all that processor power but can't read/write files to the disk fast enough to use it while compiling, lol.
 
TordanGow said:
Why would you spend your own money to benefit your employer? If a company isn't willing to put a $50-100 dollar investment into an employee's provided tools to get better productivity that says a lot about the company. Factoring in benefits, etc. you probably cost your company around $50 an hour assuming you aren't "flipping burgers" or something similar. If they won't make a 1 labor hour cost basis investment to have better production for the 40/hrs a week (or more) that you work then that's on them.

Personally, my experience has always been positive when asking for new hardware/software. As long as I can explain how the request will benefit the business the answer has always been yes:
  • Extra RAM, approved.
  • 4 monitors over the standard 2 monitors, approved.
  • 2nd PC setup to pull in work queues so I can keep on working on my main machine, approved.
  • etc.
A good management team will get employees the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Focus on explaining how the company will benefit from your request. Usually it's a win-win, at least in my experience. They get better production, you get a better and less frustrating work day.
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It was an Army computer so there was no explaining. It was also some cheap ADATA SSD I got from a slickdeal a few years ago.

It was not to benefit them, it was to keep me sane. Government computers usually have dozens if not more profiles per PC and an incredible amount of random I/O and security apps constantly running in the background.

They are horribly slow and inefficient even though they were 8th gen core i5s with 16GB of ram.

If I was in charge of product life cycles for the installation I’d never use spinners but here we are.
 
KazeoHin said:
People act like SSD endurance is a concern. HDDs are practically a disposable resource: they WILL die and be replaced multiple times on a single server. That's why RAIDs exist. I'm not saying SSDs are better, but they sure as hell aren't any worse.
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Storage is like tires on a car, better performance, as in racing tires, wear out faster, but all tires wear out eventually and assuming the car as a whole lasts long enough the tires get replaced multiple times. Even on a home PC with low write counts I worry more about SSD/HDD failure more than any other part. The only thing that might out faster are human interface stuff like mice and keyboards.
 
motomonkey said:
Storage is like tires on a car, better performance, as in racing tires, wear out faster, but all tires wear out eventually and assuming the car as a whole lasts long enough the tires get replaced multiple times. Even on a home PC with low write counts I worry more about SSD/HDD failure more than any other part. The only thing that might out faster are human interface stuff like mice and keyboards.
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So if SSDs are racing tires, HDDs must be plastic power wheels tires made of styrofoam.

I'm my machines, the last thing I worry about is drive failure, those are easy to replace and I have backups, but I haven't had one SSD fail me yet since 2009. That said, I'll never buy Adata or Crucial SSDs. My dad had 10+ Adata SSDs and every since one of them failed, 100% failure rate after 2 years. My brother had 3 Crucials in a row that failed (MX100->MX200->MX500), also 100% failure rate, relatively small sample size, but between the 3 of us we have 20 Samsung SSDs and none (0%) of them failed starting from 2009 (Samsung RBX days), their only "bad" SSD was the 840 evo.
 
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Rockenrooster said:
So if SSDs are racing tires, HDDs must be plastic power wheels tires made of styrofoam.

I'm my machines, the last thing I worry about is drive failure, those are easy to replace and I have backups, but I haven't had one SSD fail me yet since 2009. That said, I'll never buy Adata or Crucial SSDs. My dad had 10+ Adata SSDs and every since one of them failed, 100% failure rate after 2 years. My brother had 3 Crucials in a row that failed (MX100->MX200->MX500), also 100% failure rate, relatively small sample size, but between the 3 of us we have 20 Samsung SSDs and none (0%) of them failed starting from 2009 (Samsung RBX days), their only "bad" SSD was the 840 evo.
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I have been running an adata for 4 years now.... No clue what was happening to them. I also have an mx500 for about the same time, no issues. I have 2 Samsung's, no issues. And some other off brand I'd have to open the PC to remember, but still going strong. So far no problems with my mix of my SATA and nvme SSD drives. I've lost more PSUs than hard drives, I think 2 far vs 1 her and 0 SSD. Maybe I'm just lucky, seems you had really bad luck, may want to check for dirty power or something if you keep losing drives like that. I say this all today and tomorrow I'll be looking for like 5 replacement drives, lol.
 
