SSDs?

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  • Gumby
    Moderator
    • May 2004
    • 437

    SSDs?

    Anyone using SSDs?

    I have had normal HDDs go bad after a while - at the moment the disk light on my Cortex PC seems to be permanently on, not sure why. If disk access is pretty continuous then I'd be worried about using an SSD.

    On the other hand, the noise and maybe temperature reduction (if there really is one) would be welcome, and improving restart time when there is a crash is always good.

    Gave some love to my Cortex PC after 2 crashes this week, applied 58 Windows security fixes (nervously), removed the last vestiges of BitDefender. Realised that I'd built this PC in 2010, although it has had one HDD go bad in that time. Since it is thermally stressed in the loft, up to 47 ambient, that's pretty good going for a consumer board.
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    www.gumbrell.com
  • achapman
    Automated Home Jr Member
    • Jan 2006
    • 43

    #2
    I'm using a SSD in my Cortex PC (a laptop) as well as all my other PC's. I can't see any reason why you shouldn't use them. You have to be aware that SSD's tend to fail catastrophically- i.e. one minute they're working, the next they are not, so you get no warning of failure. That said, if you are backing up like you should be, then that isn't an issue and in my experience they are no more unreliable than mechanical hard disks.
    The advantages are faster boot up, lower power consumption (not that significant) and speedier response times (again probably not that important with Cortex - although if you are using cameras that might help?). I don't know about operating temperature range, though it seems logical that they may be happier to tolerate higher temperatures than non SSD's.

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    • chris_j_hunter
      Automated Home Legend
      • Dec 2007
      • 1713

      #3
      our experience of SSD is in our MacBookPro laptop (Retina screen etc) ... have to say, have been pretty underwhelmed by the performance improvement compared to its predecessor (17" MBP with the usual HDD, which is used as a TV these days, with plenty of recording etc, and is still fine) ... start-up is far from quick - indeed, often imagine it's crashed or died (it's very uncommunicative, though patience is rewarded) ... always difficult to compare, of course, because of ongoing OS & App updates, which just seem to get bigger & bigger ...

      NB: complete aside - but discovered Grapher on the Mac (comes standard, from new) not so long ago - it's brilliant for graphs (!) ... not completely bug free, but we hardly ever use Excel or Numbers these days ...
      Last edited by chris_j_hunter; 26 August 2016, 11:17 AM.
      Our self-build - going further with HA...

      Comment

      • Karam
        Automated Home Legend
        • Mar 2005
        • 863

        #4
        I think Gumby's concern is probably about the durability of 'EEPROM' i.e limitations on erase/write cycles. Certainly Cortex is continuously saving (accumulating) history data but I would think this does not translate into continuous erase/write of the same cells. Perhaps if the disk is used as virtual memory then there might be more chance of using the same areas. However I expect this would be quite a common possibility for any software or indeed o/s functions so you'd expect to see lots of stories about quick SSD deaths by now - not that I've actively researched any stats.

        Interestingly I have had to ponder a similar question myself before at a smaller scale when considering non volatile accumulation of pulse count metering data, and in that case I thought simply to discard blocks after N number of erase cycles, N being typically >100K or perhaps more depending on device spec. It would gradually reduce memory availability but the small amount of data involved meant that you'd not run out of capacity for more than a lifetime. So I guess what I'm trying to say is it depends on how the SSD is managed at a lower level to spread the wear and I'm sure much better minds than mine have been workng on this for a number of years now. I wonder if there are disk tools which somehow track such cycles and provide a measure of such 'wear', if indeed the same concept applies.

        Going back to the original observation - lots of disk activity - I wouldn't expect to see this simply as a result of Cortex. Cortex can of course easily use quite a lot of memory depending on what you have it doing - e.g multiple camera image processing, but ultimately it will be down to overall resources available and being used by eveything on that PC.

