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Hybrid Drives?

garyi

garyi

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Team. Today, my forth SSD failed. IN exactly the same way as the others, sudden and terminal.

As much as I will appreciate the responses along the lines of 'mines been fine for five years' etc, for me its been a bit of a disaster.

I am starting to believe the off the shelf SSDs don't like apples filing system or something. I am also starting to believe its only effecting me lol.

Part of the issue I suspect is I look for as much storage as I can afford, such as the last two failures of sandisk 256gig models at 140 quid.

So perhaps the old adage buy cheap by twice holds here.

I actually only really need 256gig. For me I am not interested in lots of space i have servers and external drives for that.

But I need other options within the budget of 150 quid, 'cause thats what amazon will refund me and thats all I have right now.

Hybrid drives are 70 quid for a TB. Has anyone experience of these? Are they cheap because they are now falling out of favour.

I do like the speed of SSD, I don't think I could work without it now, but right now I cannot afford the best in class and 64gig is to little.
 
Do you really need a SSD? I added one to my laptop because it is old and slow and the SSD improved performance a bit. I haven't bothered with my Mac Mini as it's only used to play music and occasional browsing etc so I just don't see the need for one. My Mac is an old 2GHZ 2006 model so the performance isn't fantastic but again for what I use it for I don't see the requirement for SSD.

Unless you are gaming or use it for music mixing or graphics buy a good old fashioned big reliable SATA drive instead.
 
I am doing a significant amount on my iMac, it usally full bore actually. Which I suppose could be an issue, but shouldn't be.

I really like the speed of SSD, the difference for adobe apps is significant.
 
I've got hybrid drives in both my Mac Minis and my MacBook.They seem to work ok and are nice and fast to boot, but I wouldn't trust them in anything critical like my main PC. The Mac Air has an SSD, but again, I'd be a bit wary of keeping anything important on it.
 
I don't keep anything important on any of my computers, its just a right pain in the arse opening an iMac!
 
iGary, I think hybrid drives are great as long as you don't keep data on them. As long as the data are kept securely elsewhere and backed up, then hybrids are ideal.
 
SSDs are absolutely fine if you only use proven tech with a good warranty and like any storage backup appropriately.

I've had bad experiences with SATA HDD and with RAID controllers so any storage can go wrong.

Crucial M500 or Intel SSD is where it's at. I wouldn't touch Sandisk SSD and only a select few OCZ.
 
Checkout the OWC marketed range - claimed to be best for the Mac, you can also get them via Amazon and get the info from the OWC web site (Other World Computing) in the US
 
I've just stuck a 250GB Samsung 840 evo in my macbook. 130quid. Let's see how it fares in lifespan with garyi's next choice...
 
I reckon Gary should get a job as a tester. All the gear for the next voyages probe should do a month in Gary's office. I can picture the scene-"I can't understand it Bob. It did the heat soak fine. Salt water spray and temperature cycling, no bother. 2 weeks in the freezer, 1000 startups, pissed them all. Then it goes in this blokes kitchen and bam, down it goes."
 
I have a hybrid 60/700 in my new Dell (Alienware) so far so good. But then I expect Dell have tested them fully given its inside their most expensive laptop model.
 
I have installed three of the new Seagate slim 500GB SSHDs (not the old Momentus ones) in laptops of varying vintage and they have all worked superbly. Good performance in SATA I/II and III setups.

Last week I took delivery of the 1TB 3.5" desktop version and that's currently doing sterling service in my work PC.

The laptop versions took about 2 days for the cache to kick in across most common apps. The desktop about 5 days. Though it's down to usage patterns on each machine. The laptops were rebuilds so lots of rebooting in one day. My work PC was a direct copy.

So I highly recommend them and the customers get on well with them.

But as it's you Gary.....well..who knows what the result will be.;)
 
On a side note I would take the SSHD over a SSD for important data.

The reason being if a SSD goes...it's gone. No warning, no come back.

But of course you are not stupid enough to not have backups eh?;)

Hmmmm.

With the SSHD, while the cache part may fail, technically the mechanical part should continue to function. Also mechanical drives tend to give some signs of impending fail before they finally go.
 
