System Restore and SSDs

[Dave McElderry]

Speaking of SSDs and SATA, maybe someone can help answer a couple of questions...

My motherboard supports SATA II, but of course my new SSD supports SATA III. Theoretically SATA III is twice as fast, but of course there are a number of real-world factors which affect the reality of that. What I'm wondering is if something like the card below would work for giving my SSD the ability to work up to its SATA III capability. The price on the card isn't bad if it would make a significant difference. So if the card would give me SATA III, would that difference likely be significant enough to warrant the trouble? And since my other, traditional hard disk, drives are SATA II I don't imagine it would help their performance at all.

https://www.amazon.com/Syba-PCI-Express ... B01BBXMLQK

EDIT: It just occurred to me that my PCI-e slot is probably V1.1 instead of V2.0. I didn't go looking for a similar card for PCI 1.1, if they even exist. Although the V2.0 card is probably backwards compatible I have to wonder if it would even be able to provide SATA III speeds through a V1.1 slot.

EDIT 2: Just found the specs. It's PCI-e 2.0. A non-issue.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Dave, my experience with an old Dell D630 laptop that originally shipped with XP so you can guess its age!

I upgraded the OS to Win 7Pro 64 bit some time ago. The original HDD was a 5,900 rpm 80GB so a bit too small for my needs so I installed a WD 250GB 7,200 rpm drive. That worked OK but the real performance improvement came when I "recycled" a 120GB SSD from my desktop. It was a completely different machine, booting up incredibly quickly and, for the basic uses that I had for it, performing very well.

My point is that the tech on that motherboard was way old but, performance wise, it didn't appear to be a hugely limiting issue.

[Chris B]

That card is only 1 lane pci express - which is only just enough for 1 SATA3 connection. It is unlikely to offer SATA3 performance on any drive it connects to. Generally for addin cards the question is whether you can boot off of it - which is a combination of card/bios and motherboard. Lastly I'm not sure you're going to see significant real world performance gains from your drive (it will probably be a bit faster - but no where near twice as fast).

[Dave McElderry]

Thanks John and Chris. I'm very impressed with the boot time improvements that the SSD has given me. I'll not be disappointed if this machine has reached the peak of its performance. After all, I believe it's 7 years old and holding up very well. It originally came with Vista. Chances are that the SSD will go into my next machine when the time comes. Some very good points Chris. I hadn't even noticed that that particular card said 1 lane, although I wasn't necessarily asking about that one, but rather about the idea of using an internal SATA iii card. I think that for the trouble and additional expense I'm probably going to be happy with things as they are.

[sidd finch]

I spotted this article on CNET and thought it might be germane to the conversation:

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-ssds-sol ... -lifespan/

ow before you let out a "D'oh!" and return your beloved, recently purchased SSD, be aware that the number of potential P/E cycles for an SSD is exponentially larger than that of a sheet of paper. In addition, modern SSDs have technologies that increase write efficiency and reduce wear on its storage cells. Among these technologies, the most important is the "wear-leveling" algorithms that effectively make sure all the drive's memory chips are used up, cell by cell, before the first cell can be written to again. This also means that SSDs of larger capacities generally have longer life spans than do smaller ones.

So how long is long? To help users estimate how long an SSD will last, most SSD manufacturers present the drive's endurance by the amount of data that can be written to the drive. For example, the 750GB Crucial MX300 has an endurance of 220TBW, meaning you can write 220 terabytes of data to the drive before it becomes unreliable. To put this in perspective, if you write 50GB of data per day every day to the drive, it will take you some 12 years to wear it out. Most other SSDs have similar or better endurance ratings.

Most of us actually write just a fraction of 50GB of data -- which is about two Blu-ray discs' worth -- on our computer's host drive on a daily basis, and many days we don't write anything at all. Note that watching movies, reading PDF files, or viewing photos doesn't count as writing; that's reading, which has no effect on an SSD's life expectancy. Only activities like copying music from another drive, downloading files, editing files, or backing up your phone, and so on require you to write to the drive.

That said, if you use an SSD the way you would a hard drive, chances are it will still last longer than a regular hard drive would. But you can do more.

Sidd

[Dave McElderry]

And then you've got articles like this one: "Don’t Waste Time Optimizing Your SSD, Windows Knows What Its Doing"

http://www.howtogeek.com/256859/dont-wa ... its-doing/

Much of the advice on “optimizing” Windows for an SSD involves reducing the amount of writes to the SSD. That’s because each cell of flash memory on the drive only has a limited number of writes before it can’t be written to anymore. Guides assert that you should try to avoid unnecessary wear on the SSD by minimizing the amount of writes.

But worries about SSD wear are overblown. Tech Report ran an 18-month-long stress test where they wrote as much data to SSDs as possible to see when they failed. Here’s what they found:

“Over the past 18 months, we’ve watched modern SSDs easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need. Errors didn’t strike the Samsung 840 Series until after 300TB of writes, and it took over 700TB to induce the first failures. The fact that the 840 Pro exceeded 2.4PB is nothing short of amazing, even if that achievement is also kind of academic.”

Even at 700TB, the lowest failure threshold, you could write 100 GB a day to the drive every single day for over 19 years before the drive failed. At 2 PB, you could write 100 GB a day to the drive every single day for over 54 years before the drive failed. It’s unlikely you’ll write that much data to the drive every single day. You’ll probably be done with the drive well before then. In fact, there’s a good chance you’ll die before your SSD dies of wear. Everything wears down, and SSDs are no exception–but they don’t wear down so quickly that we need to worry about it.

[Dave McElderry]

I also just found this. (The color highlighting is mine.):

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/disable-d ... tation-ssd

In Windows 7, Microsoft had turned off defragmentation for Solid State Disks. In Windows 8/10 however, since the Disk Defragmenter tool has undergone a change into a general disk optimization tool, you will see it enabled by default for SSDs too. In this scenario, where an SSD is present, the improved disk optimization tool sends ‘TRIM’ hints for the entire volume. A traditional defrag is not performed on SSDs in Windows 10/8.

[sidd finch]

You would think that there would be some kind of definitive answer. But my guess is that they are pretty stable and should have a long life. Technology will change at the point it is time to start replacing so I bet we will just upgrade to the new technology.

Thank you for the links to the articles it helps when trying to make a decision about where to start my research for a new SSD drive.

Sidd

[Dave McElderry]

You would think that there would be some kind of definitive answer. But my guess is that they are pretty stable and should have a long life. Technology will change at the point it is time to start replacing so I bet we will just upgrade to the new technology.

Agreed!