New Mac advice - is flash storage reliable?

[Skykid]

Need a new Mac.

Looking at the 13 inch Retina display model for $1299, but I'm a little concerned about its 1tb Flash storage - how safe is this? I appreciate you save a pound of weight by not having the internal HDD of the next model down ($200 cheaper) but in the long run I don't want it to end up losing my work.

I know backing up is important, but I can't realistically do this every night.Perhaps I'm figuring it wrong, but when I think flash storage I think of SD cards.

Maybe what's in the Mac is a little stronger?


Thanks for the help.

[GaijinPunch]

The track record doesn't really matter in the long run. You need to assume that your data on either of those two mediums can and will be destroyed. Back up to an external drive and/or cloud storage. Trust me. It is worth the hassle and money.

[Skykid]

I guess. Half the time I feel like I'm making backups of backups, external hdds and cloud. Gah. Not enough time in life for keeping track of everything.

I just associate flash storage with unreliability. But I suppose the eventual replacement will be simpler than with internal hdd.

[Astraea FGA Mk. I]

I have never had a problem with my SSDs. I tend to buy higher quality parts for my computers, my SSDs have been either pre-installed in new Apple products or Corsair drives for my windows based desktops.
Apple wouldn't use crappy SSDs in their hardware, given the price of their products and the importance of the integrity of their image. I have browsed a lot of Apple forums and I cannot remember seeing anyone talking about problems with their SSDs. While they degrade over time it would only get to the point of not working well past its usable life when it is long obsolete. Mechanical drives are more prone to failure as they have moving parts.

An SSD is the most noticeable and beneficial upgrade you can get for a computer, everything loads near instantly. You will never go back. I just got a Mac Pro with a PCi-E SSD that has >1GB read/write and it is a beautiful thing.

You can use dropbox to back up your documents, the larger files will usually be installed programs and such which can be easily installed again. I would backup important things regardless of my storage choices.

[Skykid]

^ Cool that's useful, thanks. Which Pro model did you go for, or was it custom?

Edit: I hate Dropbox. Just duplicates everything on auto. Nightmarish for large photo sets. I prefer Google drive and doing it all manually.

[emphatic]

I was in an Apple store just the other day, and the salesman claims they're fully built in the US now, so I bet the drives will be decent.

[Skykid]

I thought mac stuff was always built in Cali?

Tbh I've never had a Mac hdd die on me. Vaio on the other hand... don't want to talk about it.

[Ed Oscuro]

I have had (and thrashed) a PNY Prevail Elite (for a long while without TRIM-compatible firmware) for a good while now, and had no problems.

Flash is better than "rotating rust" hard drives in most ways - excluding cost per gigabyte, but this is much better than it used to be as your 1TB drive shows. Rotating drives are 3-4 times bigger for expensive or risky many-platter drives, but I'm at the point where I'm wondering what most people really would need multiple terabytes for. You basically have to be a pro content creator, or online downloading random shit 24/7, or both, to fill up one of the new drives. So basically storage space is a moot point for most everybody at the moment - the other benefits make up for it.

Reliability? What I've heard most recently is that when a flash cell "fails," it ceases to be writable - but the data in the cell should still be readable for decades. With flash drives, the things that can go wrong with flash could go wrong on mechanical drives as well - but all the other things related to a mechanical drive failures (which make up the vast bulk of hard drive failures) won't happen, because they've been eliminated. I have been very lucky with no hard drive failures in the last 10 years or so - but had quite a few before then, as a few stacks of old drives (pre-2005) show. I am pretty sure all of those died due to purely mechanical failures.

Pro photographers have been using flash drives in their cameras for at least 10 years (probably closer to 20 or even longer). Bottom line - going to a flash drive is the easiest and probably best thing you can do to make your portable more reliable.

I thought mac stuff was always built in Cali?

?

[SuperPang]

I've been using my iMac for about 18 months and Air for over 3 years, both with flash. Both work as well as the day I got them. I can't remember what it was like to wait for a hard disk. I like Apple products because they just work.

Backing up is necessary even with the most reliable drives. I back up to my NAS. It's slower than USB 3 but more practical. I'd back up to the cloud as well if I had fibre.

[Ed Oscuro]

Little edit here - I did run across this when looking up 'SSD failure mode' on Google. It looks problematic, but the key seems to be: If they have power, SSDs are happy. For laptop use, there should be no problems. (It does remind me that mechanical drives do have an advantage - the rotating platters act as a kind of flywheel battery, and when the drive detects a loss of power, it can finish its last operation and gently shut down properly.)

Good, reasonably up-to-date article with a simple comparison of pro/con for most aspects of SSDs vs. HDDs, from one of the top hard drive review sites:
http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd

I can't remember what it was like to wait for a hard disk.

