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Don't think you're safe because you do backups, either. You need to verify that the backups will work when you need them by periodically restoring a selected subset of the files to a different drive or folder and then comparing them to the originals. This should be done at least once every three months.
In business, the rule we followed was "An unverified backup is a non-existent backup" which meant an automatic failure of our SLA to management.
No, not all new SSDs are triple or quad stacked. As was mentioned by kenshaw QLC drives are slower. They still market performance drives. As for Samsung, the branding of the drive tells you exactly what type it is. For now, the "QVO" lineup is the ONLY product line with QLC. The Samsung EVO line uses TLC. However the Pro lineup uses MLC, which is why the Pro lineup costs so much. So dual layers are still being made.
On the 860 EVO line, Samsung offers a warranty of either 5 years or a set number of TB written. The amount of TB covered varies by drive size. It is 600 for the 1TB, 1200 for the 2TB, and 2400 for the 4TB. Which is basically 600 TBW for each TB size the drive is. That is why the 4TB model can boast a longer life cycle, because the memory is designed to shift the data evenly around all of the cells, and thus the 4TB drive has more cells for this process. Kind of simple actually. BUT this is within the EVO lineup. This does not apply to the QVO line.
You can see the difference in the warranty for the QVO line. The QVO lineup's warranty is only for 3 years instead of 5. And for each TB capacity, it only covers 360. So the 4TB model warranty caps at 1440 TBW. So you can see just how dramatic of an impact going from 3 bits per cell to 4 bits per cell is. It is such a big difference that I would hesitate.
Meanwhile the Pro lineup with its dual layer stacking goes in the opposite direction. It is 5 years again, but the TBW is 1200 for each TB. So a 4TB Pro offers 4800 TBW.
Obviously the warranty is just a warranty, not an absolute for how the drive will last in your computer. But it gives a hint to the impact of each form. The EVO line is the most popular.
As for backups, I use external drives for backups, so that never was a question IMO.
Thanks for all your helpful responses.
Dell Tech Support contacted my computer guy again and informed him that with a BIOS update my memory could be expanded to 12GB (but no more), so we went ahead and did that in addition to upgrading my main drive. Not a perfect solution but it should tide me over for the time being. Now I have a new 1TB SSD drive as well as 12GB RAM. (And for the record, even with all my files and my OS copied over, I still have 499GB free on my new drive, so at least I have that going for me.)
As a test on my "new" system, I opened Studio and loaded up a huge urban crowd scene that I had created some time back. The old config would take (I'm not kidding you) nine minutes just to load up the scene... and then I would get an hour glass every time I clicked to make any changes in the scene.. My new configuration loaded the same file in only three, and my computer is far less sluggish when responding to new commands..
So even though technically my renders won't go any faster, at least my workflow has been sped up dramatically.
We use tapes for backups at the datacenter, and we run them on every drive every day. LTO drives are expensive except compared to the other hardware in our datacenter ($2k for the rack, plus about $3k for the drives themselves (2 per rack) ) and $85 IIRC per tape (stores 12 Tb). Those damn tapes though. 12 Tb sounds like a lot but some of our customers create 100Tb of data per week. So just that one storage server goes through almost 10 of them a week. We get cases of those things every month.
You might get the old LTO versions (4 or below pretty cheap on eBay or the like I haven't looked but we got rid of all our LTO 7's when the LTO 8's came out.
IIRC US financial institutions have to obey ISO 27000 which basically forces them to do tape back ups.
No, you're supposed to check the logs files the backup creates not wait X weeeks or months to test that the backup works. We used scripts to search for warnings & errors in the backup logs. That's something that Windows hides a lot from end users but the capability is there.
Ok, thanks for the explanation. Your comments are very interesting.
Honestly I doubt many people will ever notice the slower write speed of QLC. If you're routinely saturating a 6 Gb/s SATA connection or a x4 PCIE 3 one you're pushing a lot of data for consumer grade HW. My concern is that for years people, myself included, told people to use SSD's as scratch drives and as the home of the Windows swap file. Both those use cases can result in lots and lots of writes which could have a real impact with QLC.
