Potential HDD failure: replace with same or SSD?
 

I have been getting very frequent "Your HDD is about to fail" notice by the Lenovo system monitor on my X201. Unit is about 2.5yrs old with i7/8G/500g.

With the price of 480g SSD below $300 would a SSD replacement of the HDD make sense?

It would certainly speed your system up.

Yes, definitely
 

I was so blown away by the SSD performance increase on my desktop at work I just replaced my 750GB laptop drive with a 250GB SSD for about $170. I don't really need all the space anyways, it is *much* faster, and uses less power.

If you have the money and were not near running out of space it makes sense if you do disk intensive things.

If not, it's a trade off in dollars and storage, if you are near capacity your money may be better spent increasing the disk size.

So with the SSD you are getting longer battery life?

An SSD is one of those technologies that once you've used it, you will never be able to go back to the "old" way of doing things.

^

just make sure to always back up. Having SSD does not mean it cannot fail.

+1 I had an OCZ which I used for 6-7 weeks to make sure it didn't fail. of course it failed the2nd day after I got to Europe. Thankfully I had the OEM drive being used as an external. When I got back, the replacement drive was DOA.


If you need the space, could always try a hybrid (or SSHD). Basically a conventional Winchester with a large SSD cache. I should benchmark the performance of an SSD, SSHD and OEM HD one day.

You two echoed my concern about SSD failure that I have heard and the rumour/fact that they are sensitive to external static.

I meant to say you should always have 2 copies of your important data regardless of the technology worked. A friend of mine put all his photos on his external hdd only. He thought he was doing backup. No need to tell you the reminder of the story :D

At work, we backup to SAN (which is fully redundant), then to a backup SAN (which is also fully redundant), and then to tapes. Funny enough, when it comes to restore, we always have issues. We joke that we are just the backup department, the restore department is elsewhere :cool:

Yes, if you use the system heavily, and either plan to keep it for a while or have reasonable faith that your next system will be one that will take a similar form factor drive.

Do you really need that much space? If you can drop to a 240/256gb comfortably, that makes it an even easier sell.

Indeed. From what I've seen at work, the failure rates in non-laptop use are pretty comparable.

They don't, however, die from the same things, and they're drop-proof, which is REALLY nice in a laptop, especially an ultraportable.

No more so than other electronics, and unless you're frequently taking it out of your machine, it shouldn't be an issue.

Yup, that Murphy fellow seems to like eggs only when they are in one basket.

^

I remember hearing about one company which has excellent back up plan except the Friday night sys-op forgot to close the door to the fireproof safe where the backup tapes are kept.

2.5 yrs ago this was the bleeding edge for the last version of the X201. It was posted with the wrong price; there should be a "1" in front of the 999.99. So I will be looking at another 3 years as my primary portable.
I have IBM/Lenovos over 15 yrs old and they are still running simple applications with 15 yrs old 20g HDD.

My HDD usage is about 350-400 at any one time so I am caught in no man land between 240/256 and 480/512.

In that case, an SSD rather than a hard drive makes a lot of sense. The X201 is one generation too old to get the very fastest sequential performance from an SSD, but there are very few applications where the difference between ~270MBbps and ~550MBps will make a difference.

There are a few 360gb drives out there (and some other odd sizes, although those are usually pricier) although the amount you'll save from one of those over a 480/500/512gb drive is not very big.

Which drives are you looking at? Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any 480gb drives quite as low as $300, but the less expensive better models are getting close to that so having some non-brand ones down there would not surprise me.

I've had multiple data-loss incidents with the Crucial m4 (which uses a Marvell controller), although it was a very old firmware by present standards. A lot of other people tend to say "stay away from OCZ" or even "stay away from Sandforce controllers in general" but I've had very good luck with both, personally and in very large numbers at work (although I prefer Corsair or Intel for the Sandforce-based drives, especially now that OCZ has moved away from Sandforce.)