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.)

A few things to consider.

Firmware quality/stability is more important than any specs in data sheets from the user experience point of view and the most well regarded vendors for SSD data integrity are Intel and Samsung. They have excellent toolkits for data migration and SSD monitoring and maintenance.

If your files tend to be incompressible (photos, movies, zip files etc), stay away from Sandforce controllers which do poorly with these. Intel's consumer line unfortunately uses these.

If you want to do your own detailed research, check out websites like anandtech, storagereview and hardocp.

Cheers.

My personal use is very heavily incompressible data, and while Sandforce drives are nowhere near as blindingly fast as newer SSDs with incompressible data, the X201 isn't going to see 6gbps performance to begin with, and the present generation of Sandforce controllers with better flash can easily keep up with channel speed with incompressible data on a 3gbps channel.

The ones with cheaper, slower async flash (Intel 330, OCZ Agility 3, Corsair Force 3) will write compressible data measurably slower than wire speed, but unless you have another SSD you're copying from, the difference between a 150MB/sec and a 270MB/sec write speed is academic -- there are essentially no inputs on most machine that can provide data at the higher rate.

The Intel-firmware Sandforce (520, 330, 335 serieses) drives are currently the single most reliable consumer drives of the present generation in my experience, matched perhaps only by the Samsung 830s.

In practice, unless your workload is abusive, we're far enough into the firmware lifecycle of most current-generation controllers (although not all; LAMD's consumer controller and Indilynx Barefoot 3 are both quite new.)

So buy for now or buy for future?

SSD candidate: Samsung 840 Pro. Any negative experience?

On an X201, if you're expecting to keep it in that system long term and not move it to a faster machine, the speed advantage of the 840 Pro over the regular 840 is going to be lost and you're better off saving the money.

Overall, they're very good drives; I've got a 512gb 840 Pro (and an OCZ Vertex 3) in my laptop right now, and they're what my employer has been buying for laptops lately because of supply shortages on the Intel 520 480gb drives. We're probably not going back to the Intels; the Samsungs are faster.

My only complaint with the same Samsungs are a little on the pricy side, and they are a little worse than other models about lose write performance when they fill up completely (although using trim, and making sure you have some empty space, should keep this from being noticeable for most users. It's been problematic in DB servers.)

Once you go SSD you won't look back.

I upgraded my old laptop to SSD - it's only SATA2 (3gb/sec) but it's screaming fast. Best performance upgrade possible.

Additionally, my desktop has two 128 gb SSD's in a RAID0 for 256 gb w/ SATA3 at 6gb/sec. I had that running comfortably for well over a year until my power supply fried my motherboard.

Upgraded to a better power supply, newer motherboard and re-installed win7 64bit after upgrading the firmware on the SSD's (Crucial). Also upgraded my storage hard disk to a hybrid with a SSD cache. System is fast.

-SDF

Just got back from computer store with this:

Samsung 840 SSD 500 GB MZ-7TD500BW

Going offline to do the cloning. Thanks for everyone's input.

OP said his laptop came with an HDD and he wants to change to an SSD. Does this mean that he will have to adjust some settings on the laptop? If so, which one?

Could you explain this a bit? I don't know what Sandforce is.

What do you think of a) the new Seagate-branded SSDs; and b) the Toshiba OEM SSDs?

And
I am back,
verified the clone,
replace HDD with cloned SSD,
booted up and tested a Photoshop file.

No scientific stopwatch test but it felt quite a bit faster on boot and PS file loading; I would guess half to one third the time it tooked before with the HDD

The cloning software did it all automatically. Including partitioning just like the original HDD with Lenovo recovery and boot partitions set up and hidden. I did not have to make any setting changes.

If Windows 7, it SHOULD be automatic, but it can't hurt to verify them manually. Actually, since he got a Samsung, downloading the "Samsung SSD Magician" (there may be a CD copy in the box he can use, but a retail CD is probably out of date) and running the OS optimization, it will do three of the major ones for you:
- disable SuperFetch
- disable ReadyBoost
- make sure Defrag isn't running

It also suggests disabling the Indexing service, which I can't recommend. Intel has a slightly different set of recommendations, and their SSD toolbox app will check them.

