New Laptop

[Firewind]

Re: New Laptop

Well thanks for the help guys! I just bought the screen shot on the first page from best buy, the Asus with the i7, and the GTX660M graphics card, and 17.5" screen. I'll wait for pricing to come down on the solid state before investing, plus as time passes it'll probably have more "techy shit" too. I was going to put on the things that make you smile thread, but since i started this thread... Best buy has a no interest option for financing, and the guy helping me was super cool and extended the no interest terms from 18 months to 24 months, so instead of dropping $1400, I'm just paying $50 a month for a couple years. That's some good shit. Now i can get back to participating in ffxiv without my screen dumping on me...

Sounds really nice. My PC is getting on a bit and the CPU's age is starting to bottleneck me, especially on SWTOR which is very demanding on your processor, but it should be okay for another 6 months (which should also give me some time to save for a computer upgrade).

[Aeni]

Re: New Laptop

An article has been published in the December 2012 edition of IEEE Spectrum that highlights an interesting and potentially useful discovery by ROM manufacturer Macronix. Researchers there have discovered that applying heat to NAND flash cells can drastically extend their life, thus overcoming one of the biggest problems with the solid state storage technology.

NAND flash is used everywhere, from smartphones to SSDs to thumb drives, and we've written extensively before on how it works. The technology's biggest failing is that NAND flash only lives so long. Every time the flash cells are erased, they retain some residual charge; eventually, they get to where it takes so long to make them change their charge level that they stop being useful as a storage medium.

As NAND flash grows denser, it gets more delicate; in our discussion on the future of flash, we discuss the decreasing lifetimes of NAND flash and the potential alternatives. SSDs rely on complex mathematical gymnastics at the controller level to reduce writes and hence lengthen the life of their flash cells, but the need for those kinds of workarounds could be substantially lessened by the Macronix discovery.

I seriously recommend you read the article from Ars I posted in the other thread as well as all other related articles to the discussion of Solid State AND new nanoarchitecture based technology (that I can't help ... but great resources on Google)

I'd like your sources on this. Batteries have circuitry because they can't be charged/discharged naively; full discharge kills it, overcharging could cause an explosion. Show me evidence that what wears out is the circuitry and not the battery itself.

Nanoarchitectures for lithium-ion batteries - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

^ Read up on Solid State Batteries ... I'm talking about the same process, not the exact same thing from your flash memory.

[Armando]

Re: New Laptop

However, you need to balance off a discussion with good and bad. To just ignore a downside because "it's trivial" is doing a disservice to someone you're giving advice.

You're not balancing off anything. You're just saying "Don't use it."

What happens if poor Mezlo ends up getting 3 straight bad SSDs? What is he to think?

Sure. What if he's struck by lightning on his way to Best Buy? Is he to think he shouldn't buy the laptop?

I own two SSDs. I have two friends that have SSDs as well. I believe Raydeus and DakAttack also have an SSD. Either the odds of getting 3 bad SSDs in a row are stupidly low, or it's likely and everyone on this forum is stupidly lucky. Which sounds more plausible?

Having a fast 15s bootup is nice ... but what's the point of it if you're needing large capacity and/or turning it into a part-time media center?

We already know that's not what Mezlo's gonna do with it.

There is limited benefit to reading data sequentially (beyond typical FS block sizes, say 4KB), making fragmentation negligible for SSDs.[75] Defragmentation would cause wear by making additional writes of the NAND flash cells, which have a limited cycle life.[76][77]

Ray knows defragmenting is bad. But the real reason not to defragment has more to do with it being a complete waste of time than any long-term wear on the SSD. Defragmenting moves data around on the disk; each part of the SSD will get written to at most twice in the process. Anyone who thinks a defrag will cause significant long-term damage must also be terrified of hitting the Save button on Microsoft Word.

Bullshit. Cite me your sources.

Look at the Tom's Hardware article I posted on the previous page. Page 7 shows data from a data center using 5000 SSDs. They had an average failure rate of 2% in 2 years of use. "Based on the company's usage patterns, we know that none of the failures have to do with write exhaustion."

Page two of the same article also points out that SSD return rates for the first year aren't significantly different than HDD return rates, although that doesn't really say much about failure rates.

This is why smart phone batteries (YES, NAND cells are used there, too) do not have a long life.

I'd like your sources on this. Batteries have circuitry because they can't be charged/discharged naively; full discharge kills it, overcharging could cause an explosion. Show me evidence that what wears out is the circuitry and not the battery itself.

