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Notebook Storage SSDs and HDs Compared
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jul 15, 2008 05:27 PM
from the now-what-would-you-pay dept.
from the now-what-would-you-pay dept.
The Raindog sends us a particularly timely showdown article comparing seven 2.5" mobile hard drives, four of them HDs and three SSDs, across a wide range of application, file-copy, power-consumption, and noise-level tests. Tom's Hardware was recently forced to issue a correction to a claim, which we discussed here, that SSDs aren't actually much more power-thrifty than HDs. The Tech Report's in-depth comparison provides some data points on the question of whether solid-state storage is ready to supplant traditional mechanical hard drives, but notes that the price disparity is still substantial.
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Are SSDs Really More Power Efficient? 222 comments
Bakasama writes "Tom's Hardware compared the power performance of several available SSD cards with a Rotating HDD that was chosen specifically for its poor power efficiency.
The results seem to fly in the face of current wisdom.
'Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be the future of performance hard drives, and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. We are no exception, as we have been publishing many articles on flash-based SSDs during the last few months, emphasizing the performance gains and the potential power savings brought by flash memory. And there is nothing wrong with this, since SLC flash SSDs easily outperform conventional hard drives today (SLC = single level cell). However, we have discovered that the power savings aren't there: in fact, battery runtimes actually decrease if you use a flash SSD.'"
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It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair enough, but is this particularly relevant to the market? Sure, it would be nice, but would you rather pay a couple of hundred quid or just look after the computer in the first place?
The way I see it is that geeks would replace their laptop early enough that the HD will probably last long enough and that casual users won't want the extra expense. I think to be honest, the performance difference is the only real advantage and as soon as the prices come down, I'm getting one!
Parent
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Interesting)
flash based drives simplify mil spec laptops, though. imagine having to design a laptop with a conventional HDD knowing that it has to survive being thrown into the back of a jeep carelessly, or be able to still work after a soldier pile dived on top of it trying to avoid machine gun fire, or even expected to still work if it had taken a pretty big shock as a result of nearby artillery or grenade blasts.
they used to have really good shock absorbing cages to protect the drive...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Take a peek at these: http://www.amrel.com/federal_military_computer/rocky_patriot_rugged_notebook.html [amrel.com]
This isn't even going into the fire systems equipment that is ruggedized.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really a matter of looking after the computer in the first place. There is demand for a rugged computer that can be manhandled without it breaking apart. When I come home I want to toss my computer on my desk like I do with my keys and wallet. After I've surfed a while I want to toss my computer on the coffee table like I do with magazines. The whole "holy laptop" approach where you have to carry it around on a silk cushion and press the keys one at a time so as not to hurt its feelings is the reason I've never bothered buying one.
Parent
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, there are degrees of ruggedness between carrying it on a pillow and beating the shit out of it. I've had a laptop at my side pretty much constantly for upwards of 10 years now. At no time have I ever treated it as anything other than a tool. I don't baby my tools. I don't coo to it wistfully at the end of the day. I don't 'press the keys one at a time'. I also don't fling it across the house - but I don't do that to my socket wrenches either.
In all those 10 years of laptop lugging, I have never required any repairs or replacement due to mishaps. If you truly haven't bought a laptop because you picture them as fragile, I highly recommend you pick one up and give it a try. There is something to be said for carrying around a fully functional workstation wherever you go. Just remember that there is a continuum between 'holy laptop' and 'throw it across the room' - it's not a quantum step.
Parent
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never had to repair anything due to mishaps, and I treat my laptop with reasonable care. However, I have had to replace two laptop hard drives on three occasions due to drive failures in the last ten years. Actually, make that two in the past five years, and none prior to that. One was an acoustic failure (loud, whining drive, but worked perfectly for the better part of a year in that state before I bothered to get it replaced). The other one... I put the machine to sleep, woke it up a minute later, and the drive wouldn't spin up, making a click-of-death "can't find track zero" noise. My suspicion is that it was a failure of the head due to abrasion as it drags across the ramp when parking.
Mechanical failures don't just happen to people who abuse their machines. Yes, they happen much more frequently to people who treat their machines like excrement, but they also happen randomly for no apparent reason... usually due to flaws in the mechanical design. Some drives have bad ramps that put too much stress on the heads when they park. Some drives have bearings that eventually start to leak oil all over the disk surface. And so on. I'd be much happier if I never had to deal with a Winchester drive again... particularly in laptops.
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Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Funny)
I dropped my fujitsu laptop multiple times this year and it styiklkl worklsd fklaweklersdsdklerty
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Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was babysitting my mother's new puppy a few months back.
I was happily IRC:ing away from the couch, when I heard the puppy standing by the door.
For those of you that don't know, the thing about puppies is that they do prefer to pee outside, but their bladder system isn't really that good, so when they decide they want to go out, you only have a few seconds to avoid an accident.