Ready4Dis said:
I have been running an adata for 4 years now.... No clue what was happening to them. I also have an mx500 for about the same time, no issues. I have 2 Samsung's, no issues. And some other off brand I'd have to open the PC to remember, but still going strong. So far no problems with my mix of my SATA and nvme SSD drives. I've lost more PSUs than hard drives, I think 2 far vs 1 her and 0 SSD. Maybe I'm just lucky, seems you had really bad luck, may want to check for dirty power or something if you keep losing drives like that. I say this all today and tomorrow I'll be looking for like 5 replacement drives, lol.
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I personally haven't lost any SSDs, just my bro and dad lol. The Adata's were 64GBs from like 8 years ago, only the crucials were recent. Also, he replaced it with a samsung 860 and has been fine ever since, his PC was built in 2012 (haswell), the Crucial SSDs are the only things that gave him problems. I 100% doubt its dirty power with the Crucials and Adatas. The Adatas were in a variety of machines (laptops and desktops) and they failed no matter the machine.

I also forgot to mention I recommended a 275GB crucial to my in-laws because it was on sale for a really good price and it exhibited some really weird problems that would cause windows to freeze up and crash like my brother's MX500. Returned that and got them a 850EVO and been running great even after upgrading from an ASUS prebuilt to a Ryzen PC.

The only good experience I have ever had with Crucial SSDs are in the m4 days...everything in the MX series has a 100% failure rate in my own experience (4 MX*** drives), so I won't ever touch them again. I guess Crucial doesn't like me. I haven't tried their BX series and I don't really want to, it might break in half when i touch it.
 
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Rockenrooster said:
I personally haven't lost any SSDs, just my bro and dad lol. The Adata's were 64GBs from like 8 years ago, only the crucials were recent. Also, he replaced it with a samsung 860 and has been fine ever since, his PC was built in 2012 (haswell), the Crucial SSDs are the only things that gave him problems. I 100% doubt its dirty power with the Crucials and Adatas. The Adatas were in a variety of machines (laptops and desktops) and they failed no matter the machine.

I also forgot to mention I recommended a 275GB crucial to my in-laws because it was on sale for a really good price and it exhibited some really weird problems that would cause windows to freeze up and crash like my brother's MX500. Returned that and got them a 850EVO and been running great even after upgrading from an ASUS prebuilt to a Ryzen PC.

The only good experience I have ever had with Crucial SSDs are in the m4 days...everything in the MX series has a 100% failure rate in my own experience (4 MX*** drives), so I won't ever touch them again. I guess Crucial doesn't like me. I haven't tried their BX series and I don't really want to, it might break in half when i touch it.
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Well, I it happens I guess, lol. Everyone has different experiences.
 
Rockenrooster said:
I also forgot to mention I recommended a 275GB crucial to my in-laws because it was on sale for a really good price and it exhibited some really weird problems that would cause windows to freeze up and crash like my brother's MX500.
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There was an issue with the MX line of ssds and Windows 10, it's not just you. I forget the exact error, but got stuck troubleshooting random reboots a couple days ago. I believe the fix was a Crucial firmware update and updating SATA drivers, but will also be avoiding these in the future. The event viewer code followed by crucial showed it was a very common issue.
 
Rockenrooster said:
So if SSDs are racing tires, HDDs must be plastic power wheels tires made of styrofoam.

I'm my machines, the last thing I worry about is drive failure, those are easy to replace and I have backups, but I haven't had one SSD fail me yet since 2009. That said, I'll never buy Adata or Crucial SSDs. My dad had 10+ Adata SSDs and every since one of them failed, 100% failure rate after 2 years. My brother had 3 Crucials in a row that failed (MX100->MX200->MX500), also 100% failure rate, relatively small sample size, but between the 3 of us we have 20 Samsung SSDs and none (0%) of them failed starting from 2009 (Samsung RBX days), their only "bad" SSD was the 840 evo.
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I agree that modern SSD's are very reliable. Especially Intel and Samsung drives. Completely bulletproof.

You must never have owned OCZ drives from before they were sold to Toshiba though. I somehow foolishly bought several of them.

- First Gen Agility 120GB
- OCZ Agility 2 120GB (RMA replacement for first Agility)
- OCZ Agility 3 120GB (second RMA replacement for Agility)
- OCZ Octane 60GB
- OCZ Onyx 32GB
- OCZ Vertex 3 256GB
- OCZ Vertex 3 256GB (RMA replacement for first one)
- OCZ Vertex 4 256GB (second RMA for Vertex 3)
- OCZ Vector 256GB (Third RMA replacement for Vertex 3)

Every last one of them failed within 1 to 2 years.

Tech Reports 2013 SSD Endurance Experiment - however - proved that the bad old days were over. All of the drives lasted way longer than specs would have indicated, and these were drives with Planar NAND back before 3D NAND was a thing, which greatly improved write endurance.

Also, the larger the drive, the more write endurance, so today's TB+ drives have A LOT of write endurance.

Unless you are doing something really dumb, like utilizing a small TLC drive in a workload like caching where there are heavy writes, chances are SSD's will last until they are replaced for size/performance reasons no matter what you do with them.

