HyperDrive COLORSPACE + SSD or SATA?

I want to buy a HyperDrive Colorsspace casing but unsure of the drive

1. I recently chatted with HyperDrive people and they do not recommend SSD. Anyone having problem with SDD in their HyperDrive?

2. Is there big difference with battery life for SSD and SATA in the HyperDrive?

3. What is the largest SATA drive you can install?

4. Which WD SATA drive would you recommend?

Thanks.

1. Did they actually say - "Don't use an SSD"? or did they actually say "An SSD will offer no increase in speed, a small increase in battery life, a large increase in cost. We don't think they're worth it"?

2. None that I noticed in real-world use (i.e., I've never timed anything). If there is a difference it's not drastic.

3. Hyperdrive sell them with 1TB drives. Dunno about larger.

4. The cheapest 1TB drive.

An SSD uses 2W, a HDD uses 6W. From my school electronics watts = volts times amps, the battery in the device is 3.7V and 2600mah, which is 9.6 watt hours. Given a battery life of 2 hours that suggests power consumption of 4.5W per hour. I'm almost certain my calculations are incorrect, but the lower battery usage of an SSD should be noticeable. I would only bother if you won't be near power for an extended period - personally I would do backups like this in the evenings if I'm on holiday, or maybe throughout the day at a wedding if I was paranoid - which I'm not.

WD blue or green would be best. Blue is general purpose, green is backup but spins down in 6 seconds if not in use. Should be fine for this application.

Found this...

on DP Review http://www.dpreview.co​m/forums/post/54761718

"Yeah, I just got a Sanho and I too talked with their support people. They said that the power circuit was not designed with SSDs in mind and could eventually cause unreliability. It could also do things like reboot by it self, and other such nastiness. "

Another person on the HyperDrive support discussion stated "Here'a response from Angelo in Technical Support -- It's bad news but it should clear things up

Angelo (HYPERSupport)

Sep 15 09:56

Hi,

The UDMA2 is not compatible with SSDs, it causes system instability for the UDMA2. Only standard 5400 or 7200 rpm drives will work with the UDMA2.

Thanks
Angelo

OTOH, Lensrentals.com comments

"While most other portable storage devices use spinning hard drives to store copied data, we are renting this HyperDrive Colorspace UDMA2 with a 240GB SSD drive. This allows for a much more secure storage option, as there’s no spinning disc in a SSD as there is a hard drive. Basically, SSD drives have a much lower failure rate than a hard drive, so you’ll have one less thing to worry about on your trip."

One sees testimonies on the web from people who successfully use SSD, but we also see testimonials from others who have not had success with the SSD they tried! It seems that some folks tried, and the ColorSpace did not even detect the presence of the SSD. One person reported that his ColorSpace would detect the SSD only 1 out of 4 times. In all, it sounds like a complex issue which prevents Sanho from being able to make a simple blanket statement about compatibility.

Does anyone know what drive interface they've implemented on the device? I haven't really dealt with them in a year or two, so I'm drawing a blank on the names and details, but the SATA interface actually has a few different communication protocol options, and some devices only implement the older versions. Those versions expected spinning platter based drives, which are exceptionally hit and miss with modern solid state drives, and can cause a whole host of headaches if trying to use an SSD under those protocols. Sometimes the drives will refuse to work, sometimes things will be just fine, other times they'll look fine and then you have a total premature drive failure.

Could explain the mixed bag of results.

I don't know much detail about HyperDriver ColorSpace. From the spec and picture, it looks like a portable storage to temporary back up memory cards on location. If so, SSD is actually a much better choice than HDD. For a long term back up and you can store the drive in a safe environment, HDD is a better choice.

Besides performance, the main advantage of SSD is lack of mechanical moving parts. So it can take a lot more physical abuse. The main disadvatnage of SSD is the storage medium (the flash) is no where as reliable as the HDD platter (assuming no mechanical damage). By reliable, I mean data retention here. Megnetic medium is much better than deep sub micro flash cells.

As far as WD brand HDD model, I persoanlly recommend the black version. It gets the highest binning platter for consumer grade drive.