SSD - a cautionary tale

[chris_letts]

<p>The tale goes on...<br>

I took the SSD to work and tested it as thoroughly as I could and found that it would work 100% as a secondary drive (e.g. D: drive for data) but if installed as the system drive C: then the PC always failed to boot.<br>

I also found that Windows 7 is remarkable unresilient to changes to the drive controller setup. Setup on my home PC is RAID/AHCI, at work just AHCI - I found that you cannot change this once Windows is installed (although there is an alleged registry hack that will do it). In fact if you run a system capture under one setting, then you MUST restore under the same setting or Windows will fail.<br>

I currently have it sitting in my PC waiting for the courage to use it as a data drive, although as someone else has mentioned I'll probably only use it for temporary data e.g. when doing photo manipulation.</p>

[various things]

<p>"I'll probably only use it for temporary data e.g. when doing photo manipulation."<br>

That's what I do with the Kingston-SSD Now V100 64G, as it was as unreliable as system drive as is the SSD you describe. The Kingston SSD I've set as Drive Z. So no matter how many card readers, USB sticks, external bluray drvies or whatever I attach to the system now and then, there is never any confusion for W7.<br>

And tell you what: no problem whatsoever ever since. I transfer the shots from the D800 onto the Kingston SSD (which in parallel is set up as cache for ACR, Bridge and Photoshop). Loading/saving is lightning fast compared to files stored on a standard HD. After editing is finalized, I transfer the .nef and the final .jpg or .tiff to the 2TB HD data grave. </p>

[keith_kanoun]

<blockquote>

<p>I have had one HDD fail. That was YEARS ago. The thing with that failure was it was gradual. It gave me plenty of time to move 99% of my data to a separate drive. The SSD was a joke. Works one minute. 100% failure the next.</p>

</blockquote>

<p><br />I've had both sorts of failures with spinning hard drives - the nice gradual "uh oh, I'd better do something" type failure, and the catastrophic one minute it works, the next minute it's dead failure. The latter type once was on a less than one week old drive. I've even had warranty replacement drives for failed drives fail again. I figure anyone that has never experienced a hard drive failure is very fortunate, given the statistics involved.</p>

[brodeub]

<p>first hard drive failure in my experience is the recent fail of a macbook air 256GB SSD after 18 months in use. the notion that these things are bullet-proof is rubbish, especially with the high temperature operating environments and shrinking form factors. apple charges a fortune to replace, although a 3rd party SSD is more reasonable. fortunately had a recent backup, and restoring data to the new drive was a snap. moral of the story - B&W - backup and warranty. cheers</p>

[chris_letts]

<p>I'm hearing more and more sorry tales of SSD fails and setup problems - much more than I'd expect from HDD.<br>

I've relegated mine to a data drive holding working copies of photos etc, AND used as cache for NX2, paging file, etc. Set up like that it does increase processing speed and manages to work fine.</p>