[Aeni]

Re: New Laptop

Moderns SSDs are made to last 1 million+ writes

Bullshit. Cite me your sources. According to the article regarding the new process for future NAND cells, current best is roughly 10K. This is why smart phone batteries (YES, NAND cells are used there, too) do not have a long life. This is why the new tech is very promising as it will increase integrity by roughly 5-folds and longevity by multiple factors. You don't have to look far than the 3DS ... the battery guarantee Nintendo puts out is only 300 charges. There's a reason why many warranties are all over the place on this ... the tech just isn't as good as you're making it out to be.

[Raydeus]

Re: New Laptop

Then again, all storage media has a limited cycle, even *gasp* HDDs!

The thing is Aeni keeps trying to make it sound like your SSD will fail after just a few hundred writes, which is ridiculous. Even temp files aren't overwritten that much in a consumer/enthusiast PC and Aeni even goes as far as assuming the SSD will always write the same file in the exact same cells every single time, completely ignoring all the optimization tools SSDs and OS with SSD support have.

We are talking about at least 10000 writes of the same cell in SSDs from 5 years ago, which even then was difficult to reach on testing (much less in normal use). Check out this article on the subject from 2009. Moderns SSDs are made to last 1 million+ writes, which, I don't know how are you exactly going to reach even if you (for some unknown reason) wanted to defrag a few times a day.

So yeah... I mean it is still more expensive than an HDD for the storage capacity, but cell wear due to writing only applies to server use (thousands of times more intensive than any regular PC would ever see) nowadays.

[Mezlo]

Re: New Laptop

There is limited benefit to reading data sequentially (beyond typical FS block sizes, say 4KB), making fragmentation negligible for SSDs.[75] Defragmentation would cause wear by making additional writes of the NAND flash cells, which have a limited cycle life.[76][77]

[Raydeus]

Re: New Laptop

/facepalm back to you for poor reading comprehension.

Logic for you:

1 - defrag is not recommended because as you say
2 - this is bad because of the nature of these cells
3 - continual flash/reflash of said cells wear it out faster

/facepalm

Ah, forget it.

[Aeni]

Re: New Laptop

Obviously. Still irrelevant, because:
* If the manufacturer is wrong and their products last less than they predicted, they're the ones that lose money when tons of units fail within warranty.
* The main contents of the SSD should be OS and software until capacity increases.
* You have a responsibility to back up your stuff no matter what. Even if a drive that could function forever existed, what if it gets stolen?

I'm not disagreeing with you here. However, you need to balance off a discussion with good and bad. To just ignore a downside because "it's trivial" is doing a disservice to someone you're giving advice. What happens if poor Mezlo ends up getting 3 straight bad SSDs? What is he to think? As long as someone is well aware of the pros and cons, then they can make an informed choice.

To play devil's advocate, I know of several people that have the opposite experience with an SSD. Again, your mileage will vary, depending on circumstances, what you intend to do with the PC, and what your expectations are. Having a fast 15s bootup is nice ... but what's the point of it if you're needing large capacity and/or turning it into a part-time media center?

[Armando]

Re: New Laptop

I don't even think you know how the hard drives are rated. They are rated at "best guess" ... because no manufacturer would be that stupid to actually test something for years before selling a product.

Obviously. Still irrelevant, because:
* If the manufacturer is wrong and their products last less than they predicted, they're the ones that lose money when tons of units fail within warranty.
* The main contents of the SSD should be OS and software until capacity increases.
* You have a responsibility to back up your stuff no matter what. Even if a drive that could function forever existed, what if it gets stolen?

[Aeni]

Re: New Laptop

/facepalm

They recommend not to defrag SSDs because there's no point for it given how data is accessed, not because the disk will wear off quicker. Defrag is used on a regular HDD to put all parts of a file in a sequential order for faster reads because it facilitates reading files in less spins of the disk.

The only reason not to get an SSD nowadays is money, and considering how HDD prices were affected by the Tsunami SSDs are more accessible now than ever before.

/facepalm back to you for poor reading comprehension.