It's also important to make sure the system's SATA controller is in "AHCI" (or "RAID" or "IRRT") mode, rather than "Legacy" (sometimes labeled ATA or IDE.) Switching this is non-trivial, but it's generally necessary to get Trim working.

Sandforce is one of the manufacturers makes the controller chips that run inside of SSDs made by other companies (they're owned by LSI, now, but still have their own branding.)

Marvell and LAMD (Link-A-Media) are the two other major manufacturers who sell controllers.

Intel uses a mix of their own controllers (just on enterprise drives these days) and Sandforce.

Samsung makes and uses their own controllers. I don't think they've ever sold controllers separately, but they've been known to sell whole drives to other companies to resell under their own brands.

OCZ owns Indilynx and uses a mix of their own Indilynx controllers, Marvell controllers (often with a misleading Indilynx label) and Sandforce controllers.

The reviews are very good, but they're very new. They use a relatively mature controller from LAMD, and we've had good luck with the Corsair Neutron which uses the same controller, but the deployment of those I have is TINY (10, all in the same server) compared to some of the other drive models and controllers.

Which ones?

We've had some pretty good luck with some much older Toshibas -- 1.8" drives for the T400s and T410s were hard to find except for the really slow older Intels -- but I've got no idea whose controller they are. They've been reliable, but we didn't got to "SSDs for everyone" in that generation or even with the T420s so the number we deployed compared to newer drives is relatively small.

On a quick google, it looks like at least some of their newer drives use their own controller. I can't find a review on Anandtech which generally has the most comprehensive reviews of non-enterprise SSDs, but there are some relatively positive reviews on more minor sites.

--

Honestly, unless people have a very specific workload, performance differences between the slowest current-generation SSDs (the Intel 330, OCZ Agility 3 on async flash) and the fastest (OCZ Vector and Vertex 4, Samsung 840, plus various Toggle flash Sandforce drives) will not be noticeable to most people. I'd buy on a balance of price/reliability, entirely ignoring performance.

If you have very specific workloads, knowing which controller is best for your workload is more important than the raw performance numbers, although I'd stick to sync or toggle NAND rather than async if write speed is a potential issue... the cost differences are generally quite small.

Nice! Always a good thing when things work easily the way they should. :)

One thing I've never been clear about is whether you get more than the rated capacity if your data is highly compressible. I'm guessing not since the partition creation will preclude that.

This review shows that the write performance deteriorates with time though less at the 500GB capacity than at smaller ones.

http://hardocp.com/article/2013/01/0...8#.UbQTY_nvuDk

In general, steady state performance of SSDs is not specified by the vendors and not always commented upon in reviews.

No, the compression does not help capacity. It helps write-speed, and even more so, write endurance -- with heavily compressible data, Sandforce drives are the only ones which can have a fractional write-amplification factor, which in certain applications (writing a lot of text-heavy data, for one example) means they can potentially last a whole lot longer.

Similarly, if adds effective spare capacity -- which means a drive which is say, half full with heavily-compressible data like a lot of applications, or text documents -- won't see the "I'm full" slowdown to nearly the same degree as some other drives/models.



Anandtech has gotten very good at testing the full-drive performance case; I'd encourage those concerned to look at those reviews.

That said, if you don't know why your use case needs extremely performance relative to other SSDs, it's probably not a big enough difference to worry about -- these will still outperform disks in most cases (or at least match them, in certain write-heavy workloads which is the one area where they don't always outperform especially when full.) Use TRIM, and make sure to leave at least, say, 10gb free space (5-10% is better) and don't worry about it.

Really, this is rather like the concerns coworkers had when we first rolled out SSDs at work 4 1/2 years ago -- quite a number of them read about SSDs, and started doing weird things to extend the lifetime of their SSDs, many of which limited the benefit they got speed-wise or convenience-wise. None of which made sense, because:
* The SSDs were corporate-owned. If they ran out of write-lifetime in work use, they'd just get replaced. You didn't get to keep them after, and if you did, they'd be so obsolete you wouldn't want them as a system drive... I mean, I'd take a 160GB X25M-G2 -- I think we might even have a few G1s out there -- if we started throwing them out, but it would be to stick it in an enclosure and use it instead of a USB stick as a durable carry-around...
* There was absolutely no chance that a developer would run out of write-lifetime in the course of our 3 year refresh cycle.