So, I quickly put my laptop on the table, throw my headset away, and start to quickly move towards the door. Unfortunately, I didn't really put the computer down very good - half of it was hanging outside the table. As I tried to move past it, my knee touched it, and that was enough to throw the computer of the table, letting it fall for 4-5 decimeters before it hit the floor. It gave up a faint "peeep!" before it died.
My hard drive only kindof worked after that - booting was fine, but there were lots of broken clusters that sent the computer into a (seemingly) infinite loop, forcing the computer to use all CPU resources waiting for the hard drive, in effect freezing it. Slowly but surely, more and more clusters broke down, more and more files got damaged, until I finally bought a new drive. Trust me - at that point, I really, really wanted to buy a SSD.
Oh well, at least the puppy got out in time...
Parent
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:4, Informative)
HDDs are really not the main thing to worry about when a laptop is dropped or damaged. Screens are much more expensive than HDs, and much harder to replace. Now, data on HDDs is another story, potentially very valuable or important and impossible to replace, but it can be backed up.
Also, for the same price as a single SSD you could buy literally dozens of HDDs with more than double the storage as the SSD, so in terms of price, even if you pretend SSDs are super reliable and don't even need backup they are still more expensive than dealing with the unreliability of HDs. Obviously, it is much more convient when your hardware doesn't fail, even if it can be replaced fairly easily and cheaply, with minimal data loss, but HDDs are only one compontent of several that can be damaged and make your computer unusable, and with their incredibly limited storage SSDs are much more inconvient. You won't lose your data even if the thing is destroyed, because it won't fit on there in the first place.
Obviously, SSDs have some places where they excel, but at current prices and storage levels they are way over-hyped and over-used. The eee is an especially glaring example of this, putting a ridiculously high end component into a low end machine, forcing a incredibly low amount of storage.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to be too picky o
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In my experience, it's not so much shock as it is heat that kills the drive. When you encase a high-performance hard drive in a cheap plastic coffin, it can't withstand much sustained usage. Now if only laptop makers would turn that drive caddy into a semi-decent heatsink, things would probably be different.
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Of the two times I've seen a laptop dropped (to the point of something breaking), the screen broke, not the hard drive.
SSD's do nothing for this.
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Take the hard drive out of the broken screen unit and put it in a new unit.
Sixty seconds later you are back in business.
The cost of the hardware is immaterial compared to the contents on the drive.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
For me the selling points is noise. Most of the time whatever machines I'm near are plugged in, but having a nearly silent media pc in the living room, having a silent instant-on music player in the bedroom, and having a whir-less office would increase my happiness for many hours out of the day.
Power savings would be pretty nice, too, but much less often.
Parent
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On warm sea-level areas (such as a caribbean beach), high RPM harddrives tend to fail rather quickly. SSDs would operate just fine.
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but if you drop them enough don't all the bits fall out?
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I just dropped a new 160 gb laptop and I lost all the data. I-m very interested in these new SSD drives.
Re:How can a 32gb Thumb Drive (Score:5, Informative)
You're missing SLC vs. MLC and high-performance controllers.
Parent
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And high quality tested parts. At least that was what I read in an article by someone that checked if the SSD drives were ready for deployment in his server farm. These guys like to do rigorous testing and good information, at least the professional ones.
Don't forget that these controllers are brand spanking new, and they are not in their 1000th revision like the controllers used on the hard drives. I'm really looking forward to the Intel designed drives. I presume that they will use their own controllers -
Re:How can a 32gb Thumb Drive (Score:5, Informative)
The thumb drive will die young if you use it as a hard drive, they're typically only designed for 10-15k write cycles (per cell). They also use MLC cells, which store two bits each - that doubles the capacity, but quadruples the error rate. Errors are usually corrected via parity/ECC, but obviously if you have more errors, you're more likely to exceed the ECC threshold.
There's also the issue with performance. A thumb drive might get 10-15mb/sec on a good day, 20 if you pay way too much money for a "dual channel" unit. Hard drives are expected to deliver 40mb/sec minimum these days, else your apps will take forever to load.
If you really want to be a wacko, you could try RAID-0 across a bunch of thumb drives. You'll get the performance back, but good god you're playing with fire.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And how many users will write over 320 terrabytes to their hard drive during it's lifetime? That's 190 days of continuous writing at 20MByte/sec. I wish people would stop citing write cycle limits, I have yet to hear from anyone who's actually failed a drive this way.
It's called... wear leveling algorithms.
The future is actually probably going to be a hybrid of SLC and MLC. I read a paper recently on this. They got about the same performance as SLC only, using only a small amount of SLC.
How about a link? (Score:5, Informative)
I think someone forgot a critical link... try this for the Tech Report article:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079 [techreport.com]
Re:How about a link? (Score:4, Funny)
I think someone forgot a critical link...
I think someone forgot they're on /.
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Re:How about a link? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Obviously the goggles do work (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody reads them anyway, so apparently the editors have decided not to bother including links anymore.
