SSDs, long life and a company that begins in V and ends in iglen

[jamesfed]

Trying to get a managed service provider to get us some decent PCs for a mahoosive refresh we are running but are running up across an interesting barrier over SSDs....they still don't think they last that long! (by that long I'm meaning 4+ years).

 

So what I need is some fellow edugeekers to say if they have any PCs with SSD in that are going for 4 yrs+ to post below mentioning what model they are going with and how many of the little drives they have out there which will hopefully add some support behind my good word

 

Been dragging as much out of the net as I can on the matter as well but if anyone else knows of any good resources that prove the long life as well (and I do mean prove not just synthetic testing) it would be great!

 

Cheers,

James

[mac_shinobi]

Not had experience of many ssd's but the pro version ( Samsung 840 Pro ) has a 5 year warranty. That or an Intel ssd.

[jamesfed]

Not had experience of many ssd's but the pro version ( Samsung 840 Pro ) has a 5 year warranty. That or an Intel ssd.

 

Its the 840 Pros that we are looking at however they are being a little irksome about giving them to us in the first place! Crazy but hey

[FishCustard]

Why should you have to convince the MSP to buy machines with SSDs? If you want them, and are paying for the MSP's services, they buy what you want within a certain budget surely? (assuming you pay £x per year and it includes a PC refresh every N years, that sort of thing)

 

If it helps, we've had around 40 machines with SSDs running fine for about a year. Hardly long-life yet, but it's another data point for you I guess!

[jamesfed]

Why should you have to convince the MSP to buy machines with SSDs? If you want them, and are paying for the MSP's services, they buy what you want within a certain budget surely? (assuming you pay £x per year and it includes a PC refresh every N years, that sort of thing)

 

If it helps, we've had around 40 machines with SSDs running fine for about a year. Hardly long-life yet, but it's another data point for you I guess!

 

It is a little more complicated than that.....(in fact I lie its a lot more complicated than that) - its a whole 'solution' they are providing us with the total cost coming in at quite a few 0s and so they are looking to minimise 'risk' wherever possible.

 

All just business wangling but either way its not something I can change.

[Arthur]

The oldest SSD I have is an Intel X25-M 'G2' from July 2009 (3 years, 11 months, 8 days old to be exact, so almost 4 ) and it's still working perfectly. In school PCs, we have a mixture of Samsung, Intel, Crucial and Kingston SSDs (ranging from 1-3 years old). None have failed.

 

If Viqlen can't give you what you want, find someone else who will. Clearly Lord Sugar doesn't need your money!

 

http://i.imgur.com/3PM8WJJ.png

 

^ It's a 160GB SSD partitioned down to 140GB.

Edited July 2, 2013 by Arthur

[mac_shinobi]

Would buying machines minus storage ie hard drives / ssd's be ok with them and buy whatever ssd's you want and do any ssd swapouts yourself direct with either or ???

[Edu-IT]

It is a little more complicated than that.....(in fact I lie its a lot more complicated than that) - its a whole 'solution' they are providing us with the total cost coming in at quite a few 0s and so they are looking to minimise 'risk' wherever possible.

 

All just business wangling but either way its not something I can change.

So they want to provide you kit with proven reliability so you don't have to use any warranty, and they can just take your cash for nothing?

[jamesfed]

I'm afraid the only option is to buy the kit from this one company due to a contract that was agreed long before I started my current place

 

Just need a little help on the whole long life of SSDs front really because all other options just aren't viable

[mac_shinobi]

If Viqlen can't give you what you want, find someone else who will. Clearly Lord Sugar doesn't need your money!

 

What @Arthur said !!

[jamesfed]

So they want to provide you kit with proven reliability so you don't have to use any warranty, and they can just take your cash for nothing?

 

*cough* Mayyyybee........

 

Anywhos back on track....anyone with a SSD (or even better a batch of SSDs) which have lived longer than 4 years?

[FishCustard]

It is a little more complicated than that.....(in fact I lie its a lot more complicated than that) - its a whole 'solution' they are providing us with the total cost coming in at quite a few 0s and so they are looking to minimise 'risk' wherever possible.

 

So you have to go with them, no option?

 

"Minimise risk"? Cut corners more like it I'd say...

 

EDIT: I see what you mean... I'll see if anyone else I know has been using SSDs long-term.

Edited July 2, 2013 by FishCustard

[mac_shinobi]

I'm afraid the only option is to buy the kit from this one company due to a contract that was agreed long before I started my current place

 

Just need a little help on the whole long life of SSDs front really because all other options just aren't viable

 

Im missing the point, if you are requesting kit with ssd's instead of hard drives and said ssd's have a five year warranty and they fail you claim on the warranty for the ssd generally direct with the ssd manufacturer not viglen

[jamesfed]

So you have to go with them, no option?

 

"Minimise risk"? Cut corners more like it sounds to me...

 

Yep noooo option otherwise

 

There are always ways and means to convince and knowing Edugeek all too well we have the power to convince

[pcstru]

The biggest inherent issue is the limited write life. It might be useful to pull some stats from the drives in schools to show typical use case data on units with a year or more in service. If they typically show no chance of hitting the limit within the 5 years then you could ask the supplier to start supplying evidence that it is infact a risk not within the normal remit of the contract.