We saw some drive failures, for sure, but every single one has been a catastrophic controller failure ("bricked drive") and not running out of writes.

This is what was inside my Sony, the one with which I have been having all the service problems mentioned in other threads: http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/...oid=2000055122

I've heard that Toshiba makes OEM SSDs for a number of companies including Apple. True?

although the x201 doesn't support it, if you are getting a Lenovo to replace that one in time, i would look into an mSATA card. it goes in your WAN slot and is an SSD, and you can still have a mechanical HDD (or SSD) in the main bay for storage and put your OS on the mSATA.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...view,3449.html

also, i would not keep the SSD too full as it can shorten the life over time. here is an SSD guide, that is pretty typical, in the first link of this forum post, but i agree with the second posters changes to the guide (which are significant). but you should be aware of the falsities out there as well.
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-St...rs/td-p/104886

and a fresh install is always best, although not as fun as a clone, but enjoy your SSD it can revive an old system for sure.

i would always always recommend an offsite backup of your important files. an external drive is not a backup plan (as stated here). i like spideroak but there are many cloud providers.

Toshiba has made OEM SSDs for a number of companies, and there are a number of companies (Dell and Lenovo, notably) who source SSDs from multiple companies and in some cases (especially Dell!) two of the same model of machine ordered at roughly the same time can come with two different manufacturers SSDs (often with a Dell label stuck on them such that you need to actually plug them in and check what the BIOS or OS says it is.

I don't keep track of Apple stuff, so I can't comment on who they use for their SSD suppliers.

The model you link to is are the SSD models I saw a brief positive review of, but again, it's a bummer that there isn't a more comprehensive one on Anandtech.

mSATA is nice, if you need more space and want to go the one-of-each approach, or if you want two SSDs and don't have an optical drive you can swap out for one.

In theory, yes. In practice, as I said up-thread, it is totally unnecessary for a regular user to worry about write lifetime. Even with write amplification, and lower lifetimes on smaller flash nodes, you would have to write the entire size of the drive out daily day in and day out in order to worry about write lifetime going in a couple of years.

Write slowdowns when full are a bigger issue than lifetime.

The second reply brings up some very good points: with the exception of turning AHCI on if it is not enabled, most of the guide is dangerous and unnecessary. Windows 7 should do all the tuning needed to get good performance out of an SSD under normal workloads.

Assuming you have the time and expertise to do it; it's not hard, as long as your hardware is pretty standard. For the X201, Lenovo has a very nice software update tool which will install all the Lenovo-specific software and drivers once the machine is on the net (which may require manually adding a NIC or WLAN driver); I highly recommend it.

An on-site external drive is not a backup plan, at least for a desktop (one sitting at home is, arguably, a good first-step backup plan for laptops used on the road.)

I don't use cloud backup for much; I have a RAIDed server at home, which serves as a backup for my laptops. The most critical terabyte or so of files are on two off-site external drives, one in my bank safety deposit box, and one at my inlaws' house 300 miles away. A couple gigs of the most critical files are mirrored between Google Drive and Dropbox, but that's a drop in the bucket of the family photos.

Now that flickr's gone to 1TB free, I may dump them all up there.

nkedel,

What effect does using Bitblocker to encrypt an SSD have that is different from a HDD and should that affect the choice of which SSD to buy?

My employer will not provide SSDs in their standard issue Thinkpads but will allow us to put in our own.

Thanks.

There are two differences, one general, one specific to sandforce-based drives, although I will explain them below pretty much purely for interest. As a punch-line most users shouldn't worry about it, and most will not notice at all.