Logic for you:

1 - defrag is not recommended because as you say
2 - this is bad because of the nature of these cells
3 - continual flash/reflash of said cells wear it out faster

@Armando

I don't even think you know how the hard drives are rated. They are rated at "best guess" ... because no manufacturer would be that stupid to actually test something for years before selling a product. Instead, they will put out, say, 1,000 such devices and run a "burn in" test for roughly a month, tops, and then use mathematical modeling to determine the rating that they give the drives. Which is why so many drives performances out there DO NOT ACTUALLY MEASURE UP to their actual rating. For example, Seagate was notorious in the early 90s for their "higher than rated" failures. Several WD models also suffered similar fate. And I remember Samsung with a couple of their earliest offerings having such high failure rates that the executives of that division were fired en masse.

[Mezlo]

Re: New Laptop

Well thanks for the help guys! I just bought the screen shot on the first page from best buy, the Asus with the i7, and the GTX660M graphics card, and 17.5" screen. I'll wait for pricing to come down on the solid state before investing, plus as time passes it'll probably have more "techy shit" too. I was going to put on the things that make you smile thread, but since i started this thread... Best buy has a no interest option for financing, and the guy helping me was super cool and extended the no interest terms from 18 months to 24 months, so instead of dropping $1400, I'm just paying $50 a month for a couple years. That's some good shit. Now i can get back to participating in ffxiv without my screen dumping on me...

[Raydeus]

Re: New Laptop

/facepalm

They recommend not to defrag SSDs because there's no point for it given how data is accessed, not because the disk will wear off quicker. Defrag is used on a regular HDD to put all parts of a file in a sequential order for faster reads because it facilitates reading files in less spins of the disk.

The only reason not to get an SSD nowadays is money, and considering how HDD prices were affected by the Tsunami SSDs are more accessible now than ever before.

[Armando]

Re: New Laptop

Because no one ever had an SSD for that long

You really think a manufacturer is going to throw out a warranty number without first having tested for failures? If someone's offering a 5 year warranty it means they're pretty sure very few SSDs will fail before then - or, at least that they won't fail because of reading/writing. Tom's Hardware has an article on the subject.

That aside, you're still using this mainly for OS and software. In the very worst case scenario, nothing of value is lost. If you do have something of value on the SSD for some reason...shame on you for not having backups. You need to do backups no matter what kind of drive you're using.

[Aeni]

Re: New Laptop

I'd love to know your definition of short-lived. Go to Newegg, browse to the SSD section. Click on any of them, then Details, Ctrl+F for warranty. It's pretty easy to find 5 years. You have to go really far out of your way to corrupt/damage an SSD. If you really want to, move your virtual memory to your hard drive.

"Expensive" is also relative. How much space do you need for an OS? Windows 7 takes up about 25 GB. You can find 64 GB or 128 GB SSD for $60-$100. CompUSA had a 128 GB one at $50 on Black Friday. Could you get a lot more space for the same money on a hard drive? Obviously, but it's also going to be slow.

I'm not saying you NEED to have one, but they're damned nice. The biggest bottleneck right now for everyday tasks is drive access speed.

Because no one ever had an SSD for that long ... the tech hasn't been around forever It has only seen mainstream use in the past 18 mos ... before that, only the hardest of hardcore enthusiast could afford one, as it was so expensive that it was a stupid investment considering the capacities available at the time (40-80GB) and only found its way in many upper end laptops. It's slowly become ubiquitous and will therefore see the greatest numbers of uses as well as situations in which it may introduce potential problems.

To Raydeus' point, do you know how often file swapping can occur in just one area/sector of an SSD? Remember, they recommend to NOT defrag SSDs ... therefore, the files will likely sit and be accessed MANY MANY TIMES in that same sector(s) File edits = changes in state of these cells. Refer to my response to Armando regarding the time scale ... again, new tech, not many testimonies out there and people tend to upgrade quickly, especially those with first or second gen (low capacity) SSDs. Wait till we get to "sweet spot" in SSD capacity where the end users are likely to have owned and make use for more than 2-3 years.

[Armando]

Re: New Laptop

Look up the GPU, and just in case, the CPU, in Notebookcheck.net's benchmarks to see how big of a gap there is between them. Keep in mind that the main factor in your decision will probably be the GPU. Also check for ventilation - Asus gaming laptops are very thick and have large ventilation ports out the back. Thinner laptops may have underclocked CPUs/GPUs to prevent overheating and may not give you full performance.
Comparison of Laptop Graphics Cards - Notebookcheck.net Tech
Mobile Graphics Cards - Benchmark List - Notebookcheck.net Tech
Notebook Processors - Notebookcheck.net Tech
Mobile Processors - Benchmarklist - Notebookcheck.net Tech

You should probably hit up Newegg as well, you might catch a better deal or a refurbished laptop there.