And to think in the early days they told us to not put swap files on SSD's. 😂 That's no longer the case...
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I agree that modern SSD's are very reliable. Especially Intel and Samsung drives. Completely bulletproof.

You must never have owned OCZ drives from before they were sold to Toshiba though. I somehow foolishly bought several of them.

- First Gen Agility 120GB
- OCZ Agility 2 120GB (RMA replacement for first Agility)
- OCZ Agility 3 120GB (second RMA replacement for Agility)
- OCZ Octane 60GB
- OCZ Onyx 32GB
- OCZ Vertex 3 256GB
- OCZ Vertex 3 256GB (RMA replacement for first one)
- OCZ Vertex 4 256GB (second RMA for Vertex 3)
- OCZ Vector 256GB (Third RMA replacement for Vertex 3)

Every last one of them failed within 1 to 2 years.

Tech Reports 2013 SSD Endurance Experiment - however - proved that the bad old days were over. All of the drives lasted way longer than specs would have indicated, and these were drives with Planar NAND back before 3D NAND was a thing, which greatly improved write endurance.

Also, the larger the drive, the more write endurance, so today's TB+ drives have A LOT of write endurance.

Unless you are doing something really dumb, like utilizing a small TLC drive in a workload like caching where there are heavy writes, chances are SSD's will last until they are replaced for size/performance reasons no matter what you do with them.

And to think in the early days they told us to not put swap files on SSD's. 😂 That's no longer the case...
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Oh I've heard the horror stories about OCZ SSDs.... That's why I've never had them...
 
Kardonxt said:
There was an issue with the MX line of ssds and Windows 10, it's not just you. I forget the exact error, but got stuck troubleshooting random reboots a couple days ago. I believe the fix was a Crucial firmware update and updating SATA drivers, but will also be avoiding these in the future. The event viewer code followed by crucial showed it was a very common issue.
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Yeah it was kind of hard to do a firmware update when the PC freezes in 2min.
 
next-Jin said:
It was an Army computer so there was no explaining. It was also some cheap ADATA SSD I got from a slickdeal a few years ago.

It was not to benefit them, it was to keep me sane. Government computers usually have dozens if not more profiles per PC and an incredible amount of random I/O and security apps constantly running in the background.

They are horribly slow and inefficient even though they were 8th gen core i5s with 16GB of ram.

If I was in charge of product life cycles for the installation I’d never use spinners but here we are.
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If it was an army computer you just violated regulations. Thats a security issue. Turn yourself in.
 
motomonkey said:
Storage is like tires on a car, better performance, as in racing tires, wear out faster, but all tires wear out eventually and assuming the car as a whole lasts long enough the tires get replaced multiple times. Even on a home PC with low write counts I worry more about SSD/HDD failure more than any other part. The only thing that might out faster are human interface stuff like mice and keyboards.
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I run all my hard drives in redundant configurations and back them up.

I don't worry about SSD's at all anymore.

Since ~2012-2013 or so, as long as you buy quality brands (not noname chinese junk) they are bulletproof. I have lots of SSD's. Haven't lost one since the bad old OCZ days. SSD Endurance simply is not an issue anymore unless you are doing something really stupid.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
You must never have owned OCZ drives from before they were sold to Toshiba though. I somehow foolishly bought several of them.
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Rockenrooster said:
Oh I've heard the horror stories about OCZ SSDs
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my 2x 60gb vertex 3 drives from 2011/12 are still going strong, 95%+. i'd still be using them if they werent so small, just retired the second one last week, it only had doom on it...
 
kju1 said:
If it was an army computer you just violated regulations. Thats a security issue. Turn yourself in.
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That’s on the NEC and their IMO people. All I did was ask if they could prior to it being on the network and imaged. Apparently so long as it hasn’t had either of those it’s fine.
 
next-Jin said:
That’s on the NEC and their IMO people. All I did was ask if they could prior to it being on the network and imaged. Apparently so long as it hasn’t had either of those it’s fine.
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Your opinion is wrong. As a someone who spent a decade working in that environment you not only created a security issue but caused an ethics violation. That hard drive did not go through acquisition security for one.
 
kju1 said:
Your opinion is wrong. As a someone who spent a decade working in that environment you not only created a security issue but caused an ethics violation. That hard drive did not go through acquisition security for one.
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I don’t really have an opinion on it. All I did was ask if it was possible and that’s what they did. Its not like I swapped the hard drives myself on a working PC. It wouldn’t work even if I was dumb enough to try and throw flags to admins.

I’ll forward the email traffic back to them, maybe there is new people working there.
 
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