bitflipper
Thanks for reporting back, pharoh. So often posters make an announcement and never return. And we don't get that many long-term reports from SSD users.
 
It's true that SSDs have a short lifespan compared to conventional drives, because you can only write to them so many times before they become unreliable. Even before they start misbehaving they start losing storage capacity as unusable sectors are gradually mapped out. The newer ones delay this by spreading the writes out over the whole matrix so that the cells age uniformly. But if you were using one for your C: drive and the virtual memory swap device was located there (as it is by default), then you were unknowingly writing to that SSD far more often than you realized. It's not surprising that it would "wear out" quickly in that role.
 
I do not currently use SSDs, but probably will in the near future. However, they will be treated as write-once devices and be used solely for sample libraries, and will be mirrored to a conventional hard drive. 

I imagined that windows was still writing to the drive but I didn't know about memory swaps.
 
My machine had 16 gigs of memory. I was using an EVO 840 at first and then went to and EVO 850. Might have been an 840 Pro in the middle, I forget. But when I cloned them I think they cloned the defects. It even cloned the drives write specs as reported in Samsung Magician, if I am not wrong.
 
Interesting idea about using them for sample library. I don't really use sample playback much, but I might in the future.  Plus I could put my huge MP3 (85,000 tunes) on them. Thanks for the idea because I have three of these expensive things all 500 gigs that I didn't plan to use anymore. The idea is to use them for lookup only, not writing. If they fail no big deal. Of course a "lookup only" drive is very easy to keep backed up.  Will keep this in mind.
 
BTW, I am happy to hear if someone else has good luck with these, it very well could have been some other thing causing my problem. In fact it is a safe assumption it was actually caused by CIA spying on my sonar projects!
 
 

My experience has been the opposite of the OP. I use Intel drives and (knock on wood) they have been great. If you look at the failure rate, SSD's are no worse than spinners, and they are way faster. I think it's important to have a computer that recognizes them and blocks certain disk activity like defragging.
 
I'm not a computer guy but I deal with a little shop of deranged geeks instead of a big box store. They tell me what's best and I install it. When I switched over to SSD's they told me my motherboard would be obsolete before the drives failed.

After reading this post, I decided to do some looking around for the average lifespan of a SSD drive.  The newer ones are getting better with life span.
 
http://betanews.com/2014/12/05/modern-ssds-can-last-a-lifetime/
 
 

pharohoknaughty
I imagined that windows was still writing to the drive but I didn't know about memory swaps.

Yeah one of the first things magician wants to do if you use the optimizer (which is quite good now IMHO) is reduce the size of your windows paging file.

I have 24gb of RAM, so my usage doesn't generally trigger paging. I also have a very minimal size paging file on my HDD and not on my SSD.

Interesting timing on this, as I was just looking at Samsung prices yesterday...
 
Windows Indexer is another thing to keep off an SSD. There is a lot of system setup required to use them for their intended purpose. I have read some articles that have hinted that heat is a primary performance issue, as SSD's do get hot. This makes me leery of laptop usage (where they make the most sense), since laptops run hot to begin with and "putting a fan on it" won't work. Never tried such a thing, and the only BSOD I get is a conflict of IE/Flash/Realtek drivers... enough YouTube browsing in the right phase of the moon will BSOD me. Same routine, audio blip, and BSOD 10s later.
 
I got a Patriot Wildfire 240GB over 4 years ago and it is still kicking. It does not like massive read/writes (such as unpacking/installing Dim Pro), and never did even when I first bought it. I did rebuild this machine from scratch in July 2015, and wiped/formatted it fully before re-install. Firmware updates have a narrow window after the OS is laid down before Patriot's utility can no longer see the drive (issue with Patriot specifically), and I did reload a clone after the rebuild just to test it out (also required a full reformat to execute with Macrium Reflect). Benchmarks has dropped about 10% over time (I do these on initial builds), but that is expected.
 
I am wondering if cloning could have been an issue as you suggested. I have always used "opportunities" for rebuilds to start from scratch to purge the registry and all associated garbage. Typically data files only will make it back onto the rebuild, since I also worry for "cloning a flaw" for no reason.
 
Did you clone the SSD to the HDD when you switched back to an HDD?

mettelus
 
 
Did you clone the SSD to the HDD when you switched back to an HDD?

Going from scratch.  New MOBO(ASUS Sabertooth Mark 1), Boot drive (WD Blue) and memory. New copy of Windows (this time ver 10).  Going to have a clean registry again.
 
Man is it a pain to track down all of those licenses and downloads. I have way too many softwares. But it has to happen every couple years, in my experience.
 
Is your logo an Avanti convertible? Ray Loewy never left well enough alone.
 
 
 
 
 

If you still have the other drives, it might be worth the experiment to make a backup image onto a third drive of the WD Blue once you are up and running, and put that on an SSD with the WD Blue unplugged. If you try that be sure to format both partitions on the SSD first so the restore has no competing files.
 
Definitely keep a file of the installation procedure, software, serial numbers, the who nine yards.
 
The car is a '71 mustang. I think it may be the last one made that year as it carries the panels that were more predominant in the '72/'73s, but even contacting Ford didn't yield much.