Reliability of solid state drives vs hard disk drives

MYMunshi

Honorable
Nov 15, 2013
23
0
10,510
Hi everyone

Thanks so much for viewing my query guys and once again I'd be extremely grateful if you could please provide me with some help on this predicament.

Essentially, my query relates to these articles on the Web which say that solid state drives have the disadvantage that they begin to deteriorate performance wise over time compared to hard disk drives.

I'm currently building a new system mainly for gaming but also to watch films, listen to music, do some programming work, use Excel, Access and Word. I currently have loads of movie and animation files sorted on my system since 2005 so that's why I'm thinking SSD would for the bill nicely mainly for loading times. I'll work with images now and then (only Paint and Microsoft Picture Manager - no photoshopping). That's pretty much it.

The reasons why I'm going with solid state and not disk is because I know they are amazing at boot start ups (on Windows 7 I know they would be amazingly fast) and the fact that there's no noise. I also know that there's very little defragmenting involved. I just find hard disks to be a pain to work with now. I built me previous system in 2009 using a WD 7200rpm drive and over time, it has slowed down so nightmarishly, it can take 10 mins for my pc to load up.

Considering the above guys, would solid state still be a disadvantage compared to hard disk??

Again I'd be very grateful for any advice you can offer to this predicament.

Cheers
 

CTurbo

Pizza Monster
Moderator
Overall reliability are about the same between the two. ssd performance slows once it starts to get over around 80% full. It also shortens it's lifespan by keeping it mostly full. That's why I like to keep windows and all programs on a ssd, and still use a hdd for all data storage.
 

giantbucket

Dignified
BANNED
Unless you spend most of your computer time rebooting, the boot speed is largely irrelevant. For gaming it might be great, though. But from what I've seen a HDD fails more gently than an SSD even if their failure rate is similar.

I'm sure you can get a dead-reliable SSD as long as you can afford it, but on a per-dollar-per-GB basis I think a HDD is still a more reliable bet these days.

Here's an impromptu example:

$300-$400 can get you a 512GB SSD or maybe a 1TB. One device. Fast.

$300-$400 can get you 4 WD Black 500GB 2.5" drives and a RAID5 controller. Just as fast, and more fault-tolerant. A little more power use and not silent, though.

If I had to pick, I'd take the second option.
 

MYMunshi

Honorable
Nov 15, 2013
23
0
10,510


Does it help the SSD's longevity if you use the SSD for core system files (Windows, games, software etc) and use a HDD for non-core files (videos, music, documents etc)?

I'm considering getting:

SSD: Intel SSDSC2CT240A4K5 Extreme 335 240GB to use for Windows, games etc
HDD: Western Digital 4TB 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive - Black to use for music, videos etc.