[mac_shinobi]

Are the PCIe ssd's any different as there are some of those that are bootable and faster than a sata connection ?

 

That or maybe a hybrid drive like the seagate momentus xt

[superfletch]

Sorry to add another slightly off topic post to this thread but - I think you'll find it difficult to get many people to be able to demonstrate where they've had long life SSD's for two reasons.

 

1) The price of SSD's is still relatively high, compared with traditional disks anyway and if you translate that back four or five years to think how expensive they were back then I don't think you'll find many people have had them fitted that long.

 

2) Any makes / models of SSD that have lasted that long will probably now be discontinued so to get the same one's might be tough.

 

Sorry - I hope you find the info you're after, I think your SSD crusade is worthwhile. Hopefully some more posts like the previous person who said they'd had a fair few SSD's in for almost three years roll in.

[3s-gtech]

I trust SSDs far more for longevity than spinning disc HDDs now. Fairly low failure rates, but for laptops especially it's working out well here. Oldest I have is a Crucial M4 64GB - that must be nigh on three years old now, and is perfect. Only had one SSD failure of 300 odd, but that was broken from the box (Sandisk).

[Arthur]

Just need a little help on the whole long life of SSDs front really because all other options just aren't viable

Perhaps you could point out that manufacturers such as Apple, Microsoft, Asus, Lenovo etc. are all selling computers with SSDs. Apple are so confident in solid state storage that it is impossible to buy a MacBook Air, Retina MacBook Pro or new Mac Pro with a mechanical drive; and the iMac and Mac mini both have SSDs available as BTO options. As you probably know, Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet also comes with an SSD - typically a Micron C400 (a.k.a Crucial M4) or Samsung PM830 (a.k.a Samsung 830).

 

Regarding the number of writes...

 

NAND endurance is something that always raises questions among those considering a move to solid state storage. Even though we have showed more than once that the endurance of today's MLC NAND based SSDs is more than enough for even enterprise workloads, the misconception of SSDs having a short lifespan still lives. Back in the day when we had 3Xnm MLC NAND with 5,000 P/E cycles, people were worried about wearing out their SSDs, although there was absolutely nothing to worry about. The move to ~20nm MLC NAND has reduced the available P/E cycles to 3,000, but that's still plenty.

 

[...]

 

Client workloads rarely exceed 10GiB of writes per day on average and write amplification should stay within reasonable magnitudes as well. (Source)

[Chris_Cook]

We have quite a few now, and haven't had any problems, although we've only been running them about a year or 2.

 

We order most of our PCs from viglen and have never had a problem with them supplying ssds, but then we buy our own equipment rather than leasing or whatever.

 

I haven't heard any issues with ssds that would put me off. For normal desktop usage, they are great, and much faster. Even if they are a bit more unreliable, they aren't expensive to replace, and not much more than a standard hard disk. We regularly replace dead hard disks anyway - I don't think ssds will be any worse.

[jamesfed]

Well after a good discussion (and a 19 slide PowerPoint) all has been sorted out

 

The chaps at the MSP have also done some more reading at their end as well and have seen good things so....................pure SSD school on the way!

 

Thanks to all that contributed and provided ideas/links!

[zag]

Being quite an early adopter of SSDs in our school I can give some stats.

 

We have mostly 1st generation intel X25-Ms and latest generation 520 series here.

 

We have 500+ machines with them in ranging from 1 to 4 years old.

 

No failures at all. Quite amazing really compared to old mechanical drives.

 

I also use them on my file servers and a huge volume web server. They have been running happily for a couple of years reading and writing gigabytes of data every day with no troubles at all.

 

I wouldn't believe anyone quoting the old wives tale of SSDs running out of write cycles, I've never seen it happen in the real world even on non TRIM firmware.

 

3.5 years, 5.68tb, no TRIM

Edited July 3, 2013 by zag

[MikeGilbert]

As far as limited life goes, it was suggested to me back in the early days of SSDs that it was sensible (under Windows) to ensure the drives weren't being automatically defragged or indexed - neither of which is of much benefit on a student PC anyway.

[Pottsey]

I have lots Crucial SSD’s (different versions) none have failed and one has been running for 27,598 hours which is what 3 years 1month? Powered up time. It still has an estimated 9 years left on it. It’s already had over 5 GB read and written to it today.

 

 

 

This year I swapped out and started using SSD’s in classrooms and so far no problems.

 

EDIT: Thinking about it I had one Crucial SSD fail around 3 to 4 years ago. Back then sudden power losses could cause SSD’s to fail but that is far less of a problem now.

Edited July 3, 2013 by Pottsey

[robjduk]

My home PC's SSD must be coming upto 4 years now and still working perfectly. At work we have some coming upto the 2 year mark and all is well. We use Stone here so have a 5 year warranty anyway. The way I see it is a network machine is not going to have much to write to it after the initial build and a few updates so its great for industry.