[RESOLVED] SSD vs Hard Disk vs Raid vs power black out vs ?

[sessi4ml]

http://www.computerworld.com/article...the-money.html

http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/storage-ssd-buying-guide

http://firstweb.promise.com/product/...product_id=122

After reading all this material, looking for a solution for my project, I have have more questions.
I have an OCR system by, www.peelletech.com/
Which works great, does the job.
This PC has been working for 10? years, 1.2Ghz, 2GB, 200GB, XP-3
What to do about the hard disk.
Speed is not the concern, keeping the disk working for another 10 years, or 5 ...is

Installing a Raid-5 will keep the data useful
or is SSD ? , what if there is a power spike, UPS.
What system to invest in ?

Thoughts...thanks

[Steve R Jones]

I didn't click on any of your links.... I'd be more concerned about the old pc....

But I would simply clone the current drive... I'd pop in the new drive to verify it boots etc....Then I'd take out the new drive and put the old one in...

Then I would pray that the mobo doesn't die next week.

[sessi4ml]

This PC will be reloaded, update the OCR software, and drive replaced with ?

[dilettante]

If flash-based commodity SSDs were really practical outside of a few edge cases then hard drives would have disappeared by now. The fact is that they are still very pricy per bit and wear out and fail far sooner than hard drives.

I'd worry about that entire PC. Just get rid of it and buy something current, something with a hard drive.

Forget RAID, which doesn't have any role in desktop PCs anyway. Stop chasing unicorns.

[sessi4ml]

Data storage reliability
SSD, no moving parts sounds good
Raid-5, if one drive dies, the data can still be recovered
Disk, one drive dies....?

No conclusion yet

[Lord Orwell]

raid 5 requires three drives and it is rarely supported by motherboards. Windows supports it with software (some versions of windows do but it was removed from later versions). If you want data redundancy and you have that small of a primary drive, you can run software that clones it to a usb drive.

If you are running xp i believe you have to have sp1 installed to even use all of that 200gb hard drive. A ssd would not be properly utilized in this set up at all since your data transfer speeds would be limited by the bus. Make no mistake though: they are MORE reliable than hard drives. If you've had this one 10 years you are lucky. I had to replace the same drive three times in the warranty period.
here's what i would do: I'd get a usb hard drive and set up an auto-schedule for msbackup to copy your data directories to the usb drive. You could also get a super-large usb flash. I have a 128gb one i paid $34 for.

[sessi4ml]

In the first post, Promise sx4060 will handle the raid5. I have one running now on a different system, works great(win7).
I am not concerned about data speed, only Data storage reliability.

note, I have read all the information from the first post, and want to know what others are using for their OCR system or backup PC (where users copy their data to..)

[Pinky_Brain]

All of this is determined by your budget.
What's your budget?
How much are you willing to spend and what do you want to achieve?
I would do a mirror RAID for data redundancy. Many motherboards have this built-in.
If you are low-budget and want to keep as much of your old system as possible, the #1 component to think about is the Power Supply, as a bad power supply will kill-off the motherboard, hard drive, video card, CPU and/or all of the above, as well as itself when it goes.

SSD's are great for start-up speed, if you have a lot of crap running. I agree with the previous poster that for most people they are an expensive and inferior luxury. You spent $300 and your computer starts 45 seconds faster. Woo. Hoo.


However a RAID 1 (mirror) is 2 HD's and ensures that if one (cheap) HD fails the data is still good on the other.

Here's a nice 500 Gbyte WD Black for $67:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822236345

You can get two of these in a RAID 1 for less than $150.00. I'd discount any advice that is based on the idea that any hard drive is "reliable" or "more reliable" than others. ALL HD's are prone to failure. They might last 5 years, they might fail after 5 days. I DON'T think that any current hard drives are going to last 10 years.

Also, MS support for XP has ended. It seems like your needs are fairly low-end. I just guided a couple of customers to buy a nice quad-core desktop at Wal-Mart for less than $400. If you don't need top-shelf, don't be too proud to buy a cheap desktop at Wal-Mart.

[sessi4ml]

Thanks for your advice Brian.Raid-1 sounds good, Now, SSD with no moving parts vs moving parts.
This system is for OCR/backup, so speed is not an issue

[Pinky_Brain]

Thanks for your advice Brian.Raid-1 sounds good, Now, SSD with no moving parts vs moving parts.
This system is for OCR/backup, so speed is not an issue

I don't think the "moving parts" is much of an argument against and SSD as it's a bit of apples vs. oranges. True, no moving parts in an SSD, but the more you use the thing the faster it wears-out. My information is spotty and dated, but as I understand the technology, it's not JUST like RAM, in that it can read and write data an infinite number of times. For some reason the SSD can only perform a finite number of reads/overwrites/writes before the electromagnetic storage molecules in there "wear out". How many times? I don't know. It might be completely wrong, or it might have been true at one time but now it's not. It's new and advancing tech, which is bad in a lot of ways. Example I paid $250 for a 250Gbyte HD when they were only 4 month released (the price had fallen dramatically from $500 and so I HAD to have one and after 2 months of light use it went tits-up.

So much for the bleeding edge.

So, I vote "no" on the SSD vs. mechanical, victorian era clockworks-style hard-drive on the reliability question, plus if you go my route and get a RAID1, two donkeys beat a single horse any day of the week.

Back to budget. Do you want to buy a new motherboard and CPU that has RAID1 native, or buy a cheap, add-on card? Do you/should you buy a new Power Supply? What are the specs on your current power supply? What's the financial value of the data that's on the HD and what would be the financial cost to you if the worst-case scenario happened, i.e. the Power Supply burnt-out and took the RAM, the Motherboard, the CPU, the video card and the hard drive when it went.

The replacement cost of the data & the system is what you think about when determining the budget for your upgrade. Most people's time is worth WAY more than the cost of a good system, so it almost always makes sense to spend money now as a safeguard against the inevitable and catastrophic loss of data. Again, back to budget.

[sessi4ml]

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.co...ability-2.html

As SSDs mature, manufacturers are improving their reliability processes. Wear leveling is a controller-run process that tracks data movement and component wear across cells, and levels writes and erases across multiple cells to extend the life of the media. Wear leveling maps logical block addresses (LBA) to physical memory addresses. It then either rewrites data to a new block each time (dynamic), or reassigns low usage segments to active writes (static) in order to avoid consistent wear to the same segment of memory. Note that writes are not the only issue: so is deletion.


As I understand this, SSD would be good for the OCR system because it only Writes once and Reads many.
A 30GB boot disk with a 250GB SSD for the OCR.
The OS never changes
Thank you everyone

[sessi4ml]