When your a designing you store everything! Ask me I know.
When you compare the lifespan of a drive with your computers your automatically going to think that hard drives might be the best option.
Comparison
If you were to compare a Hard Drive to an SSD and the differences between them then you could very easily understand the difference between them.
Hard Drives have moving mechanical bits in components inside of them at tight tolerances.
SSD or Solid State Drives have no moving parts inside of them. Which means you can drop it and you will be able to fully able to still use it like nothing happened to it.
When it comes to Hard Drives if you drop a Hard Drive then you will most likely be taking a giant gamble to whether or not if you will be able to still use the data on it at all. You have to look into the many factors of:
Was it on when it was dropped? was it off when you dropped it.
How far was the drop from the surface it started at.
Did the internal magnetic plates shatter or touch the play head that is responsible for Reading and Writing data?
Was the hard drive in contact with an external magnet?
Was the hard drive in a hot environment?
Could there have been a power surge that was improperly protected?
These are all the many things that Hard Drives have to deal with and can be a huge downside to the damage of them.
Solid State Drives have many benefits when being able to last for a long time.
Are able to survive hard drops from high elevation surfaces.
Can operate at higher temperatures for long periods of time, This isn't ideal all the time but can be normal.
Not susceptible to magnets.
What is the highest amount of time that a SSD can last for?
There are many variables to this but there are lots of different variations in this technology.
M.2 NVMe drives have a huge amount of longevity and performance a backing them.
Normal Sata 3/6 drives don't have the highest performance to NVMe drives but are way better than using a traditional Hard Drive.
Different Nand bit Types
There's believe it or not different nand cell designs that give you better writes to read performance.
SLC - Single Cell (Fast Reads and Writes/ Less Longevity/ Used in Servers for high performance with Raid)
MLC - Multi-Level Cell (balanced performance between SLC and TLC)
TLC - Triple Cell (Lower Performance, High endurance design)
QLC - Quad Level Cell (High impact on latency ideal for servers)
VNand - Nand in a stacked 3D configuration (more storage density, good endurance longevity, even though it is not clear in my research and understanding. VNand/ 3DNand is just SLC stacked to create a high amount of capacity while still having great performance)
Is SLC great?
SLC is alright for most applications over time it has been able to mature over time to the point with newer firmware, the added ability for wear leveling, doing garbage collection for old bits, using compression this has greatly helped the aging use of the nand cells wearing out not as quickly.
Voltage Death
What makes the drive that has been made with SLC nand to stop working is that voltage levels that require the read back data function work is when its accessed it loses its charge then it introduces the chance for a bit error to increase eventually causing the drive to not function as it once did.
When a nand cell is uncharged it becomes a 0 bit, and if you were to charge up a bit that would turn it into a bit value of 1. This how SSD's are able to store ones and zeros just like how Hard Drives can but in a way better fashion.
Filling a drive to 100%
When it comes to a Hard Drive the whole entire performance of the drive begins to take longer to fetch files and operate normally. When drives reach 75% this is there optimal performance before they begin to slow down even further than normal.
An SSD can go all the way to 100% capacity which you might think is really cool without any performance decrease like a hard drive and they can only be filled up 75% of the way. If you were to fill up a SSD to 100% then you would run into your Windows operating system not being happy with you because of the fact of the matter is that many of the programs that operate on a normal basis like to create temp files or cache that needs to be operational to take up space for a temporary amount of time that will eventually be automatically deleted or kept around for later use that may need to be accessed.
If you were to keep your SSD at 100% usage for a long period of time then you would end up allowing your SSD to burn through its lifespan a lot faster than normal due to the fact that the SSD when data is being written the data that is at the bit individual nand level is actually shifting and randomaly moving the data all around the drive to keep a drive with-in an optimal range of life expectancy that doesn't wear out one particular nand cell more than the other day one time.
It is ideal to have a buffer of 30 to 60 gigs of free space for the allowance of data usage so that the firmware that is operating on the nand controller is able to ensure that the drive is able to last for a long time. If there's only about 1 gigabytes to 5 gigabytes free then you run into the ability of the nand controller unable to move the data around efficiently to preserve the drive to make it last for a long time.
DRAM Cache?
DRAM Cache is a very important part of the performance of a drive having a low latency snappy experience. It is essentially a quick lookup table for where all the data is located on the multiple chips on a PCB that might have data spread across multiple nand chips.
If you have a drive that does not include this DRAM Cache chip there are products that you can find that are on the cheaper cost of products. You might find a SATA 3 SSD that might cost $30 with having 250 GB's and you might think wow that might be a really great deal but in reality the read and write performance is going to suffer and you are going to have a terrible time using your operating system and you're going to think about this is worse than a Hard Drive.
There is another metric worth talking about as well called IOPS (input output operations per second).
There are two measurements that are used for this that you can look at when you're wanting to get a new SSD.
Sequential Access - Means 123456789
Random Access - Means 175638595235
Hard Drives typically hover around 70 IOPS, whereas SSDs can achieve over 8,600 IOPS all the way to 85,000 IOPS.
Personal Experience
For me I have had two experiences with using an SSD with high amount of lifespan.
My first experience is with a HP 2018 Spectre 13 inch laptop that had an M.2 NVMe 500gigabyte drive installed. This drives lifespan went all the way to 100 Terabytes worth of Read and Written data throughout it's life span. I did some Googling around on M.2 NVMe drives life spans and there are drives that are depending on the capacity are able to have a longer lifespan.
500gb - 700 TB
750gb - 900 TB
1Tb - 1,200TB
2Tb - 1,700TB
This lifespan of an example of 700 terabytes is dependent on the manufacturers tolerances with the mass production before first failure begins. So my 100 terabyte read and write wearing of the nand cells was hugely with in spec for a drive that was only 4 years old. I had three different times when my Windows operating system felt slow, and what I ended up doing was that all I needed to do was dealing with reinstalling Windows itself and setting up my Windows operating system just the way I liked it.
Very soon I will be doing a little article on Windows and it's idiosequencies and how much the operating system is able to slowly be able to get to a point where the operating system breaks down internally versus the actual drive that you might be using it on having its own issues that decreases performance over time. So look forward to reading that soon and understanding how to best deal with it.
My second experience with solid state drives is that I also have a SATA 3 VNand SSD from Samsung that I have inside of my custom built workstation that I have had for 7 years+ that still runs like it is brand new.
I use the Samsung magician software to monitor the wear on the drive. I have reached 15 terabytes Read and Writes over a 5+ year longevity that still operates normally. It may take 5 minutes to boot up but the fact that it still turns on and loads Windows completely fine is absolutely astounding. One of the most critical things with Windows as the operating system that sets itself apart from Apple products and the Unix/ Linux system that they use for the operating system is that when you uninstall programs and reinstall programs or even install a fresh new program there are programs that insert themself in over 30+ different places and depending on the program. You might very well have a program that might have a lot of dependencies or other variables that it defines such as using Photoshop can create a lot of registry entries such as defining what a. PSD file does and how to open it. This is what a sensually creates bloat.
Imagine a Panda that is munching on Bamboo for a long period of time and gains a huge amount of weight do to the result of that. But when exercising isn't able to completely remove all of the fat on panda's body, No matter how the panda might exercise. This is essentially what happens to Windows.
Read later when I create my article on all the different ways how to work on this or to deal with this issue with Windows.
Hopefully you have learned a lot about The difference between Hard Drives and Solid State Drives.
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