How many years could I expect a netbook flash drive to last?

[Yownanymous]

Just wondering. In particular, I am using a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with Windows XP as the Operating System.

[gn2]

It could last longer than you.

[Yownanymous]

It could last longer than you.

You serious? Or are you making a death threat? :P

[starcannon]

Looks like they last just over 50 years for a Solid Stated Drive (SSD)

http://www.bitmicro.com/press_resources_debunking.php

GL and have fun.

P.S. Oh and heres lots of reading if your interested http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=ssd+longevity&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=ssd+longevity&fp=9XpCdJbaSz4

[gn2]

Serious.

[Yownanymous]

Looks like they last just over 50 years for a Solid Stated Drive (SSD)

http://www.bitmicro.com/press_resources_debunking.php

GL and have fun.

P.S. Oh and heres lots of reading if your interested http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=ssd+longevity&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=ssd+longevity&fp=9XpCdJbaSz4

Thanks for that. It's reassured me that I don't need to panic about backing up everything just yet. :P

[whansen02]

The key point of the article mentioned is below:


A few years back, BiTMICRO published an article that arrived at a different conclusion with regard to solid state flash drive endurance in database applications. Although the write endurance rating for BiTMICRO's computations is smaller (1 million cycles), endurance ratings are much higher as a result of wear leveling methods, proprietary RS ECC and other techniques designed to prolong the life of E-Disk solid state drives. Assuming a much smaller endurance rating of 100,000 cycles (typical rating quoted by NAND flash vendors), a bigger volume of writes per day at 3.4TB and no caching nor wear leveling implementations, a 160GB solid state drive is projected to last up to 12.9 years, which is definitely longer than the average replacement cycle of most IT storage devices and equipment.

A big key to making sure your flash drive will survive a long time is to make sure you don't create a swap partition on the flash drive.

[billgoldberg]

I've been using my asus eeepc 900 now for about a year and it's already starting to show signs that some of the hardware is dying.

What do you expect for that kind of money?

I hate to admit it but it was a stupid impulse buy. If it dies, I won't be buying another one.

[Wiebelhaus]

See that's the thing , no one knows yet.

[mikewhatever]

I've been using my asus eeepc 900 now for about a year and it's already starting to show signs that some of the hardware is dying.

What do you expect for that kind of money?

I hate to admit it but it was a stupid impulse buy. If it dies, I won't be buying another one.

Some of the hardware? What exactly is dying? What are the signs?

[MikeTheC]

Thanks for that. It's reassured me that I don't need to panic about backing up everything just yet. :P

That's still no excuse for not backing stuff up, you know. Only those who don't back up deserve to lose their data. ;)

[forrestcupp]

I've thought all along that it seems crazy to have a computer with only a flash drive.

[HappyFeet]

I've thought all along that it seems crazy to have a computer with only a flash drive.

Why? Pretty soon all pc's will have SSD's.

[sloggerkhan]

it depends, particularly on how many write ops you do.

[stmiller]

It depends on the type of the flash drive (SLC or MLC), but a quick and dirty example is:

A 4GB flash drives can take 4TB of writes/erases. Probably many, many, many years of use. Someone who is better at math than me can probably explain more details.

It's the writes rather than the reads that seem to matter as they have a limited amount of write cycles.

[starcannon]

I can't remember where the article I originally read is at, but someone had published a paper stating 25years 24/7 use, can't remember if it was just writing or whato; but, long story short, SSD sounds like its very stable, as a previous post mentioned the larger SSD drives are reporting an estimate of around 13years.

I also agree with the previous poster who said its not excuse not to back up. Those who keep all their eggs in one basket may end up with scrambled mess; so as always, backup then move forward.

[JK3mp]

Wait WHAT! Windows!!, I give it 3weeks! (lol, sorry, couldn't resist, not an anti windows purist i swear!) Idk, everyone i know that had one, didn't make it but a couple months w/o issue's. My uncles updated and deleted everything on the hard drive whilst updating for some reason (and won't do a usb boot so is useless). My cousins motherboard went out and they were gonna charge him more to fix it than he paid for the whole thing. And a friend of mines was dropped and shattered into like 10 peices from a 4 foot drop (Okay, so not entireley the hardwares fault, lol).

[Stefanie]

I've been using my asus eeepc 900 now for about a year and it's already starting to show signs that some of the hardware is dying.

What do you expect for that kind of money?

I hate to admit it but it was a stupid impulse buy. If it dies, I won't be buying another one.

I also own an eee 900, and I'm very happy with it. I've been using it for 6 months now, and everything still works perfectly. I installed 4 different OSes on it (not at the same time), but the SSD drive doesn't show any signs of old age. I formatted the partitions as ext2, though, without a swap partition.

[3rdalbum]

I think the most realistic figure I've seen is 3-5 years for intensive use, and 10 years for casual use. That might be too long, though.

When people start quoting "50 years" as a lifespan, it makes me think of recordable CD and DVD media. Companies started claiming that their CDs would last 50 years, and I heard it so often that I thought it would be a good idea to store some rarely-used data onto CD-Rs, to free up hard disk space.

Six months later my discs were showing signs of data loss. Six years later, all my data is gone from them. And, Murphy's Law, all the valued, irreplacable data got damaged first! In addition, I had an interesting CD-R recently that got disc rot after a week.

In short, if somebody claims their product will store data for 50 years, you should expect it to last 1/10th of that on average. Because I do have CD-Rs that are 10 years old and still going strong.

[forrestcupp]

Why? Pretty soon all pc's will have SSD's.Well, here's why.


it depends, particularly on how many write ops you do.


