HDD or SSD

[Clive197]

I’m toying with the idea of replacing my 1Tb HDD USB drives with SSD drives but I’m getting conflicting information about reliability of said SSD drives so I’m a little confused. As reliability is the main reason for the possible change, I wondered if any of you guys could give me advise.

[Paul-H]

Hi

It's my understanding that the life limiting side of SSD drives is if you constantly write to them, it's the writing that shortens their life, but I don't know by how much it shortens it.

It's better to use an SSD drive for you boot drive which will give you a much faster boot time then possibly stick to standard drives for your data writing, which is what I did with my system, although my laptop only has one drive and that's an SSD, but it gets very little use so no issues yet ;)

That's the limit of my understanding, others with more knowledge of these things will be s long soon.:)

Paul

[lovejoy]

My last 2 laptops have had SSDs in them, so I've been running with SSD with a laptop running for at least 8 hours a day, every week day. I've never had a single issue other than having to keep on top of running out of space, but the benefits in speed are easily discernible over a spinning drive.
My audio PC has been running with a Samsing EVO SSD as the operating system drive for the last 4 years or so too without any issues. I'm thinking of replacing the music drive which is a standard spinning WD hard drive with an SSD as the prices of larger drives are now coming down. I've come to trust SSDs more than I trust standard HDs.

[struth]

Hi

It's my understanding that the life limiting side of SSD drives is if you constantly write to them, it's the writing that shortens their life, but I don't know by how much it shortens it.

It's better to use an SSD drive for you boot drive which will give you a much faster boot time then possibly stick to standard drives for your data writing, which is what I did with my system, although my laptop only has one drive and that's an SSD, but it gets very little use so no issues yet ;)

That's the limit of my understanding, others with more knowledge of these things will be s long soon.:)

Paul

indeed..

[Sherwood]

All drives WILL FAIL at some point, SSD drives have several advantages when it comes to audio storage. I would go for an SSD with HDD backup.

[AJSki2fly]

Hi

It's my understanding that the life limiting side of SSD drives is if you constantly write to them, it's the writing that shortens their life, but I don't know by how much it shortens it.

It's better to use an SSD drive for you boot drive which will give you a much faster boot time then possibly stick to standard drives for your data writing, which is what I did with my system, although my laptop only has one drive and that's an SSD, but it gets very little use so no issues yet ;)

That's the limit of my understanding, others with more knowledge of these things will be s long soon.:)

Paul

My experience with Hard drives over the past 30 years in the IT u=industry is this, for what its worth.

1. HDDs they generally give up at around 5-6 years of age with general use and if not flung about or given shocks(being dropped or knocked). In fact my NAS drive 3TB HDD failed last week with just under 5 years use and the previous one did the same. These were both Hitachi drives, I have also had about 4 other HDDs from other manufacturers fail at around 4-5 years. The reason is the constant read write to the disc and constant accessing of certain blocks(especially with and OS drive), this causes wear and eventually bad sector failures. There had been a number known dodgy HDDs of a particular build line from several suppliers that have been replaced by computer manufacturers.

2. SSD can and will fail with time, there are several issues with these, primarily they are storage chips, which are basically lots of miniaturise on/off switches(diodes) on a chip. So any quality control issues during manufacture can and does result in short life for part of the chip, when they fail this cause what is colloquially call a hole. So here is he rub, where the hole is and how big it initially is can render the SSD immediately useless and immediate loos of everything on it, it becomes inaccessible in normal set up. SSD as I said earlier fail with time and use, they are affected by adverse heat and cold and sudden temperature changes, so an SSD in a portable devices that is carted about regularly will likely fail sooner than one in a machine that stays at home in a stable environment. Be warned there have been several SSDs from different manufactures that have been known to suffer from bad build quality and it is know that they fail within the first 2 years of use, believe this is fact, there was a number of SSD free replacements that Apple undertook in different units, as the supplier got it wrong.

By the way certain filing systems system for hard drives, actually move and re-arrange were files are physically stored on a drive to try and maintain the quickest access possible, this happens on the fly and the end user will not necessarily be aware of it. So to think that its write to the drive once and that's it is not necessarily correct. Also with a spinning drive that act of the read/write heads move across the disks and then physically reading the data files causes wear and tear.

My machine is a 6 year old MacBook pro with 500gb SSD and it rarely leave the house and I take great care of it, and so far so good, but it is constantly backed up for that fateful day.

So IMO if the drive(s) is going to be used for media server and price is a concern then a good modern high speed HDD is fine with buffering, but be prepared to write it off in about 5 years time. If you can afford it then SSDs can be good but not necessarily more reliable. whichever you use, for heaven sake back them up to another drive and remember to throw the back up drive out every 4-5 years as well. If everything you have is on your hard drives and is important to you and cannot be replaced, i f you can have 2 backup drives that you rotate every other week, sticking one in a fire and water safe place in a sealed box when not in use.

