SSD or HDD?

st999

I need to replace the 2.5 hard drive in a USB 3 external hard drive enclosure as it was dropped and now no longer works and was thinking of replacing it with an SSD but then I got to thinking, is USB 3 fast enough for a SSD or should I just replace the hard drive with another 1 TB HDD?

It is the hard drive as I tested the enclosure with another drive but it was only 64 GB so not big enough.

buglawton

If it's just for backups of video storage I'd get another HDD. Apparently if HDDs fail (short of dropping htem!) you get some advance warning, whereas with SDs they can fail catasrophically. And HDDs at the big end of the scale are by far the cheapest.

that

I have done this. I have a usb3.1 to sata converter.

Background info usb3.1 is twice as fast as usb3.0. usb 3.2 is usb3.1 but has the new oval usb connector and is double the speed of 3.1 (20gb/s). My home laptop is usb 3.0

Good: The speed, I got 35mb/s with rust, but went down much less esp with smaller files. peaked at 220mb/s with my usb 3.0 laptop and 180mb was not unusual for medium size stuff. Over 300Mb/s on a 3.1 usb so my work colleague claimed. It normally took mt colleague over 30-45mins to copy files, but was initially very disappointing when it stopped copying after 2 mins but after doing it a second time an realising they copied at great speed and were there impressed him.

The disk data has its charge kept at peak performance, compared to rust which once the sector has been written to slowly starts to lose magnetism

ssd not prone to go faulty if dropped on the floor.

The bad: Cost
small size for you money, but I have just bought a 2T disk for £153

Sort of bad: Rust has a sector size of 256B SSD 4k. If you have loads of small files (3*256 or less) as developers may have, then it wastes data as the 4k will not be fully used.

And the biggie... The information on that disk is stored as a charge when powered, rather than magnetised rust. It is said that if the disk is not powered, after 6 months some will loose the charge, and all disks will have lost their info in around 2 years. Also storage conditions are a factor too.


When I first used my ssd I got a throughput of about 8-12mb/s, but after deleting the test data, it flew only when it used those segments. After the disk was filled with test date and then deleted, it was fine - suspect it had to do with trim?

Neil_Jones

that wrote: »

Background info usb3.1 is twice as fast as usb3.0

No it isn't.


USB 3.2 Gen 1: originally known as USB 3.0, and previously renamed to USB 3.1 Gen 1. It’s the original USB 3.0 specification, and it can transfer data at up to 5Gbps.
USB 3.2 Gen 2: Previously known as USB 3.1, and then later as USB 3.1 Gen 2. It offers speeds at up to 10Gbps.
USB 3.2 Gen 2x2: formally known as USB 3.2, it’s the newest and fastest spec, promising speeds at up to 20Gbps (by using two lanes of 10Gbps at once).

Key phrase in bold. Doesn't mean its going to.

that

that wrote: »

Background info usb3.1 is twice as fast as usb3.0

Neil_Jones wrote: »

No it isn't.


USB 3.2 Gen 1: originally known as USB 3.0, and previously renamed to USB 3.1 Gen 1. It’s the original USB 3.0 specification, and it can transfer data at up to 5Gbps.
USB 3.2 Gen 2: Previously known as USB 3.1, and then later as USB 3.1 Gen 2. It offers speeds at up to 10Gbps.
USB 3.2 Gen 2x2: formally known as USB 3.2, it’s the newest and fastest spec, promising speeds at up to 20Gbps (by using two lanes of 10Gbps at once).

Key phrase in bold. Doesn't mean its going to.

Agree, but available with the right conditions. I am wrong about usb 3.2 speed, it is 20gb/s and not the same as i initially stated with 3.1 10mb/s - I will correct my post.

Always better to potentially having the speed increase than not

Neil_Jones

that wrote: »

Always better to potentially having the speed increase than not

Not necessarily.

USB 3.1 is backwards compatible with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, except in the following scenarios:

USB-B 3.1 cables are not compatible with USB-B 2.0 ports.
Unless you use an adapter, USB-C ports or cables will not work with USB-A or USB-B ports or cables.
Devices that require USB 3.1 transfer speeds of 10Gbps might not work with USB 3.0 or USB 2.0, or you might experience lower transfer speeds and impacted performance.
Bus-powered USB devices that requires more power than what USB 2.0 can provide are not compatible with USB 2.0.

Uxb1

I can vouch for the instantaneous unannounced failure mode of an SSD:
A sudden strange boot up time and the laptop spending a lot of time doing "something" was the only notice I got.
Checked SMART data on the disc - perfect.
Tried to reboot - total failure, would not go past bios boot up/POST screen.
Actually at first I thought motherboard or memory failure - but the BIOS diag tests ran OK and when I took out the disc and tested it standalone it was totally dead.
I've lots of backups and disc images so it was a case of a weary sigh from me rather than a disaster.

that

Neil, i am 99.9% sure that if the IT fairy came around offering free usb upgrades to 3.2, nearly all would take the offer, even if they have to buy the adapter that nearly cost £10 a pop. I know I would.

the other issue with ssd is trim. Put your favourite recovery software on your PC, copy a small directory, delete that small directory, and now try and recover it. I tried this with Recuva in both basic and advanced modes and got nothing, not one file or directory.

arciere

that wrote: »

the other issue with ssd is trim. Put your favourite recovery software on your PC, copy a small directory, delete that small directory, and now try and recover it. I tried this with Recuva in both basic and advanced modes and got nothing, not one file or directory.

I think the issue in that case, generally speaking, is having to resort to data recovery software when the drive fails, instead of keeping a backup.

that

arciere wrote: »

I think the issue in that case, generally speaking, is having to resort to data recovery software when the drive fails, instead of keeping a backup.

I don't know. failure and deletion are very different. On deletion trim internally can wipe the cells I believe...
stolen from wiki "After trimming, the SSD will not preserve any contents of the block when writing new data to a page of flash memory, resulting in less write amplification (fewer writes), higher write throughput (no need for a read-erase-modify sequence), thus increasing drive life.

Different SSDs implement the command somewhat differently, so performance can vary.[3][8]

TRIM tells the SSD to mark a LBA region as invalid and subsequent reads on the region will not return any meaningful data. For a very brief time, the data could still reside on the flash internally. However, after the TRIM command is issued and garbage collection has taken place, it's highly unlikely that even a forensic scientist would be able to recover the data."

dylanzhang

An SSD can be taken as a larger USB drive because of the same base technology, which further organized data. SSDs are much faster than HDDs, more and more people, especially for guys who like video games, would like to upgrade HDD to SSD[/URL]
of course, sometimes, USB 3.0 gives you the same experiment of SSDs, but it needs to be with an enclosure that supports the USB attached SCSI protocol, and still add some overhead by involving the USB stack. Using raw access via PCI-e (M2.NVME SSDs) or SATA based SSD will always be faster.
And my choice is to keep games, movies, musics in my internal SSD, and store some large file in HDD or USB 3.0