OK I have purchased a 1tb seagate SSHD, I hope this will offer a good balance of what I am after.

Amazon I think have had a few issues with the sandisk ones, well at least they were on the phone to me for half and hour writing a report then she said they were pulling it from the website!

Its the sudden failure I cannot get to grips with, I was working away everything fine and boom. I suspect OSX, I really do. Everyone who shows an interest in geekery has told me they have not had issues with SSDs, so this rate for me is excessive.

I think it has to do with timemachine polling the drive or something, because if memory serves a back up was underway the last two times they went boom.

Luckily everything is backed up in all sorts of places. I use virgins excellent and unlimited back up facility for my photos as well as the server in the house. If push came to shove these woul dbe the only things I would be gutted to loose.

Most everything else of import in day to day use is in dropbox.
 
I've been selling and installing SSDs in Macs since about 2010-ish, and it's been an interesting learning curve. We started off with Crucial, Intel and some others, and quickly found that (then, at any rate) most of them had hidden snags. I could bore for England on this, but over this period, and bearing in mind that the technology itself has changed quite a lot under the surface, I found some key things which should be born in mind.

1. Unless the device in which you're putting an SSD specifically warns against it (eg, Drobo), your SSD should be one with a Sandforce controller. There's a list of manufacturers here, with the individual models that use this (and it may even be up-to-date). With some, their entire range uses Sandforce, but this isn't universal, so the odd character suffix in a model number may make all the difference.

2. If it doesn't have Sandforce, the performance will probably degrade considerably and quite quickly unless the host device has a built-in routine to take its place (eg, Drobo) -- often RAID applications won't require it. There may also be other controllers which are as good -- just haven't yet risked enough money to find them.

3. Any SSD with a "normal-sounding" nominal capacity should probably be regarded as suspect. An SSD should be 240GB, not 256GB, for example, or 480GB, not 512GB. That means it won't fail as a unit when (not if) some of the cells fail, as there is some spare capacity which the controller can bring into use when required. Some manufacturers use 'greater capacity' as a marketing point, which is like giving a discount on a car with no spare wheel.

4. All the SSDs with which have been found most successful so far have had metal cases. Again, this may be coincidence, and there are probably some with perfectly good casework which doesn't happen to be metal. But it certainly shouldn't bend at all, and it should get warm, so that the inevitable heat generated is released. Mostly, they should run cooler than a spinning disk, though (all of which are metal-boxed, with good reason).

5. Some SSDs have a housekeeping routine ("garbage collection", "wear levelling", etc.) which kicks in when there are no I/O operations happening, which is vital. Some of these are not compatible with computers going to sleep. In the case of a laptop which is used for short bursts of heavy activity between which the lid is closed, the SSD needs to be able to deal with this without omitting its housekeeping. There needs to be some awake, but idle time daily. This is easier to arrange with desktops & servers, obviously. I think it's possible that this factor has a hand in many SSD disaster stories.


I'd second Derek's endorsement of OWC SSDs. Installed loads of these, with not a single failure or indeed, any problem at all. Field-upgradable firmware, thorough attention to detail in the design, and in all cases, noticeably faster than stock Apple SSDs which cost even more (or did at the time). They deliver exactly as promised. They cost more. They work.

There are probably others which are also consistently good and may be worth the inevitable risk. I regard an SSD purchase as something which should ideally outlast the host device and move to its replacement, so a flexible SATA III interface which will deal gracefully with SATA I & II hosts is also a big plus. The next generation of personal computers (not just Macs) will use some form of direct bus-connected storage, so SATA itself has a limited life, but will live on in external boxes.

And it's still true that even if you buy the most expensive SSD you can find, there's no other upgrade which gives a greater real-world boost for the money spent. All those years when the only thing anyone considered was "megahertz"...
 
This does seem a strange thing to happen so many times since many new Apple products are SSD based with no conventional HD option. Surely it's most likely a fault with the machine in question?
I'd include slightly off-spec in the definition of 'fault' since it might work absolutely fine with a drive using different technology.

FWIW the standard Apple supplied SSD is still fine in my 18 month old MBP. Though of course having said that I suppose it will fail tonight....
 
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