What about recovery? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about recovery? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've read that the algorithms used in SSD's are usually proprietary. The problem with SSD's is that they DIDN'T fix the wear leveling problem. It exists, just a lot slower now due to the algorithms referenced above. If my drive dies, I'll have to find a service that can recover my files, but they will have to be certified in samsung, seagate, white label, etc. I really feel uncomfortable with that idea.
You could just backup your files...
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Re:What about recovery? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What about recovery? (Score:4, Insightful)
The larger the drive, the more space to spread the wear.
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> Try this experiment: Get a normal thumb drive (a high quality brand so you know it has good wear levelling), and put run mkswap and swapon on it, and just run your system for a few hours.
For me it would do nothing. My swap is nearly never used except for hibernation.
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Nah, about ten thousand, and - as far as I know - that's the guaranteed number of write cycles. And the Samsung drive reviewed uses 64 GB of single bit memory, so it's not old. What it is is expensive. Both of these things are in the freakin' article by the way (and they seem to be correct if I must believe my internet sources).
SLC vs. MLC flash (Score:3, Informative)
I thought modern, high density flash memory had only a ~3000 cycle life. The old, single bit/gate memory was good for 100,000 write cycles, but I think those parts topped out at a few megabytes.
Single-level-cell NAND flash is still produced, for use in the faster, (slightly) more expensive drives with longer warranties. And multi-level-cell NAND flash is usually guaranteed for 10,000 writes, not 3,000. And the number quoted on the data sheet is the minimum longevity for each sector; more writes than that are possible. The CF controller doesn't retire a sector until it starts returning too many just-barely-correctable errors.
Practical observations (Score:3, Insightful)
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Reliability = Good, Speed = Good, Space = Awful , Cost = Not this decade, Charlie Brown.
And for all those saying "no moving parts - what if I drop my laptop?" - If you drop your lappy hard enough to break a modern drive, you'll probably be shopping for a replacement. Unlike those "tests", laptops don't land flat and square.
(queue all the "but I dropped my laptop and the only thing that broke was the hard drive" posts)
Re:Practical observations (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Us Army guys had one of those in Iraq too - we called it the "Whore"-Drive. I destroyed my laptop drive there, but it was mainly intentional. I was trying to connect it to the crappy wireless we had, and I got so frustrated that I punch my laptop. Repeatedly. The HD didn't like that.
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I got so frustrated that I punch my laptop
Never punch inanimate objects. You cannot win. Something will probably break, and both options are bad. I found this out when I got cross and punched a monitor. It was a while ago, so it was a CRT.
I never punched a computer again.
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I dropped my laptop once - actually, it kind of cartwheeled up into the air as I pulled it out of my backpack, then crashed on the ground.
No my hard drive didn't break - but it landed square on the end with the wireless card sticking out of it, and crushed the card. Fortunately the rest of it was fine.
In fact, I've never had a notebook drive die in any way (though maybe by saying so I've jinxed myself). Lots of desktop drives have died on me though...and I never dropped any of those.
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Maybe you need a modern laptop hard drive [akihabaranews.com]
All those design points are incongruous (Score:4, Interesting)
I would love an SSD for r/w performance that blows a mechanical drive out of the water.
I would love an SSD that doesn't use much power.
I would love an SSD that's shockproof.
I would love an SSD that runs cool.
I would love an SSD that's silent.
I would love an SSD that roughly the same price performance of a mechanical drive.
The problem is, it can't be all of those things. It can't even be most of those things. So pick the ones you need.
The best thing since the MOUSE (Score:4, Insightful)
SSDs are the best thing to happen to PCs since the invention of the mouse.
I have had a MemoRight GT for 3 months now, and my laptop feels amazing. I am disappointed Tom didn't include one in his review.
Because the seek speed is 40x + than an HDD, data access is blazing fast on even the cheaper SSDs. The hangup is in the slow read/write speeds and problems with random access. MemoRight GT is the first SSD I saw that was faster than HDDs in all of these areas, and hence it not only outperforms I/O wise, you get the full benefit of fast access... And this will make your PC feel 4x faster.
Everything becomes faster. Web pages load faster. Email arrives faster. Windows moves faster. No more HDD cache writing lag or "what is my HDD doing" moments.
I don't care that much for battery life, though I am sure some do. As Tom concludes, that is pretty much a spec you just need to look out for, so if you want it, look for a drive that has it.
What I do love though is the silence. Anyone who has gone through an HDD failure is sensitive to HDD sounds probably more than they know, or would like.
SSDs make no sound, and there are no strange vibrations.
I spent close to 2K on the drive, but it was worth every penny. If I buy a new SSD when the 3rd generation drives arrive, my Memoright will still always have a place in one of my notebooks.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, they're not very _big_. 32 Gig for a hard drive is fairly pitiful these days: the hard drives stacked against SSD in Tom's Hardware's article were typically 10 times the disk size. So our soldier boy in the story above, where they had 200 movies they lost in an attack on their campsite, would have had to have 10 times as many drives. The power savings and stability are great for small scenarios and high availability resources, such as laptop drives or small, encrypted filesystems. But for ov