My desktop PC has dual boot XP and Win7. XP only for the odd prog I still use occasionally which I've not wanted to pay for an upgrade, as it still does what I want.
They are on separate HDs. Which of course whizz round whether being used or not.
Would an SSD wear out when not actually in use?
No.
Although the OS might make use of it despite you thinking there's not much going on.
Dave Plowman (News) scribbled
No, but there have been other problems with SSDs
Indeed - and I can heartily recommend:
PLEXTOR PX-512M6
PLEXTOR PX-256M6
SanDisk SDSSDXP1
I've had all 3 running for 1-3 years and have all remained excellent.
I'm more familiar with Enterprise SSD drives than consumer ones, but the classic wear caused by block erasures is completely predictable, and available in the SMART data (although not standardised between manufacturers). If you are using an SSD, you should keep an eye on how far through it's life it has gone.
Of course, that's not to say it might not die from some other issue before the cells wear out. An SSD is actually quite a complex storage array managed by its firmware, and firmware bugs are common, as well as not handling things like power loss gracefully at every possible stage of operation in the firmware.
The main thing is not to keep running speed benchmarks. They are very good for write once read many and especially small random accesses the seek time is essentially zero on an SSD.
I have had one of the Intel smart cache SSDs die on me that fronts for the big spinning rust disk. It basically no longer responds to the OS and is marked as DUD - the system still works OK without it. The OS and compilations are slower without it but I don't feel inclined to replace it. I also have a Samsung 830 256GB now which performs very nicely.
BTW I'd put your most used OS onto the SSD for maximum benefit. I only use mine for caching files that will accessed a lot and randomly.
Windows can be configured to spin down unused hard disks after a while and some variants of Linux can too. Try this at your own risk!!!
Not sure if you can do it on desktop kit.
Umm. yes.
All solid state devices suffer from diffusion of the various trace elements put in them to make them work.
So technically all semiconductors eventuially fail. It may be centuries of course ;-)
I've had a Samsung 840 PRO for a couple of years, and so far it simply works.
It was my first SSD, which I bought with this latest PC, and the startup speed improvement was little short of astonishing.
Chris
I've got a 500GB 850 Pro in my work laptop, comes with 10 year, 150TB write warranty, I wouldn't have a machine without SSD now.
I've also got a couple of smaller/cheaper/slower/older Kingston ones, and not had any problems with them either.
I've never had one of my many HDs fail in that sort of period. 5 years plus would be more impressive.
Yebbut weren't the Samsungs EVOs getting the slowdown issues much faster than that?
I looked at SSD life with journalling filesystems, and even with ext4 and 24 hours use a day they won't fail from wearout until long long after they've ceased to be any use to anyone.
SSDs do have data loss issues though, so I prefer to just use them for OS & swapfile.
NT
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