kelpdiver wrote:
SushiEater wrote:
I can write many terrabytes to a HDD (age has nothing to do with it because if HD is old it is most likely small enough to be replaced by a larger one anyway) time allowed, reformat it, write again and again and reformat again and again if I want to in one single day all day long. Absolutely nothing will happen with HDD. There hardly be any wear and tear. At least nothing you would detect.
Can you do the same with SSD?
Great. Now why would you be doing this? Most of your shooting is repetitive stuff - every people that walks by gets several pictures taken. That doesn't call for a lot of processing (your own words) nor write activity. Your pano fun is a tiny bit of your work. So in the end, you're mostly doing read activity like everyone else.
It was given as example what HD can do and SSD can't. That is all.
Just imagine one day cheap SSD with a price per GB as HD now.
Would I be able to do the same thing on SSD what I did not HD? Nope.
Increasing the size is not everything. Increasing the size and longevity is the key.
As of right now longevity is increased by increasing the size because when blocks are destroyed other blocks can be substituted. But what if destruction overwhelms substitution? That is why we hardly use SSD for data now.
HDDs can be overwritten many times with not much damage.
Yesterday I recorded over 30GB of interviews on my 5D3 not including over a thousand photos on D800. My partner was using 5D3. If I stored that data on the SSD plus editing the SSD would not last very long even if I do it once per week. I know Malch is going to say something about hammering his SSD but somehow he never really says how much hammering was involve. And I don't care because I do it on HD and I don't care about hammering it.
The DVR drive is the only use case that comes to mind. And particularly for the Tivo types that always record life buffer (these days most seem to adopt power saving modes), this is problematic for a consumer SSD.
Your 150MB/s hard drive could write perhaps 12TB in a day.
Ha? At 150MB/sec it would take about 7 seconds to write 1TB.
a 240GB SSD like the 840 series conservatively could do 400-500 TBs of writes, and more likely close to double that. How long would you insist on doing full blown writes? It would sustain it for over 2 months.
2 months? Besides being theoretical value I am not going to replace SSD in 2 months or 4 months or even 2 years. Are you?
Besides. Theoretically if 500GB SSD is used and 10GB is written per day it would last 14 years.
For the average user who doesn't do much these numbers are huge.
In my case on average I do exactly that. I write 70GB files on average per week.
But there is more. I also write video files that I can't really quantify.
I also need long term storage so I don't have to dig in to archives of backup so 500GB SSD is simply not large enough. If 500GB was large enough and I was like crazy going to archives I could just but 600GB Raptor and not worried about SSD longevity. So my main storage is 3TB.
Minimal processing you say? Processing is not the main GB creator. Constant copying and deleting and relocation of files is the main GB creation. To save time I copy all of the photos from CF cards in to one directory. Just keep shoving cards in to the reader using Downloader Pro.
After that I create folders and relocate all photos in to those folders while deleting many files. That is at least doubling the writing. So now my theoretical life just got decreased in half to 7 years and I have not done much yet. I did not even include everything else I do on the computer and did not include maintenance. BTW, according to the SSDlife every week is about 100GB is written to the SSD OS drive probably because of the scratch file is set in PS. That cuts life of that theoretical SSD in half again to 3.5 years and still there is not much work done. And as I understand if something is deleted from SSD unlike from HD the whole block is being overwritten not just the space of the file. That is why these numbers are theoretical.
Sorry but I will stick with 120GB for OS and software only for a while and use my HD for anything meaningful without worry that I have to do another replacement in a short time.
There are people who do exactly that sort of heavy activity - transactional db servers are murder on writes. So they use SLC based enterprise SSDs, add a factor of 10 to the wear life, and they replace when needed. The performance gains easily justify the expense.
Yeh, and someone is being charged for that. You can't compare enterprise computing with home computing. I would rather spend money on the camera and the new lens.
