Trying Out A $37 DREVO SSD On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Trying Out A $37 DREVO SSD On Linux

Needing to replace a failed hard drive in one of the older benchmarking systems, I decided to try out my first DREVO brand solid-state drive with frankly the I/O performance on this particular system not being too important and being curious how well this sub-$40 SSD performs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DREVO-X1-60GB-SSD-Linux

[torsionbar28]

The concern with these super low end SSD's isn't performance, they universally perform better than a mechanical hard drive in benchmarks. The concern is write endurance and reliability. How many TBW can you get from it? And what's the URE rate? Just as with mechanical hard drives, it is these two values that differentiate the low end from the professional and enterprise products, much more so than performance.

[starshipeleven]

I'm not going to touch these things with a ten foot pole.

Why does it say "$37" on the title and second paragraph, but "$38" on the last one? Is it a typo?

the actual price is 37.89 $, btw.

[andyprough]

Price per GB is horrendous for such a poor performer. Just sayin. I'd go with the mechanical drive just so I wouldn't feel like I was getting ripped off quite so badly.

[caligula]

The concern with these super low end SSD's isn't performance, they universally perform better than a mechanical hard drive in benchmarks. The concern is write endurance and reliability. How many TBW can you get from it? And what's the URE rate? Just as with mechanical hard drives, it is these two values that differentiate the low end from the professional and enterprise products, much more so than performance.

Even the perf is quite weak. There are drives like 'Kingston SSDNow mS200 60GB' which offers 550/520 MB/s read/write and 86/78k IOPS. Price was $39.99 last time I checked. It's kind of pointless to invest in these lower end drives with limited write speed. $2 more expensive, 6 times the write speed.. Invest $5 more and you get a 120 GB drive..

[Guest]

I got my ADATA SP550 128GB 2.5" SSD for $37 off eBay months ago.

[Adarion]

Price and size are intriguing (sometimes you just want a SSD for booting the OS, the rest ist HDDs anyway), speed is okay enough - but reliability? I'd rather pay some more money to have a reliable / high MTBF / low AFR / high TBW device.

[Mike Frett]

Let me ask you guys a question as I'm still using a mechanical drive. I do TONS of Video recording, some 720p but mostly SD, and lots of writing to disk. This drive I have is in old-age/pre-fail mode. Is it safe for me to buy an SSD now or should I stick with mechanical. Reliability is very important to me, I've been able to get up to 5-10 years out of these mechanical drives.

250GB is what I need, something not too expensive as I can get another 250GB/500GB mechanical drive for around 40 bucks

[starshipeleven]

Let me ask you guys a question as I'm still using a mechanical drive. I do TONS of Video recording, some 720p but mostly SD, and lots of writing to disk. This drive I have is in old-age/pre-fail mode. Is it safe for me to buy an SSD now or should I stick with mechanical. Reliability is very important to me, I've been able to get up to 5-10 years out of these mechanical drives.

Decent brand SSDs are reliable as "they won't randomly die" since a while. What you need to look into is "write endurance", which is another thing entirely.

You would need to look at the drive's specs or "endurance tests" that write on them until they die to see how much writes they can hold, and eyeball your workload to get an idea of how long they will last.

For example this one from 2015 http://techreport.com/review/27909/t...heyre-all-dead

You can see that they all last more than 500TB of writes before dying. And the situation has improved in the meantime. But you must look at specs of each device as there is variance.

EDIT: btw, SSDs report their write level through SMART and if they know they are on their last legs they will rise alarms just like normal HDDs.

[caligula]

Let me ask you guys a question as I'm still using a mechanical drive. I do TONS of Video recording, some 720p but mostly SD, and lots of writing to disk. This drive I have is in old-age/pre-fail mode. Is it safe for me to buy an SSD now or should I stick with mechanical. Reliability is very important to me, I've been able to get up to 5-10 years out of these mechanical drives.

250GB is what I need, something not too expensive as I can get another 250GB/500GB mechanical drive for around 40 bucks

Choose a drive with high endurance flash cell tech. There are cheap, mid range, and quality drives. These are known as TLC, MLC, and SLC, respectively. TLC may last 1000 writes per cell, SLC up to 100 000 writes. I'd go for MLC these days for data, TLC for OS and games. Another option is to buy a 500GB drive and only partition 250 GB. You get a lot more endurance thanks to wear leveling. Also use RAID. You should ALWAYS pick RAID, if you care about data integrity. My oldest (MLC) SSD is from 2008 and it still has > 50% life time left.