It's the writes rather than the reads that seem to matter as they have a limited amount of write cycles.

When people tell me I can't put a swap drive on a flash drive because writing too much to it will wear it down, I don't want that to be my only option.

[3rdalbum]

When people tell me I can't put a swap drive on a flash drive because writing too much to it will wear it down, I don't want that to be my only option.

In this era of computers that come with 4 GiB of RAM, who needs swap?

[LowSky]

In this era of computers that come with 4 GiB of RAM, who needs swap?

I never ever use SWAP. It seems like such a waste. But you do need it if you like to Hibernate/Suspend

[3rdalbum]

I never ever use SWAP. It seems like such a waste. But you do need it if you like to Hibernate/Suspend

Suspend doesn't require swap. And Ubuntu Jaunty boots up on an SSD about as quickly as a hard-drive-based system comes back from hibernation.

[Yownanymous]

I have backed everything up on a less-used Kingston (which I know to have good lifespan) pen drive, so if the main drive dies suddenly, I won't be screwed. :P

[Polygon]

In this era of computers that come with 4 GiB of RAM, who needs swap?

every single laptop user out there? leaving a laptop in suspend wastes battery. I don't like opening my laptop to find it only has 30% battery left cause i left in suspend.

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

I've thought all along that it seems crazy to have a computer with only a flash drive.

I tend to agree with you.

I am a curious person...So, I opened my wife's eeePC 701/4G to determine if the 4GB SSD could be replaced should it die. I was surprised by the unused space inside the 701/4G.

I had just replaced a HDD in a friend's laptop so I had the old 250GB HDD siting on my desk.

I looked at the eeePC's SSD card, that can be replaced, and realised that the space used for the SSD card could be used for the 512MB RAM card. The space freed up by that simple change would leave enough space to install the 250GB HDD sitting on my desk.

I just thought to myself, "Why a SSD?" :rolleyes:

Battery life??? I don't know.

[Xbehave]

I just thought to myself, "Why a SSD?" :rolleyes:

Battery life??? I don't know.battery life
More durable (no moving parts)
conisderably faster (drive speeds)

hdparm -Tt --direct /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing O_DIRECT cached reads: 140 MB in 2.02 seconds = 69.20 MB/sec
Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 122 MB in 3.05 seconds = 40.06 MB/sec
I think that command is correct (thats for a HDD, try it on an SSD and you'll see why such devices boot fast)
More stable, (i think) ATM HDD have to do some clever hacks to get reasonable read/write speeds, but if the power goes out the cache doesn't get to the disk, so even a journald file-system can be corrupted as what it claims is written to the disk/not written, may be wrong, with SSD these hacks arn't nessisacry so an fsync is an fsync.
Cheaper/more dense, nTB his a practical limit on conventional HDD because they have moving parts, SSDs will theoretically scale much better resulting in cheaper devices)

These are a few of the reasons the world is moving to SSD.

I think the swap thing is just a myth, if you don't heavily use swap (e.g have enough ram) then 500MB of writes per hibernate is nothing to worry about, if you do use swap then consider the fact that your system doesn't die while using the swap a reasonable compromise for a slightly reduces live span (you are still looking at longer than the life of most components in a netbook)
There is some sensible advice to reduce read/write to SSD, but they tend increase swap usage (which isn't worse than any other kind of usage btw). Mount volatile directories /tmp & /var/lock into ram (if you use a startup script you can also mount /var/run and if your insane /var/log too (if you crash you get no logs))

Considering modern laptops are unlikely to last 10years and even under heavy use SSDs will easily last that, your ssd is not anything to be concerned about. If however you still insist on swapping it for a HDD, feal free to send me any spare SSDs (4GB will be enough) [pm for my address, ill pay for P&P to UK]

[Corelogik]

As soon as I can buy a 250, 320, 640, 750 or 1 TB or larger SSD for the same price as a current HDD, I will consider it. Until then SSD are useless to me. They don't hold enough data. I will gladly sacrifice a little speed, for needed capacity.

[Warpnow]

I just thought to myself, "Why a SSD?" :rolleyes:

Battery life??? I don't know.

An "on the move" laptop, which is what a netbook aims to be, would always have the risk of the hard drive failing if moved around too often or too fast.

Also, its faster.

But, mostly, an 8gb SSD drive is cheaper than any SATA hard drive when manufactured in bulk.

[Corelogik]

An "on the move" laptop, which is what a netbook aims to be, would always have the risk of the hard drive failing if moved around too often or too fast.

Also, its faster.

But, mostly, an 8gb SSD drive is cheaper than any SATA hard drive when manufactured in bulk.

8GB is also less than 1/10th of my media library, not to mention OS and apps,... not big enough. SSD's are a good idea. When capacity catches up and price comes down, I would probably switch over to them wherever possible.

[snowpine]

For me, it came down to noise. My eee900ha had a fan and a noisy hard drive, so I replaced it with a Dell Mini 9, which is whisper quiet. Maybe not a big concern for everyone, but late at night when things are quiet, I really notice the difference. It was absolutely worth going from 160gb to 8gb for the reduced noise, for my purposes. If I want to hear some music or watch a video, I just stream it. :)

[Warpnow]

8GB is also less than 1/10th of my media library, not to mention OS and apps,... not big enough. SSD's are a good idea. When capacity catches up and price comes down, I would probably switch over to them wherever possible.

The SSD in a netbook was never designed to hold 1/10th of your media library.

It was designed to hold the OS, and some light documents. Do you complain that your cell phone or GPS unit are incapable of holding your media library?

Your pretending the device is something its not. It is a web browsing ultra-mobile netbook, not a desktop, and not a laptop.