DEAD Small Sized SSD- Word of Caution

mtpleasantben

mtpleasantben

Young grasshopper
Feb 27, 2017
73
3
Washington, DC, United States
Just want to share my story.

A word of caution, as I recently killed by Initial Boot SSD drive (uber small at 64GB). Against common sense; I thought it would be smart to use an old SSD drive I had laying around as the Boot, DB, TEMP and Initial Video Recording drive (with a 4TB Purple Drive as Secondary. What I didn't consider is that writing a SMALL Space for the Initial Video Recording meant a tremendous amount writes and delete to a VERY small area (I have 20 cameras writing 5-7MB/s). After exactly a year, or about 2 weeks ago disk operations on the SDD dropped to a snail speed. Yesterday I cloned it over to a fresh $35 120GB SSD, however I eliminated the initial writing to the SSD (for video clips). DB is still on SSD. Things are happy again. Here are my specs for others looking to build a system.

i7-2600 CPU
Cooler Master 212 Hyper - This has helped a lot!
16GB RAM
120GB Boot SSD
(2) 4TB WD Purple Drives
(4) 4MP Cameras
Windows 10
750+MP/s
5500kB/s
CPU Range 50-70% (Spikes up a bit when BlueIris Interface is open)
 
mtpleasantben said:
Just want to share my story.

A word of caution, as I recently killed by Initial Boot SSD drive (uber small at 64GB). Against common sense; I thought it would be smart to use an old SSD drive I had laying around as the Boot, DB, TEMP and Initial Video Recording drive (with a 4TB Purple Drive as Secondary. What I didn't consider is that writing a SMALL Space for the Initial Video Recording meant a tremendous amount writes and delete to a VERY small area (I have 20 cameras writing 5-7MB/s). After exactly a year, or about 2 weeks ago disk operations on the SDD dropped to a snail speed. Yesterday I cloned it over to a fresh $35 120GB SSD, however I eliminated the initial writing to the SSD (for video clips). DB is still on SSD. Things are happy again. Here are my specs for others looking to build a system.

i7-2600 CPU
Cooler Master 212 Hyper - This has helped a lot!
16GB RAM
120GB Boot SSD
(2) 4TB WD Purple Drives
(4) 4MP Cameras
Windows 10
750+MP/s
5500kB/s
CPU Range 50-70% (Spikes up a bit when BlueIris Interface is open)
Click to expand...
FYI, the i7-2600 intel hd does not support more than 1080p for hardware acceleration...that same load with a third gen i5 would likely result in 25-40% cpu usage..
 
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mtpleasantben said:
Thanks for the tip, I didn't know that. This is a recycled CPU/box. I'll check to see if the motherboard supports a 3rd gen cpu
Click to expand...
most of the time swapping cpu is not worth while...you can buy a fully functional box with a third gen i5 for 100-120....also note that h.265 decoding is being implemented in BI, but will require a 6th gen cpu with quicksync or higher...
 
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mtpleasantben said:
Turns out that's also a 2nd Gen processor. Are there any advantages of 4th 5th 6th 7th or 8th gen processors
Click to expand...
6+ has h.265 decoding capability in the processor..the 8th gens are much more powerful, but the 3-7 are close to each other....
 
There are huge differences between SSDs, so which model was it? But yes, recording to a small SSD is a bad idea.
 
We have a department that solely use SSD for boot drive in their workstations.
We had an initial failure rate at almost 50% 4 of 10 machines died in less than two months.

Found that users were hard shutting down their workstations. only to find in the morning the drive not boot back up.

If memory servers me, they were 250GB HyperX Savage SSD's.
 
58chev said:
We have a department that solely use SSD for boot drive in their workstations.
We had an initial failure rate at almost 50% 4 of 10 machines died in less than two months.

Found that users were hard shutting down their workstations. only to find in the morning the drive not boot back up.

If memory servers me, they were 250GB HyperX Savage SSD's.
Click to expand...

That sounds more like an infant mortality issue with that particular drive, rather than a problem with SSDs in general.
 
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58chev said:
We have a department that solely use SSD for boot drive in their workstations.
We had an initial failure rate at almost 50% 4 of 10 machines died in less than two months.

Found that users were hard shutting down their workstations. only to find in the morning the drive not boot back up.

If memory servers me, they were 250GB HyperX Savage SSD's.
Click to expand...
Garbage ssd....if you stick to known quality brands you won't have problems..
 
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Mr_D said:
That sounds more like an infant mortality issue with that particular drive, rather than a problem with SSDs in general.
Click to expand...

Sounds like poor hardware.

I have a Samsung 840 Pro SSD 250gb as a boot disc in my main pc, which is used 7 days a week at between 10-18 hours per day. My pc is now 6 years old, (built 2012), as fast as ever and the drive passes all checks using Samsung's analysis / wear tool with flying colours. My laptop contains a Sandisk SSD, also 6 years old and that's not just a boot disc but the only disc.

If you're having SSD failures, then it's cheap hardware issues not SSD's generally.

Just for you, I ran Samsung Magician on my desktop 840 Pro SSD this morning, 13.4TB of data written to a 250GB disc - worse when you bear in mind Windows is using most of it for it's static files, only leaving 123GB free for boot data to be written. So that's 13.4TB written to 123gb of space. Condition Good. A breakdown status which I haven't screenshot shows error values almost at new levels and light years away from fail status:



What it also shows, is that if it's setup properly as solely a boot disc, you shouldn't be getting large amounts of use anyway - that's 108 overwrites if my math is correct over 6 years of almost constant daily usage and not only do I use the PC for long periods, but I boot it several times a day as it's use is not continuous.

It's impossible to calculate the reads, but in that regard, the figure must be enormous.

Proof though, that a good SSD should last at least as long as a traditional Hard Drive if not used as a main drive. In fact, I'd say both of mine have outlasted the traditional hard drives I've had.
 
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Well, this is a top SSD. And it probably shuffles data around, so it is more like 60 rewrites, which is nothing.
 
My C drive is a 250 GB 840 EVO with 61 TB of writes. Samsung Magician still shows the condition as "good". I don't remember when I installed it but it's probably 2-3 years old.
 
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