You should never really rely on a single disk for anything important SSD or HDD.

 

 

That's exactly it, at the end of the day it doesn't matter how reliable either system is because at the end of the day either can fail therefore important data should always be on more than one place and preferably in different locations which is easy and cheap to do with a USB hard drive.

 

We're only just now starting to deploy SSD's as standard in work PC's so I'm interested to see how they fare as it's hard to tell until you get a decent number of units in use.  At the moment there's a few in 24/7 systems and reliability hasn't been great despite being enterprise grade SSD's there's been quite a few premature failures.  On the other hand the SSD's should handle laptops better as I suspect many of the hard drive failures we have are due to people carrying laptops about with them powered on.

 

I use SSD's for most of my PC's and will continue to do so, the only reason I use hard drives is either because the PC isn't worth spending the money on an SSD for or I need bulk capacity.  I've a variety of SSD's from different manufacturers and eras none of which have failed so I don't find them chronically unreliable.

 

John

Thanks Dom I will check it out

 

I see what you're saying John, its an avenue worth looking down, although his previous 2 have been Dell pc's and I think he has been a little off put by their service. Not had any dealings with them myself.

 

 

If it was consumer PC's with return to base warranties then the service usually isn't that good, the business on site warranties are usually much better because if anything goes wrong it's just a case of phoning Dell and getting an engineer out the next day to sort it rather than having to remove the part, rma it, wait for a replacement, refit it etc.  Usually for business use, the support is one of the main factors but it depends on how crucial availability of the PC is and a desktop PC without any high power parts is less likely to have hardware issues.

 

John

http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/4178/10/hardwareinfo-tests-lifespan-of-samsung-ssd-840-250gb-tlc-ssd-updated-with-final-conclusion-final-update-20-6-2013 intresting article on longevity of SSDs. just reading conclusion page should give you the info thats important

http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes/4 Loved following this one. 2PB of data written and counting! Think the article writer measured it against his SSD use per day, would take over 1,000 years to kill the SSD

That's some posh PC to just do the very bottom level of core basics. Save him time and money and find him a pre-built for half the money with a real warranty which in the event of a component failure, you having to come to the rescue / diagnose / disassemble / arrange to return a part (at his expense) / wait a week for it to get there, be processed and a new one sent out and arrive/ go back again / reassemble / test / have been correct in initial diagnosis...... A business one and scrap the SSD/liquid cooling or a home PC and if SSD is a specific requirement he has, change the drive. 

 

I just can't see how for a home office PC for work use, that this self build won't cost him more and give him less in terms of service. Business HP or Dell would be my first choice. I wouldn't self build unless it was for a decent specific user requirements gaming rig or a high demand number cruncher. 

You should never really rely on a single disk for anything important SSD or HDD.

 

Even if data is recoverable it can be prohibitively expensive. Much cheaper to be backed up so all you need to do is replace the disk and restore.

 

You'll never regret an SSD in terms of performance, they're stunningly fast compared to spinning rust. But they do have a reputation for being unreliable especially with cheaper consumer drives.

 

Small SSD for a boot drive with a nice big slow HDD for data. Backed up either to the cloud or to a local storage drive.

 

If your girlfriends old man is doing insurance and the data he works with contains the personal information of customers he'll be best to keep everything local, sticking it in the cloud can breach the DPA.

If he definitely has personal information especially if he's dealing with medial info for life insurance you might want to investigate encryption for him.

 

Is he self employed (IFA)? Usually this sort of stuff is quite tightly managed by the company

Agreed with regards to backing up. Given how easy it is to do it in this day and age with cloud storage and external HDD options it would be silly IMHO to not specify some form of backup as part of the package.

 

Failing to plan is planning to fail - especially for a business where resilience is a requirement.

http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/4178/10/hardwareinfo-tests-lifespan-of-samsung-ssd-840-250gb-tlc-ssd-updated-with-final-conclusion-final-update-20-6-2013 intresting article on longevity of SSDs. just reading conclusion page should give you the info thats important

http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes/4 Loved following this one. 2PB of data written and counting! Think the article writer measured it against his SSD use per day, would take over 1,000 years to kill the SSD

 

Those articles are not talking about longevity, they're purely talking about number of write cycles which as they've shown is not a factor in longevity it doesn't really matter - I've used several enterprise grade SSD's with far higher write cycles that have failed within a couple of years.

 

John

Those articles are not talking about longevity, they're purely talking about number of write cycles which as they've shown is not a factor in longevity it doesn't really matter - I've used several enterprise grade SSD's with far higher write cycles that have failed within a couple of years.

 

John

Like all hardware there are components that perform under the average and those that perform well beyond it - luck plays a huge part (I have had HDD's fail after 6 months while others went for years without issue)

 

All the more reason to ensure you have some resilience by way of a backup strategy built in to any plan