Originally Posted by rkpatt
Are these as reliable as HDDs for file storage (I presume not but don't really know) ? -Thanks
SSD reliability is a double edged sword.
They have no moving parts, which is especially significant in a laptop. Most laptops for a while have had something called a sudden motion sensor, which parks the head on the hard drive when it senses shocks and other things, but it's not perfect and the knocks/bumps a laptop is susceptible too can be deadly for rotating media. I would say that head crashes are not common these days, but they can be catastrophic when they do happen-especially with the data density on a 500gb+ 2.5" drive.
At the same time, the NANDs in an SSD are rated for a finite number of read/write cycles. They are engineered for the application. As an example, it's somewhat common in obsolete/vintage computers to use a Compact Flash or SD-card based adapter to replace things like laptop IDE drives, which are getting scarce, or even more exotic things like SCSI. I ONLY consider this a solution for lightly-used computers where a proper drive is very difficult to find("real" SSDs are doable for most IDE applications for about the same cost, while I keep stashes of things like 2.5" SCSI drives on hand) as that type of media is mostly designed to be written to sequentially, read from, and then erased. Computers, especially those with some form of virtual RAM, are constantly reading and writing to the disk. "Real" SSDs(this Kingston falls in that category) are designed for the kind of read/write beating that a computer drive gets.
Aside from that, one of the big things a higher end SSD gets you is better longevity in terms of read/write. I've installed a handful of Samsung EVO 860s, which I consider something of a benchmark in both quality and performance for consumer level SSDs. These drives are rated for a total lifetime write capacity 600x the capacity, which translates to a really, really long time for most folks. I don't know what these Kingstons are rated, but I'd be shocked if it's less than 200x the capacity, and probably more like 300x.
Modern SSDs are "smart" enough to use things like "wear leveling" to make sure that the individual NAND cells are getting written to and read from evenly.
Also, after installing you should enable TRIM. This has to do with how the OS handles actually deleting files from the SSD(on a platter drive, when data is "deleted" it normally is just marked by the drive controller as being deleted and then the drive overwrites it when it needs the space-SSDs are a bit more complicated). Proper use of TRIM, which happens behind the scenes and is invisible most of the time, both keeps up the performance and reduces wear on the drive. I'm not sure what's needed to enable it on Windows. On recent versions of Mac OS(I think 10.11 and newer) you just need to go into Terminal and type "sudo trimforce enable"(older versions require the use of a 3rd party tool).
In any case, the one big downside of SSDs is that if they do die, data recovery can be SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult than with a platter hard drive. Still, the old rules continue to apply-keep a backup of your data! SSDs are a lot more reliable than floppy disks, CD-Rs, and really pretty much any other type of removable media. I still like a big external platter drive that plugs into a USB port for backup.