1) For all SSDs, Bitlocker will do a one-time pass of filling the empty drive with encrypted "junk" so that it's not clear what's in use vs. not in use. Because this makes the entire drive seem "full" to the SSD controller, there can be some slowdown. It is generally not enough to worry about for general use -- it's still a lot faster than a hard drive, and AFAICT it still plays nicely with TRIM, etc -- but it may be worth leaving some unpartitioned space to increase the spare area if write performance is at a premium (eg, if you have a 480gb drive -- which comes out as about 450 usable in Windows, thanks to drive-manufacturers using 10**9 for a gigabyte, and Windows and everyone else using 2**30 -- maybe partition 425 rather than the full 450.

2) For drives with a Sandforce controller, the use of Bitlocker means you will get no benefit from the built-in compression. They're still pretty fast, and you're unlikely to notice the difference with the better models (using sync or toggle flash), but once again if write performance is at a premium, this can be an issue (and the cheapest models with async flash are definitely best avoided with this one.)

In terms of buying drives for it, I'd still go on reliability first, but that might swing the recommendation to Samsung over the Intel 520s given that the latter have a Sandforce controller. We've deployed a ton of laptops with the Intel 520s (and before that OCZ Vertex 3 and Deneva 2, also Sandforce-based) and bitlocker, and I've never heard of a reaction other than "wow, this is really fast" (often even compared to an older-generation Intel or Toshiba SSD, rather than just against disk.)

There's also one other point I should make: almost nobody will do this frequently enough to care, but because there are a few crazy people out there... blowing away your system and doing a fresh install with bitlocker -- or switching between encrypted and unencrypted repeatedly -- will overwrite the entire drive every time. Done once, twice, a handful of times isn't going to matter in the slightest, but done repeatedly over long periods of time this is one of the few "abusive workloads" which could prematurely wear out the drive.

I mention the above given a thread I saw elsewhere suggesting that someone should encrypt their drive before every time they went outside the US, and then decrypted it when they came back. Don't do that with an SSD, at least if you're going out of the US regularly.

Also as an aside regarding Bitlocker -- it has a bigger CPU performance hit on older CPUs -- Sandy-Bridge and newer machines (eg anything in the X220/T420/W520 generation or newer), barring some some lower-end CPUs have the "AES-NI" feature which makes the computational cost of the encryption almost free.

Thanks, nkedel. I've been using Intel SSDs at home but will likely get a Samsung for work.

I've also confirmed that the CPU is an i5-520M that does support AES-NI

He'll have to turn on AHCI in the BIOS in some laptops so that the TRIM function is supported.

I'm glad to hear that's got AES-NI, and that my memory was incorrect about it starting with the Sandy Bridge machines.

With luck, the X201 will have come with it on -- turning on AHCI in the BIOS is easy, but Windows does not always play well with that change having been made. When it works, it "just works" but when it doesn't, doing the switch involves a couple of reboots and a couple of registry changes which -- while not rocket surgery -- aren't the most comfortable things for non-technical users to mess with.

Also, more than a few laptops (including my most recent HP) don't include an AHCI switch in the BIOS.

That can happen either if it's too old (no AHCI support) or too new (no legacy option -- which will either be AHCI or RAID/IRRT, either of which is fine.)

AHCI came in at the same time as chipsets intended for the Core 2 processors (the "965" chipsets) and the ability to use a full 4GB of memory as opposed to maxing out at 3.25GB-3.5GB (as in the last-genertion Pentium 4 and Pentium M/Core Duo laptops/boards, the "945" chipsets.)

On laptops, main "too old" case will be netbooks; AHCI will be on mainstream notebooks from mid-2007 and newer, but plenty of netbooks (and larger-than-netbook machines with Atom processors) as late as 2010[*] still use non-AHCI-capable chipsets.

(* and could be later for all I know -- that's when I started saying "forget it, these things are too slow even for casual use, don't buy 'em" and stopped following them.)

Of course, I'm sure there are some exceptions, especially in the 2007-2009 Core 2s, where there was a slightly broader variety of chipsets out there. Since going to the onboard GPU and memory controller on the i3/i5/i7 chips, there has not been much variation in Intel chipsets, and AMD has been so far behind on their laptop CPUs that they've not been very appealing to anyone except at a few odd corners of the market.