My first real awareness of disc access was having Quake freeze up on me while it switched audio tracks. Some recent programs that I use on Windows 7 exhibit similar behavior if I'm running them off a mechanical disk drive. Whenever I do disk operations to a particular one of my mechanical drives (just a couple years old, and a decent performer at its time - no ultra-RPM monster, but still over 7000 RPM) when it's gone to sleep and parked the heads, I hear a clank/buzz as it picks them up, and then I wait for maybe five seconds before my program / Windows responds with the information. I get something similar for my other major big disk drive.

It's great to see some of the long-time holdouts of tech turning into more solid-state formats recently. There's this, and there's also those mostly invisible-to-consumers solid polymer capacitors. Both have really helped computer reliability.

[BPzeBanshee]

Not all of the stuff was always built in California. My iMac model is commonly known to get sent from a South Korean address and have issues adjusting to weather conditions, and the parts in them are generally variants or verbatim off-the-shelf components (not like Core 2 Duos are Mac-exclusive).

My understanding of SSDs is that they had a certain amount of writes guaranteed and then anything else is hit-and-miss, but like Ed said it has its pros too. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

[GaijinPunch]

The most reliable drive is not safe from it's biggest threat: you.

Back your shit up to at least an external. Learn from your elder's mistakes.

[cools]

I *hate* messing about with backups. I take (intermittent) copies of stuff onto external drives and a NAS I have sitting around, but it's infrequent and generally more as an archive process than anything else.

So the past couple of years I've had a paid for account with http://www.crashplan.com. I point the application at whatever folders I want to keep safe, and just leave it do its thing. Backup speed is limited by your line speed, but it just sits quietly in the background chugging away - it does deduplication and compression as well (the former is incredible to watch the first time - say I move a 50GB folder from one location to another on the same machine, Crashplan will simply dedup this in the backup so rather than sending the whole thing up again taking weeks, it takes minutes).

I've restored whole drives with it where I've not been bothered to take a physical backup when reinstalling. An overnight job, but flawless.

Can't sing it's praises highly enough. Screw managing backups. Keep yourself a copy of everything critical (cloud services could disappear as well - you always need two physically seperate backup), and let Crashplan handle the offsite part.

[Skykid]

Really good advice and info in here guys, liking the backup suggestions too. Pretty comfortable about going for the Pro model I was looking at now, time to dig deep.

[Icarus]

Are you planning on doing everything on it? Then get the Pro with whatever drive built in, and have a sizeable external drive handy - I have so much media to consume and work on that I have four external 4TB drives and a handful of <1TB pocket drives for working on the go. You can set OSX to back-up your stuff to your external regularly using Time Machine if you don't want to faff about, or you can do it yourself manually using Carbon Copy Cloner.

If it's just for basic consumption and travelling around with, however, I find the Pro series quite heavy and cumbersome to lug around. You've seen my 17" 2010 Pro, that goes everywhere with me. The Air models are really nice for travelling with, in that regard.

Also echoing the sentiment that the worst thing that can happen to a hard drive (and a computer in general) is you. Make sure it's fully covered and physically protected, and it'll last you forever - I still have a 12" 2004 model Powerbook G4 that still functions really well, and was given to my mother who uses it for managing her work as an on-call multilingual translator; and the only thing I've had to do to my Macbook Pro is upgrade the hard drive to a 750GB hybrid SSHD and 8GB RAM since I bought it years ago.

[Skykid]

Are you planning on doing everything on it?

Everything important. I need a new work horse as my last Mac has had it. Overheats and slows to a crawl in 30 minutes. Needs a refurb. I did run it into the ground though.

But I have a tablet to share the entertainment workload now, which is useful.

I'm thinking Pro not Air because it has slightly more kick in the hardware dept and it's cheaper. The mid range model is the lightest at 3.5 pounds for the 13 inch screen w/1TB flash drive. I think that should be ok in terms of portability.

[ZellSF]

I'm just going to repeat what GaijinPunch is saying. Drives aren't reliable. Data that is kept only in one location will eventually be lost. Sure, 9/10 people might not have lost critical data to a storage failure, but do you want risk being the 1/10 that have?

Get a SSD for performance reasons, not reliability reasons. SSD drives are very fast. SSD drives = flash drives btw.

And if you're worried about performance uninstall Mac OS X from the Mac and install a better OS

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I thought mac stuff was always built in Cali?

Nope, that's just their slick marketing. I used to work in a warehouse that regularly shipped iPads and whatnot, all the packaging says "designed in California" to make it 'feel' more american, so when you think of where it was made, you subconsciously remember California first. But they all are manufactured in Asia. They might have built a manufacturing plant in the USA recently and might actually be making product there, but unless it says "made in the USA", don't assume it was.

http://m.tuaw.com/2012/01/22/why-apples ... assembled/

[Skykid]

I'm just going to repeat what GaijinPunch is saying. Drives aren't reliable. Data that is kept only in one location will eventually be lost. Sure, 9/10 people might not have lost critical data to a storage failure, but do you want risk being the 1/10 that have?