I would seriously advise NOT to rely on cloud back ups alone, it has been known for data to be corrupted on route to the cloud and then the resulting back up is corrupt, you are likely to be completely unaware of this, (remember the route from your machine over the internet to you cloud back up server can be long and torturous) so that when your personal unit fails and you try and restore from the cloud back up it is corrupt.

I am not sure this will help you decide but hopefully it clarifies things a bit.

[dave2010]

I have used, and indeed still do, a multi-pronged approach. It used to be the case that SSDs were really too expensive for backup purposes, so I have previously done backups to HDD, but now I do that less. I have had complete failure of a portable HDD used for backups, as it swung down on its cable, and banged into the sofa on which I was sitting at the time. That is not a problem for an SSD - they are much more robust and hence more immune from physical damage.

I have had my laptop with an SSD drive since the back half of 2013. It's still going. Most of the HDDs are still going too, but I wouldn't expect a laptop with in-built HDD to be so resilient after 6-7 years.

However for large amounts of storage, say 1 Tbyte and over, cost is still probably a deterrent factor against SSDs. If they're affordable, go for them.

[Clive197]

Thank you all for your time replying to my post. I will probably invest in a SSD to back up my own music which is currently on my NAS. My plan then is to give the backup to my son to look after so that Its offsite. I listen to music now mainly via Qobuz.

[Lawrence001]

I was speaking to the UK head of technology or something for a leading music server company (whose name eludes me) at the Windsor show, and I asked him why all their products costing many thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands, used HDDs. He gave me a number of reasons which went over my head but I think they included noise and lifespan.

I'll dig out the show guide and see if I can remember what they were called. I think they were German or Japanese.

Sent from my HRY-LX1 using Tapatalk

[Clive197]

I was speaking to the UK head of technology or something for a leading music server company (whose name eludes me) at the Windsor show, and I asked him why all their products costing many thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands, used HDDs. He gave me a number of reasons which went over my head but I think they included noise and lifespan.

I'll dig out the show guide and see if I can remember what they were called. I think they were German or Japanese.

Sent from my HRY-LX1 using Tapatalk

It was probably Melco as it was one of their reps that first put the doubt in my mind. The rep did add that they see more SSD’s going into their products than HDD.

[eatapeach]

Thank you all for your time replying to my post. I will probably invest in a SSD to back up my own music which is currently on my NAS. My plan then is to give the backup to my son to look after so that Its offsite. I listen to music now mainly via Qobuz.

I'm a bit confused about why you would back up to SSD? I assume the NAS is HDD- haven't you got things the wrong way round ie why pay more for something where reliability isn't an issue but cost maybe is?

Like others I've got 2 laptops (work/home) running SSDs with no problem for years but I back up everything to a couple of old school HDDs

[Lawrence001]

It was probably Melco as it was one of their reps that first put the doubt in my mind. The rep did add that they see more SSD’s going into their products than HDD.That's right I just found the below from a StereoNet review which is what he told me. I got confused, they do use SSDs but they are in the models outside my price range. Well all the models are outside my price range at the new prices!

Music data is written infrequently and is rarely modified, rendering the usual computer SSD lifetime optimisation algorithms as inappropriate, especially as they also tend to impact on data integrity, as they operate in bursts as required. The N1ZS uses purposebuilt SSDs designed especially for audio playback, with a low level and consistent management algorithm that has zero impact on data integrity, but lowers the power noise signature significantly.

Sent from my HRY-LX1 using Tapatalk

[Paul-H]

Purely a coincidence but my lightly used first SSD drive a Crucial MX300 has started failing the Crucial diagnostics, did a quick sector check and one bad block was reported, don't know how valid a sector check is on SSD's though but Crucisls own software reports a fault.

This drive is 2 years old and used as a boot drive on a machine that is mainly used for internet browsing.

Can't remember the last time a proper Hard Disk failed so not overly impressed with the Crucial at the moment.

[StanleyB]

1. I back up to SSD for speed.
2. My oldest SSD is around 8 years old and still going strong on the laptop that it cam with.
3. I prefer the Samsung EVO range.

[Clive197]

Thanks for the advice guys. I’ve just bought a 500Gb Samsung T5 USB drive. It took 5hrs to load all my home stored music (319Gb).
To check out the results, I plugged the USB into the input of my Aries G1 and compared it to my Synology running MinimServer on WD Red Drives. I found that the USB drive was very slightly louder but SQ was very close to the point that I couldn’t tell a difference.