Reason for 16GB in workstations

[Hans Manhave]

A reason to have 16GB in a workstation:

www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-ram-endurance,3475-3.html

No, I don't have SSDs in my workstations, but I was researching it a bit more and saw this.

There is probably benefit if one only has the regular spinner drives as well.

[Mark]

We have 8 in all our new workstations.  Price difference was minimal.  We are using SSD.

This does make sense to me.

[Jeff Golas]

Or just use the SSD and have plans for if (more like when) it croaks. By then they'll prob come down in price as well.

Lately I had 2-3 drives go bad...I spent $100 on a Kingston SSD rather than a $50 mechanical and at that price as long as it lasts a year or two I'm happy with that.

How you manage your data as far as user profiles, home drives, backups, etc is much different now. Hard drives are commodity stuff in our environments.

[Mark]

How you manage your data as far as user profiles, home drives, backups, etc is much different now. Hard drives are commodity stuff in our environments.

Very true!  Until you are looking at 15,000RPM RAID 10 for your SAN.  Then, it doesn't seem so cheap! 

[Hans Manhave]

I don't grasp all of the discussion but have one question: does it make sense for a non-network desktop to replace the spinning hard drive with an SSD drive?  Right now I see 240GB SSD on sale for $89/ea.  I know that is not a terabyte.  But it is more affordable than SSD has ever been.  Is SSD just a short term solution, where one needs to be ready with a replacement in one or two years?

[Mark]

SSDs are getting better and are finally to a point where they should have a relatively decent lifespan.  Remember, a spinning hard drive only has the expected lifespan of around 5 years - though we all have drives that have lived much much longer than that.  They are only "expected" to last 5 years.  I haven't had SSDs for long enough to comment on their expected life but if you are replacing a drive and want speed I say go for the SSD.  Just make sure you have good and tested backups.

[Billy Welsh]

The SSD's are also supposed to have a limited life, but nobody has been willing to say what that is.  Apparently there was no testing method that could give them confidence, so they just released them into the wild and we all have to wait and see what the average MTBF turns out to be.

Based on the few that I have used, my next personal purchase WILL include one.  And I will just make sure I have iDrive or some such backing up my data.

[Hans Manhave]

I thought an SSD was like a memory stick.  Just bigger, but now you can get 128GB memory sticks too.  Everything breaks, it just seemed odd that the SSD appears to have a shorter live span.  Nobody appears to be concerned that my two 8GB memory sticks may fail at some point because of high usage, yet usage is supposed to "wear out" an SSD?  Makes me think I'm being told a story.

[Billy Welsh]

The way I recall it being explained at a seminar was that there was just no reliable way to replicate real-world reads/writes/rewrites and how that combined with Father Time would ultimately affect the reliability.  The thought process was all things being equal, a properly manufactured SSD would last at least as long as a standard magnetic spinning disk drive, but with faster speed and lower energy usage.  So they sent them out into the wild, and we all shall see.

Besides all that, the thought/prediction was that before long these will get replaced by optical drives.

[Mark]

Without being very technical:

Solid State Drives are made with flash technology similar to memory (RAM) with the key difference being that when power to an SSD is switched off, it does retain it's data (non-volatile).  RAM on the other hand is temporary (volatile) as such when power is removed, so is all data in memory.  (I always relate volatile with puking to remember this.  If it's "volatile" memory, it "pukes" out the data when power is removed  )

ALL storage has a limited number of writes.  SSD included.  The problem is that it most likely fluctuates based on tens of thousands of variables which makes it difficult to test for an expected life of a drive.

In my opinion, writing to an SSD has GOT to be somehow different than writing to RAM.  Many reasons for this and I would have no idea which reason is the culprit that causes shorter lifespan.  That said - RAM does fail, too.

[Conan_Ward]

You guys can get all technical with debating ssd life, all I see is a reason to double the amount of RAM in my home machine and be able to justify it.