My Workstation PC (“The Force”)
19/05/2010 5 Comments
PC: Self-concept / Assembled by: Informatique BV / Computer Store: Berkel & Rodenrijs (Rotterdam)
Mobo Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3R (Bios: F6) CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.400 MHz, 1.136V (FSB: 400×8.5) Memory 2 x OCZ Platinum PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 (4GB) @ 7-7-7-20, 2T (1N) Boot Drive 2 x OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD 30GB @ 60GB RAID 0 (128K stripe, 8K sectors [1:1], 2MB offset) – random access time [AS SSD Benchmark R/W]: 0.13/0.20 ms 2nd Drive 2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 HDD 500GB @ 1TB RAID 0 (128K stripe, 8K sectors [16:1], 2MB offset) – average access time [short stroked]: 8 ms GPU Asus EN9600GT Silent/2D/HTDI 512MB, PCIe Sound Asus Xonar D1 7.1, LP, PCI CPU Cooler Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev.1 Gamer Case Antec Nine Hundred Two Power Supply Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro Edition (P7), 450W Optical Drive Pioneer DVR-117F DVDRW OS XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 (SXP June 2009) System Tools LSoft Active Boot Disk Suite v4.1.4 Paragon Partition Manager v10.0 Server O&O DiskImage 4Professional Edition (x64) Diskeeper 2010 Home Edition with HyperFast
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Nice post! Keep up the neat work!
superb post! Keep up the informative work!
Actually, this is not a myth seplosudpy based on experience. This is a known disadvantage inherent to flash technology. Writing to flash chips damages the chip. It can take a very long time to cause sufficient damage to actually destroy the data integrity of a chip, but excessive writing (especially to the same blocks, like most modern OSs do) can dramatically reduce the life of flash media.One of the reasons tests may not show this is because most flash drives contain extra unused memory that is used as failover when bytes on the regular part of the drive fail (I am sure the redirection to failover, once a block has failed, increases read and write times, although only marginally).The problem with modern flash manufacturers is that they do not list technical specs on the package. This means I do not know if that drive can withstand 10,000 writes per block, or over 1,000,000 writes per block. This also means I do not know if the drive has 5 or 10 blocks of failover space, or half the total drive capacity.Anyway, excessive write use, especially to the same location, very well can wear out a flash drive far more quickly than a hard drive. Modern technology and failover techniques can slow this, but it depends greatly on how much failover space the manufacturer provided and the technology used by the drive, and since these are not listed on the package, the dependability of any given drive is subject to many unknown factors.In any case, even if I did have a drive known to have an average life that is 3 times that of magnetic hard drives, I would still use these techniques, because they will extend the life of the drive at least two if not five to ten times as long as it would otherwise have been.Note: A user would not have to write the entire drive over and over to quickly destroy a flash drive. He would just have to focus on a single block, writing it until it failed, then continue the same pattern until all of the failover space was also destroyed. Temporary data storage and virtual memory use in most modern OSs fits this pattern almost perfectly. Once a single block has been made unreliable, the reliability of the entire drive is gone.Another big disadvantage of USB flash drives is heat (having less experience with SSDs, I do not know if this is also a problem for them). Try copying a 25MB file(or folder)to your USB drive, then feel the drive’s case. Imagine how hot the chips inside must be for you to be able to feel that heat through the plastic case. This heating (and then cooling in between reading or writing) is what destroys most small electronics. Reducing write cycles to USB flash drives will help circumvent this wear. If you are using USB drives, internally, for hard drives, I would recommend at least removing the plastic cases if not adding heat sinks to the chips, to keep them cooler.(Several years ago I was working on using a USB flash RAID for a mini-ITX motherboard and I did an enourmous amount of research on this. Because flash technology has improved a good deal since then, I am going to actually try it this time. My recent research has found that the limited write cycles of flash is still a big concern when using it for running an operating system, but modern flash technology coupled with the techniques listed on this page should yield a good long term use system.)Lord Rybec
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