I suppose this will sound like a weird suggestion but I think if you have a McAfee or Norton antivirus product, you should get rid of it. It has been my experience that they slow computers down much more than any computer virus. And the "Windows Defender" software that was all the rage in the Windows 7 era is probably just as good at being security software without killing the computer. Some of those name brands just fill up all available memory and keep reading and writing data all the time. And it's not like they're going to detect any viruses. The only safe practice is to be careful about what you download or click on.
It's been my experience that I've never been in a fatal automobile accident. Therefore, insurance is overrated!
So I actually do have a couple backups though they have to be updated. What I generally tend to do is just copy over my library and call it good. I always just assumed that the backups would work. How should I go about testing my backups? They are protables, can I plug them into the computer and attempt to load my assets from the backup drives?
I use Windows Defender as I've had bad experience with Norton products. McAfee I've not tried since early Windows days though.
You can bet Microsoft knows more about stopping viruses and the like via Windows in
That's ridiculous as a Windows Defender isn't free as Windows 10 is not free and is of better quality than the products you are trying to pressure people into paying more money for.
Windows Defender is fine for 99+% of people and uses. Paying for Norton is pretty much always a terrible idea. The first diagnostic step for a large swath of compute problems is "uninstall Norton." Simply turning it off won't always work as the things has something like 2 dozen services running in the background and it has a terrible reputation about actually shutting them all down when told to.
In todays world an AV might save you if you spend a lot of time on very sketchy sites and anti-malware will save you even more frequently. However practicing proper care in using your system will save you from a lot more. Make sure your email client doesn't download attachments till you say so and never DL any attachment you weren't expecting. As a matter of fact never even open an email from someone you don't know. If you get an email seemingly from your bank, CC company etc. that says something bad is happening do not follow the link in the email. Log in to the site yourself (that will mostly protect you from the more basic phishing).
Erm, if I was in a fatal accident I don't think I'd care whether I had insurance or not.
Well, I could be in a fatal accident and still be alive having to worry about how to pay for the fines, and expenses of someone else who did die in the accident.
But truthfully, as soon as I posted my original response I KNEW someone would catch my sloppy wording, so I had 24 hours to think of a reply.
A good backup program has an option for verifying the files during or after backup, otherwise you can use a compare program like DeltaWalker after copy. It's actually very rare though that files get corrupted during a simple copy unless there are problems with the system - I've made hundreds of large disk images with byte for byte comparison om several PCs and have never had any errors except once where a RAM stick had gone bad. In general, once verified the files on a HDD do not change or corrupt unless the disk is going physically bad, like getting bad sectors.
Can an SSD be broken? I have a laptop upon which DAZ Studio refuses to run. It had a small (120 GB) SSD in it and Windows 10.
One "quirk" that arises involves the render settings pane. Entering the "values" in that pane, eg. width of render 2048 pixels is frozen at 448 or something.
I changed the SSD back to Windows 7 which I kinda like, for a shrinking number of reasons but hey. Same result pretty much.
Its possible. Download and install Crystal Disk Info and run it - it will examine the drive logs (the S.M.A.R.T. data) and report the condition. I have a 512 GB SSD as my system drive that's been powered on for six and a quarter years (55,002 hours) and has had 7,446 GB written to it over that time frame that is still running strong.
...that's basically the plan I have for both the Boot and "Daz Library" SSDs I am changing over to. The HDDs will be used primarily for storage (the old boot HDD for swap and temp files as well).
I would second this suggestion. I also do this with a different piece of software, and once found the backup corrupted by random single bytes here and there, also eventually tracked down to a previously good stick of RAM that went bad. Had I not been verifying the backups, I would have been silently been damaging more and more files probably for years. Given the extreme number of files on today's systems I would likely not have noticed for a while and maybe never solved it, and who knows what all I would have lost or how I could have recovered the unkown damage from it if at all even if I had figured out what was happening years later.
Back in the day - sometime in early 2000 - we ran into situations where the backups to DLT-7000 drives went clean and error-free. And then we'd get unrecovrable read errors trying to restore the files. We never had an instance of this once we migrated to an IBM 3584 library with LTO drives. That never stopped us from running test restores though.