I was an early adopter of the SSD, my M4 256Gb cost a wedge. Good news is the 5210. If they are 100 credits per TB then I will be buying them like hot cakes. 🙂

I can't say I'm looking forward to QLC. The writing endurance will suck terribly...

Lebon30:

I can't say I'm looking forward to QLC. The writing endurance will suck terribly...

Well SLC/MLC is silly, no normal user will ever hit that endurance limit. TLC is kinda the same thing, think my worse drive atm is set to last me around 20-30 years at this given rate before it does have sector issues, while im less used drive will last me around 70 years. if i even would have that drive by then. QLC far as i've heard is meant to last about half as long as TLC in which my drive would then last 10-15 years, even if it was half of that 1/4 of TLC 5-7.5 years ain't bad for a drive, i personally haven't had any HDD last that long, longest one died about 3 years in. Personally i say TLC is the nice mix between cheap and endurance, and if you can get that. but QLC isn't bad unless you want the drive to last a long time. then again it depends on what you also plan to do with it, Cold storage drives will last longer.

vestibule:

I was an early adopter of the SSD, my M4 256Gb cost a wedge. 🙂

Yup same, my M4 still running strong. I bought it when I saw all the issues the faster OCZ was having, so many bricked, all while the M4 had an almost perfect rating

I keep my hdd's in till they die out they last 5-10 years the 10 year one was a 40gb ide western digital that was working fine but for 2-3 years was reaaaally loud was the only hard drive i ever removed from my pc before it breaths out his final breath! That said the old drives ending up used as bulk storages that i keep things i do not care if they are lost but they are nice to have readily for that one time. So even qlc drives seem to be more reliable than traditional hdds espesially on higher capacity models trim etc would work much better! That said a 250 -500 gb operating system drive with tlc or mlc and a 2tb qlc bulk/games drive seem to be my future !

Ricepudding:

5 years ain't bad for a drive, i personally haven't had any HDD last that long, longest one died about 3 years in.

What on Earth did you do with your HDDs to make them all fail in three years? I've lost a single drive in under three years, and it was 35 months! Just one month before the warranty expired, so I got a new one. The couple of other drives I lost were much older.

I have 10 year old HDD drives in my PC that are still working 24/7. Also having older drives in storage that are still holding their data. Which i can't say about SSDs. One SSD without power for about a year and tones of bad blocks...

coth:

I have 10 year old HDD drives in my PC that are still working 24/7. Also having older drives in storage that are still holding their data. Which i can't say about SSDs. One SSD without power for about a year and tones of bad blocks...

i did not knew about the power thing although my 2tb toshiba that serves as my bulk games drive has about ~1tb of games in it .... and every month or two i add a game or two to it some times i might uninstall a game but thats it , if i am not mistaken for this kind of use a qlc drive will do just fine for example ...hey i have to play civilization 6 months ... i have time and i will play a game ! already installed just open up steam and fire it up ...although for civ6 ...patch and then fire it up 😛

Kaarme:

What on Earth did you do with your HDDs to make them all fail in three years? I've lost a single drive in under three years, and it was 35 months! Just one month before the warranty expired, so I got a new one. The couple of other drives I lost were much older.

yeah that makes me wonder too ...i think every single drive i ever had lasted at least 3 years ...that said 3 western digital blue 750gb they where one after the other almost doa ... "install em ...power the pc ...click click grrrrrrrr click click grrrrrrrrrr....and dead .... all 3 of em " i seriusly started thinking it is the power plug or something but nope the 4th replacement was a seagate and the drive is still operational on my brothers pc ....since ...hmm i think 2012 ?

Kaarme:

What on Earth did you do with your HDDs to make them all fail in three years? I've lost a single drive in under three years, and it was 35 months! Just one month before the warranty expired, so I got a new one. The couple of other drives I lost were much older.

Nothing un-normal, just gaming use. maybe i got bad drives? bad luck

Ricepudding:

Nothing un-normal, just gaming use. maybe i got bad drives? bad luck

ST3000DM001 now that was a hard-drive full of failure to use a personal example and a known bad drive. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/222267-seagate-faces-lawsuit-over-3tb-hard-drive-failure-rates Thankfully the only truly bad one I had and it still lasted almost 4 years before the onset of bad sectors but this can be quite random, average also varies heavily since older drivers have less sensitivity whereas newer ones can be pretty robust but if something happens (A little bump from the drive head for example.) it can get really bad really quickly. Age wise 4 - 6 years seem to be the average and then it quickly ramps up with bad sectors or other problems, SMART is a good initial indicator but things can go really fast from starting to fail to completely dead or it can be really slow. Guess SSD's avoid the whole moving part and platter and drive head wear and tear but instead of a set amount of time there's a limit on writes but TRIM and other factors ensure even TLC and I guess QLC still get a good number of years before they even begin declining although it's something I have to look up more in-depth especially for triple and quad layers now.

JonasBeckman:

Guess SSD's avoid the whole moving part and platter and drive head wear and tear but instead of a set amount of time there's a limit on writes but TRIM and other factors ensure even TLC and I guess QLC still get a good number of years before they even begin declining although it's something I have to look up more in-depth especially for triple and quad layers now.

It would be cool if all SSDs simply stopped writing and that's it. You could just copy/clone the stuff onto a new SSD and be happy again. I haven't yet lost any SSDs but it seems like they can randomly die as well.