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        • MichaelD
          Automated Home Guru
          • Mar 2006
          • 167

          #5
          I don't use Cortex but do use HomeSeer 24/7, and MSOffice, and do software dev, and all my everyday browsing on the same PC with a SSD. Used the first one for about 4 years without a problem, upgraded to get better performance and greater capacity, been with that for about 18 months, no problems whatsoever, so can confidently recommend them.

          For Chris' concerns about limited performance improvements, there are two factors to consider, first is the capability of the PC to support a fast device, my new SSD is running at half its performance because the PC can't use its full capability. The second factor is the capability of the SSD itself, there are massive performance differences in read/write performance between different SSDs, so just buying a SSD doesn't mean you have a fast disc, some are actually slower than mag discs, but the fast ones are really, really fast.

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          • chris_j_hunter
            Automated Home Legend
            • Dec 2007
            • 1713

            #6
            interesting ... though imagine ours should be OK on both counts (the SSD was just what came built-in, and the laptop was their top of the line model at the time - my experience of Apple is that they make the effort to be sure their memory & batteries will perform & will last) ...
            Our self-build - going further with HA...

            Comment

            • Gumby
              Moderator
              • May 2004
              • 437

              #7
              Depending on the MacBook model, Apple used some pretty conservative SSDs in the early Retinas.
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              www.gumbrell.com

              Comment

              • Gumby
                Moderator
                • May 2004
                • 437

                #8
                Funnily enough, it's probably noise reduction that may be most valuable to me. I am getting some fun noises due to disks in a NAS beating and resonating into the cabinet and then into the ceiling. The NAS will move soon. The first HDD in this PC was a laptop drive in a "silencer" mount. Ultimately it silenced the drive by cooking it.

                I believe that wear levelling is baked into SSDs now, which is why they have stated capacities reduced from the expected multiple of a flash IC - some memory is reserved for automatic block swaps, and they also scramble block positioning to reduce overuse of certain physical blocks.

                I need to investigate what is apparently hitting the disk all the time... and I also need to do a better job of controlling the order that certain programs load on startup - it seems that by default Windows launches the lot and then let's them fight over disk access.

                Thanks for feedback!
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                www.gumbrell.com

                Comment

                • MichaelD
                  Automated Home Guru
                  • Mar 2006
                  • 167

                  #9
                  It was interesting when I first moved from mag disc to SSD, to see how startup changed. I have a bunch of stuff starting just as you've described, HomeSeer, HSTouch, HSSpeaker, xAP, the SONOS app, Outlook, ...

                  With the HD the CPU ran at about 60%-80% for a few minutes whilst it waited for everything to load off the relatively slow disc. Running the same system with SSD suddenly removed the lag from the disc, and now the constraint is the CPU, which runs at 100% for a while as it gets everything going. If I cared about startup time on a machine that is meant to run 24/7, then I'd really need a faster CPU to keep up with the SSD.

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                  • Gumby
                    Moderator
                    • May 2004
                    • 437

                    #10
                    Well, now that I have swapped, I definitely get through the reboot to a running Cortex a bit quicker. I think I am going to change startup to script everything other than Cortex on a delay after Cortex has started. OTOH the process has revealed accumulated errors that mean stability is now an issue, so the reboot is needed more often. A clean install of Win 7 beckons :-(
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                    www.gumbrell.com

                    Comment

                    • spellinn
                      Automated Home Sr Member
                      • Dec 2007
                      • 53

                      #11
                      My Cortex installation has been on a HP Microserver with a local SSD drive installed for the past five or six years with no issues.

                      Most modern SSD's have SMART counters that report their wear level, so you can get some warning when they are approaching their theoretical end of life, although most will continue to work just fine for many years after this.

                      Cheers

                      Neil

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                      • Gumby
                        Moderator
                        • May 2004
                        • 437

                        #12
                        Thanks Neil, good to know.
                        ----------------------
                        www.gumbrell.com

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