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Comment by ajtaylor | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking long and hard about upgrading my Macbook Pro with a hard drive to an SSD. Which this kind of performance and value, it's looking to be a no brainer. The main thing holding me back was going from 500 GB HD => 256 GB SSD (based on price). With the MX100, I can have it all!

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Solid state drives are the most cost-effective laptop upgrade. I cannot recommend them enough. SSDs beat laptop hard disks by an order of magnitude in sequential read/write and two orders of magnitude in random access. I made the switch back in 2009, when the 80GB Intel X-25M was around $350. Since then, any computer with a hard drive has felt broken to me.

If anyone reading this uses a laptop for development and it has a hard disk, please upgrade. The cost in time and frustration makes it worthwhile purely for economic reasons.

Make sure you have Trim Enabler and a good backup system! With an SSD, performance goes up and reliability will go down. SSD manufacturers have been improving firmware in order to be able to sell ever crappier MLC memory. You will need Trim Enabler in order to preserve the performance gain. This also means that you have to restart once again whenever your software updates require a restart, in order to restore TRIM.

Yes a good reliable backup system is a must. I've been running SSD's since 2010 and have seen three failures from three different vendors and different drive generations.

Failures range from SSD no longer being able to communicate properly over SATA, to losing chunks of data at random points in time, and freezes.

Essentially none of the unreliability of consumer SSDs is directly attributable to MLC flash cells wearing out. They're large enough, have enough spare area, and the wear leveling works. When a consumer SATA SSD fails, it's almost always a catastrophic failure of the controller or its firmware, and the rest of the failures are from things like losing an entire NAND package or some other critical component on the PCB.

Now, it can be said that the need for good wear leveling and latency hiding is what causes the controllers and their firmware to be so complex and thus failure-prone. But the myth of SSDs wearing out needs to die. When an SSD does wear out its write endurance, it's a gradual process with lots of SMART warnings and a gradual decline in performance when the controller no longer has enough less slack space to work with, and some sporadic data corruption. It also doesn't start happening until the drive has been subjected to a lot of heavy writing - it takes months of 24/7 torture testing: http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

I had a Crucial drive fail on me during a reinstall at about a year and a half. Spolsky has also written about the reduced reliability of SSDs. It doesn't matter if it's a secondary cause of more complicated firmware from using less stable MLCs -- a crashed drive is a crashed drive. It wouldn't happen so often with SLC flash drives or Spinning platters.

And yes, I took steps to reduce wear on my SSD, including installing a secondary drive, noatime, disabling local TimeMachine, and using external drives for torrenting. My SSD still died.

Drive reliability is far more important to me than minor differences in performance. Unfortunately, reliable information about reliability is typically absent from most sad reviews, making them not terribly useful for purchasing decisions.

it might seem redundant, but i'll reiterate: keep backups of important stuff. i personally use a spinning USB drive and it's saved my back a couple of times since i switched to ssd's.

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