What can I use spare SSDs for?
Community Forums/General Help/What can I use spare SSDs for?
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| I have two spare OCZ Agility 3 SSDs, 120GB each. One was faulty, and has been replaced by OCZ, so it's brand new. The other is about 18 months old. They've both been replaced by Samsung SSDs. Seems a shame to leave them in my "crypt of crap" with all the other computer bits I have no use for, so maybe I could use them, but as what? I thought about maybe using them (or one of them) for windows virtual memory etc, but given that my main hard drive is a faster SSD (Samsung EVO) and I have 32GB RAM anyway, is there really any point? It might actually slow things down... right? Last resort, flog them on eBay (they aren't worth a lot). |
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| As you say, no point at all with 32GB. Not got any other hardware that would benefit from a hard drive upgrade? |
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| By all means flog them, but avoid feeBay, unless you don't want your money until 3 weeks after the sale. :/ |
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| Depending on your motherboard's capabilities: Some of them have an option where you can assign an SSD drive as an automagic cache for a specific mechanical HDD, speeding up its throughput for frequently accessed files. (Apple calls it 'fusion', different motherboard manufacturers have other marketing-speak for the same feature) |
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| And oh -- if you ARE planning to sell them: Keep in mind that due to the way SSD's automatically re-allocate sectors and move data around behind the scenes, there is currently NO way to guarantee that all your existing data is actually gone permanently, regardless of what kind of government-grade wipe utilities you use. There may still be segments remaining on unallocated blocks behind the scenes that can rear their heads later. |
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| You should be able to use them as external drives for backups. I have several standard hard drives, not in cases, I use for external storage with a USB to SATA adapter cable. Just a thought. |
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| @xlsior- surely if you fill it to capacity with garbage, it doesn't have space to keep your deleted data? |
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| I did think about having them in my development PC and setting up RAID1. But there are two problems with that. First, I think I read somewhere that you can't have specific drives in a RAID array - it's all or none. I didn't read up on it very much so that might be a crock. Second, I've already had one OCZ SSD fail on me, so they might not be the best choice for a backup medium. |
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| John: Yes, it does. SSD's have a good chunk of 'hidden' space -- e.g. a 128GB drive can easily have another 32GB or so squirreled away hidden from the user, which is being used for optimization, wear leveling, error correction, garbage collection and redundancy purposes. (As a matter of fact: HEre's an article from yesterday, with Intel announcing that they will be coming out with a new 'overclock' ability for SSDs to be rolled out in the coming months, which would allow end users or OEMs to re-allocate those hidden blocks and choose between speed and reliability: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9242007/Intel_wants_to_help_gamers_others_overclock_their_SSDs ) At this point in time those hidden blocks are only accessible by the on-drive controller, and not by the OS / user side of the equation. That's the problem: the controller does a bunch of behind-the-scenes magic Even if you force rewrite the 128GB a couple of times, you have no guarantee that it actually passed over every single block on the drive and didn't get redirected to do the same chunk a number of times instead. Just because the OS receives the instruction to write data -x- to sectors ABC on the drive, doesn't mean that's what the SSD actually does. the controller chip will do the wear-leveling and continuoously remap where those sectors actually point to, so even though you write a bunch of times, it doesn't necessarily use the SAME portion of the drive. Here's a research paper with more info: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/Fast2011SecErase.pdf Some interesting bits: "All single-file overwrite sanitazion protocols failed - between 4% and 75% of the files' contents remained on the SATA SSDs" "Mac OS X Secure Erase trash: 67%" Even the DoD repeated overwrites left not insignificant porttions of files recoverable. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9211519/Can_data_stored_on_an_SSD_be_secured_ (I mean, it's /unlikely/ that someone could easily recover your data, but there are absolutely no guarantees) |
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| Keep in mind: the TRIM protocols don't work in a RAID setup, which means that the performance of the drives will degrade dramatically over time vs. being used in a typical single-drive configuration |
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