SATA Solid State Hard Drive Help Needed

mrmessy · February 2015

Hi. I have an old PC with an SATA hard drive in it, which I would like to replace with a solid state hard drive. I do not know much about them, so do I need to look for anything in particular when searching for solid state hard drives on eBay?

Thanks for your help.

Vampyre · February 2015

Not in my opinion, no. You just treat them exactly as you would a standard platter HD. You'll get some geeks moaning that the read/write time is lower than X brand but the reality is if you're going from a platter to an SSD the difference will be astonishing (my Win8 PC boots from post BIOS to login screen in about 5 seconds, for example).

Having said that, see what SATA version your motherboard supports and get that - remembering that SATA is backwards compatible. Oh, and even though the prices are coming down they're still expensive for a decent sized one (256Gb+). If your just going to use it as your boot drive and have a big platter installed for everything else (like I have) then you'll do just fine.

I've got one of these in both my laptop and desktop and have been delighted with them. Never given me a single seconds trouble.

EDIT: Ah, you did say old PC. It probably depends on how old it is as some don't support the boot sequence IIRC. Check with the motherboard manufacturer.

Antiriad2097 · February 2015

Do you not also need a new(ish) version of Windows to keep the writing to a minimum? I've vague memories about the lifespan of SSD being hammered by old Windows versions as they were constantly writing. Bear in mind that by newish, I'm thinking of post XP.

AndyC · February 2015

Antiriad2097 wrote: »

Do you not also need a new(ish) version of Windows to keep the writing to a minimum? I've vague memories about the lifespan of SSD being hammered by old Windows versions as they were constantly writing. Bear in mind that by newish, I'm thinking of post XP.

Yeah, you really don't want to be running XP on an SSD if you want it to live a reasonable life span. You want Windows 7 or above really.

guesser · February 2015

From what I've read recently the lifetimes of modern single level cell SSDs is an astronomical amount of writes so the chances of wearing out the cells in any consumer application are basically nonexistent. Cheaper multiple layer cell flash is another beast entirely.
My understanding is that it's not worth fretting over the Flash wearing out*, but using an OS/filesystem without TRIM support will potentially hurt your performance quite a bit.

*obviously it doesn't hurt to minimise unnecessary small writes like disabling saving the file access time on Linux etc. unless you really need it.

pmsr · February 2015

You can run Windows XP, but because it does not support TRIM the lifetime will be a little reduced even though in practice you will still get several years of operation out of it under normal use. There are a few guides on the net on how to optimize Windows XP for SSDs by reducing the amount of writes on it. And if you leave part of the SSD free by not partitioning it, you also won't get issues with reduced performance when the SSD nears full capacity, while increasing durability.

There is a better alternative, though. Buy a SSD with a tool that scans the SSD and does the TRIMming for you. My experience is with Samsung models and their Samsung Magician tool works very well for the purpose. I also know for a fact that Intel SSDs have something similar.

/Pedro

pmsr · February 2015

guesser wrote: »

From what I've read recently the lifetimes of modern single level cell SSDs is an astronomical amount of writes so the chances of wearing out the cells in any consumer application are basically nonexistent. Cheaper multiple layer cell flash is another beast entirely.

True. But even TLC flash has enough reliability for years of normal use. At my work I just replaced a Samsung 840 Evo 128GB SSD that has 52TB of writes on them and Samsung Magician still says it is 100% good. But this one didn't have a life of normal use. It was used on a software build machine 24x7 for a little over a year. :razz:

/Pedro

guesser · February 2015

pmsr wrote: »

True. But even TLC flash has enough reliability for years of normal use. At my work I just replaced a Samsung 840 Evo 128GB SSD that has 52TB of writes on them and Samsung Magician still says it is 100% good. But this one didn't have a life of normal use. It was used on a software build machine 24x7 for a little over a year. :razz:

/Pedro

That's cool to know. Stuff I've read has been inconclusive and erring on the side of avoiding MLC, but real world, real use, benchmarks are hard to find and everyone draws different conclusions :)

I've also found you have to make a note of when any article was written. An article about an SSD technology from 5 years ago is basically irrelevant and full of outdated conclusions and advice :)

What I take away from it all is "trust the firmware, it's pretty smart" and "you aren't running massive database servers, don't worry about it" :)

ADJB · February 2015

A few people above have posted stating you don't get Trim support with XP. This isn't entirely true. XP (and Vista) don't have native Trim support built in but Intel and Crucial (probably all the other SSD suppliers as well) supply programs which add Trim support. I've run SSD's with XP in commercial setups with no issues at all having added the Trim support.

RND · February 2015

It's not really worth getting a modern sata 3 SSD if the machine can only take up to sata 2 devices. You won't get full performance (speed) from it.

pmsr · February 2015

ADJB wrote: »

A few people above have posted stating you don't get Trim support with XP. This isn't entirely true. XP (and Vista) don't have native Trim support built in but Intel and Crucial (probably all the other SSD suppliers as well) supply programs which add Trim support. I've run SSD's with XP in commercial setups with no issues at all having added the Trim support.

As mentioned in a previous post, some manufacturers have tools that scan the SSD and "reclaim" deleted space from the OS layer onto the flash cell layer. These normally must be run manually, but maybe some can be scheduled. The Samsung Magician tool only lets me run this function, called "Performance Optimization", from the GUI.

/Pedro

Spudgun · February 2015

My first SSD was a Kingston SSDNow V+100. Doesn't have trim support - because it does it's own garbage collection. I ran that in an XP laptop, before moving it over to a Linux laptop when the XP PC died. You might be able to pick one of those up on ebay.

I might be wrong on this, but an SSD in RAID doesn't support trim, so any drive that is designed to work ok in a RAID array should be fine in an OS without trim support.

And I wouldn't worry about ignoring SATA3 drives. I've got a SATA2 controller with a SATA3 drive - no issues. 95% of the performance benefit of an SSD is in random not sequential access, so you don't hit the SATA2 bottleneck.

AndyC · February 2015

While Trim support is important, it's not the only thing that can affect SSD life or performance and modern OS will use drive differently, including ignoring certain low level operations like block reorganization that aren't useful when applied to an SSD. So I still wouldn't recommend running a pre-7 version of Windows from one.

pmsr · February 2015

Spudgun wrote: »

I might be wrong on this, but an SSD in RAID doesn't support trim, so any drive that is designed to work ok in a RAID array should be fine in an OS without trim support.

At least in Windows, certain Intel chipsets (series 7 at least) with Intel RST drivers version 11 and newer support RAID 0 and RAID 1 with TRIM. More advanced Intel chipsets such as the C600 even go as far as supporting RAID 10 with the right driver.

/Pedro

SATA Solid State Hard Drive Help Needed

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