OT - SSD, cloning and bad sectors

[Chris French]

Ok, got a new larger capacity SSD to replace the old Crucial M4 64GB (almost 2 years old) one in a laptop. No problems, just an upgrade, and releases the M4 one for use elsewhere.

Now yes, I'm sure the best thing is to install Windows 7 afresh, but I've got better things to do right now. So, go to use Acronis True Image to clone the old drive onto the new drive. Part way through it complains of bad sectors on the old drive and that it can't copy them. give it another go, same again.

Try to run chkdsk on it (like I would do with a mechanical HDD) but doesn't seem to do anything.

So decide that on the basis that it was working fine before, tell Acronis to ignore the dodgy sectors, it completes the clone fine, and the machine boots and runs fine.

I'm not really sure about the ins and outs of SSD's - but AIUI they don't really have sectors like a HDD, but they 'pretend' to for the purposes of talking to the rest of the computer, and dodgy bits of the SSD are mapped out by the formware. So I'm wondering what acronis was complaining of? should I have done something to fix it? should I be trying to RMA the old SSD?

[Tim Watts]

They do have blocks - just like disks, which no longer have "sectors" as such.

Either way, you've hit bad blocks which will not read - and you've forced the software to skip them. That's all you can do. You've done the best you can do...

Run chkdsk on the result to fix up any problems and you'll be OK.

[cd]

Not to keen on the idea of having a SSD for a system drive. They don't like too many re-writes, do they...

[Andy Burns]

But they do wear-levelling, so you can do cumulative writes measured in tens of TB before they clap out, e.g. Intel were guaranteeing 20GB of writes every day for 5 years on 80GB and 160GB drives

More recently sizes have gone up, but many non-enterprise drives have switched from SLC to MLC, the total number of writes may be coming down, but the product of size*endurance is still on the up ...

[airsmoothed]

System drive is the best place for an SSD, assuming faster operation is the reason for having one. Recent consumer MLC drives are rated for tens of gi gabytes of read/write every day for years; hopefully that should be more th an enough for most domestic users.

[The Natural Philosopher]

system drives don't get too many writes...except log files.

Put /var on a normal disk?

[Tim Watts]

Modern SSDs are fine as system drives - Been using them in 2 laptops and a server for a good couple of years.

In normal use you will not even get to 10% of the wear capacity of a decent make of SSD (and I mean decent consumer make, not a "super datacentre SLC costing 1000s).

[Tim Watts]

Not remotely necessary :)

[meow2222]

They are life limited, but the real world life expectancy is beyond any reasonable computer life expectancy. You can happily use ext4 rather than ext2/3.

NT