Yeah there are safeguards in place at least including a good number of spare cells similar to the spare sectors on HDD's and TRIM ensures continued high performance and even distribution of the writes so from that alone a decade or more of total lifetime is possible although like all electronics other wear and tear and gradual breakdown is also a concern and I think as a previous post already pointed out that storage is still a concern if the device is powered off, HDD's eventually succumb too but not as quickly. Never really know when these devices will fail though same as HDD's I suppose in that way, SMART can look fine and the stats and such showing standard wear and then it just no longer boots up or can be accessed at all if things go badly although as seen by the stress test performed a year or two ago by now they can take a pretty good amount of wear before they fail catastrophically, often even above the rated threshold although bad batches do exist so in the end I guess it all comes down to the usual and you have to keep important data backed up if loss is a concern. Although with current utilities and the tech in these devices a check every now and then is usually enough to gauge overall healthiness of the device and there's not much to do if it just breaks down from some other error or fault. 🙂 (Sadly recovering the data just isn't that easy depending on the nature of the error, a few bad sectors or cells are manageable but once they start declining that's usually it and of course sudden immediate and usually total failures where it's just dead and can't be accessed at all anymore.) Component shrinkage also accelerates this to some degree although exactly how much can only be speculated about, new features such as using helium instead of air on HDD's can have advantages but can also see components brought even closer so a small nudge on the platter can have bad results and for SSD's well the multiple cell layers do have far lower write counts although TLC and QLC are probably both still more durable than regular HDD's far as longevity goes under regular circumstances. Suppose that's just stating the obvious though, data loss and recovery is always a problem too and sometimes there's no good way to recover data depending on the nature of the damage. Wonder if taking security into consideration that's going to be a incentive for more of a push to cloud storage and data centers in the future as the tech here also matures and sees bigger server farms? (Personal or sensitive info would be a possible concern of course so a USB stick or separate storage drive might be better with how profitable certain exploits and malicious software can be these days thus why there's so much of it.) RAID is a thing as well come to think of it, keeping the data synced and cloned and resistant to errors plus newer file systems like ReFS was it whenever Microsoft actually gets that into something that can be used regularly or even replace NTFS eventually. (Early Windows 10 builds supported it and then it got some updates with additional features though it still can't be a boot drive and then support kinda disappeared outside of Enterprise systems last I heard about it.) EDIT: Well depending on which RAID mode is used plus it needs more drives and that does incur a extra cost in hardware since SSD's can still be pretty pricey although affordability has improved a lot. EDIT: Well that's a lot of text for hardware eventually fails just be prepared and don't lose any info that you consider important. 🙂 Much of this is pretty standard stuff too I suppose, will be interesting to see how the SSD and HDD technology develops in 2020 and beyond though, 20+ TB HDD's for storage would potentially be a lot of data that might be lost if things go badly and for SSD's I wonder what's next beyond QLC although I suppose Intel Optane is also a interesting concept although quite expensive for now and for more specialized demands or future developments. NVME and PCIE 4.0 is also a combination that can probably see even greater speed gains though I suppose software actually requiring that level of throughput isn't too common yet although bandwidth saturation would also be less of a concern I guess. Lots of interesting and exciting developments I guess, as usual with the computer and tech industry heh. (There might be some limitations looming but there's probably ways around them or other alternatives to resolve these obstacles such as the constant node shrinkage.)

And more on topic I wonder how many other HDD manufacturers are considering a shift more towards SSD technology, eventually I do assume it will replace it in full although not for several more years as storage capacity and cost is still a important factor where a HDD can excel when speed isn't a key concern and long term reliability or storage might be another if the device isn't constantly powered on and maintained in some form. Also something we'll probably hear more on in 2019 and on along with changes in pricing and manufacturing costs as I assume the hardware is going to see a even bigger demand and facilities to construct these require some specialized equipment. (Though I suppose it's the same with the old HDD only this is more recent although growing rapidly in demand and seeing really rapid development as well.) EDIT: Interesting times ahead I guess, which has probably been said since the 70's or so and the start of personal and home computers in their many forms. 😀 EDIT: Right there was a previous announcement earlier this year about another manufacturer focusing on SSD's over HDD's as I recall. Certainly shows the increase in demand for these devices which is probably going to increase further still. (Particularly if it can be come more affordable such as from quad layer cells and other developments.) EDIT: Wait Micron deals more with flash memory and such, I'm being confused again. :P

JonasBeckman:

And more on topic I wonder how many other HDD manufacturers are considering a shift more towards SSD technology

Are there any more HDD manufacturers than Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba? HGST belongs to WD. Spinning HDDs have been a sunset business for years now. Samsung dropped out of it half a dozen years ago already, some much earlier (like Maxtor). If you see other brands, for example in external HDDs, it's actually a drive by one of these manufacturers inside, just the enclosure and interface electronics are made by whoever.

You're right, I completely overlooked that fact too and how the actual hardware is made a smaller set of manufacturers which can then be sold by others. EDIT: And that the list has shrunk a bit too over the years.

"By switching to QLC SSDs from hard disk drives, our machine learning workloads complete eight times faster." Sounds like somebody should have switched a long time ago. It's not only their machine learning that's slow...

Kaarme:

It would be cool if all SSDs simply stopped writing and that's it. You could just copy/clone the stuff onto a new SSD and be happy again. I haven't yet lost any SSDs but it seems like they can randomly die as well.

Not personally seen and SSD die, my oldest is about 5/6 years now and runs like normal XD