Already have been. Thanks Sony.

I learned my lesson, but I'm liking these tips nonetheless.

[cools]

What VAIO are you cursing BTW? My current Z still astonishes me at the tech inside.

[Skykid]

Oh it's ancient history now. My first laptop almost fifteen years ago. Ruined me good and proper.

[cools]

Ahh fair enough. All for a good Sony bash but it has to be selective

[brentsg]

I haven't studied recently, but if you buy the 256GB and above varieties then you'll usually get top of the line Samsung PCIe based SSDs that are really great. If you get 128GB then you play roulette that you might get craptastic Toshiba or maybe get lucky with Samsung.

The toshiba is fine, just slower.

Edit: Another great trick with Apple is to buy from the online refurb store. The stuff will look (and smell!) brand new but come in a plain white box with the same warranty as new. Usually it's a 15% discount.

[brentsg]

I've restored whole drives with it where I've not been bothered to take a physical backup when reinstalling. An overnight job, but flawless.

Can't sing it's praises highly enough. Screw managing backups. Keep yourself a copy of everything critical (cloud services could disappear as well - you always need two physically seperate backup), and let Crashplan handle the offsite part.

I'm down with the Crashplan praise too. I bought a 4 year plan and have restored a 1GB drive from it with no problems.

[Ed Oscuro]

My understanding of SSDs is that they had a certain amount of writes guaranteed and then anything else is hit-and-miss, but like Ed said it has its pros too. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

If I had the choice, I'd move exclusively to SSDs - there's no benefit here from combining technologies.

But yes, I totally agree with the important backup suggestions made.

Backups don't have to be fancy. Just exercise a bit of diligence in having an organized file structure, and everything else is a simple drag-and-drop operation.

BTW, there are many different types of SSDs. In reading a bit more for up-to-date info on this topic, I ran across this article that claims that the traditional "tiers" of flash types are becoming obsolete as the technology matures and the market starts to work like CPU manufacture with binned parts.

Overall, the main thing I'd pay attention to is the period of warranty coverage. And it's a rare thing to find SSDs that have fewer than a 3 year coverage period. There's lots of SSDs with 5 year warranties, and some even have been given 10 year warranties to highlight that these things can last a damn long time under light usage.

Realistically, unless you are driving HUGE amounts of random writes (I don't mean downloading a movie; probably amongst "normal users" this would be something like maintaining a huge file database which changes a lot, or having an internet browser that you use hundreds of tabs on) you probably don't have to worry about the warranty period much at all. If anything fails it'll probably be the stuff that provides juice to the chips, as usual.

[brentsg]

People aren't going to wear out a consumer SSD unless they're doing something they know will fail it. There's nothing to worry about in that regard, so failure would be the normal run of the mill failure. It wouldn't be due to write cycles.

But yes, always backup your stuff. Even if you feel safe with a RAID 1 or whatever, you're not.

[Stormwatch]

Think of it this way: if you don't have a backup in multiple physical locations, you don't have a backup.

[Ed Oscuro]

Think of it this way: if you don't have a backup in multiple physical locations, you don't have a backup.

This sounds nice, but that's an extra level of paranoia beyond what most people need, and having things in multiple locations comes with new problems, especially if you like your privacy.

Realistically, most peoples' options for "off-site backup" involve putting drives in distant relatives' house, or trusting The Cloud. I would not trust or depend on either.

When it comes to this quandary, I give security (and it does come with cost-effectiveness) a bit more shrift than trying to pursue physical integrity to the extreme.

[brentsg]

Think of it this way: if you don't have a backup in multiple physical locations, you don't have a backup.

This sounds nice, but that's an extra level of paranoia beyond what most people need, and having things in multiple locations comes with new problems, especially if you like your privacy.

You don't need an offsite backup at all until your house burns down or your computer gets stolen. I've personally watched friends go through both scenarios, and it'd be a tough way to lose all the photos and videos of the kids growing up.

It all depends on what data you're trying to preserve. I also like how you cited paranoia for the folks using offsite backup, then mentioned that you fear for your privacy. There are plenty of ways to encrypt your offsite data with heavy encryption with only you holding the key.

[Skykid]

Edit: Another great trick with Apple is to buy from the online refurb store. The stuff will look (and smell!) brand new but come in a plain white box with the same warranty as new. Usually it's a 15% discount.

There's always a stigma attached to refurbished anything that makes me avoid it. But 15% off of $1300 isn't bad. Tell me more!