Solid State Drives - Fast, Rugged, and Expensive

Nick Breen writes "Are solid state drives becoming a reality? Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech has written an article concerning the current state of SSD with a comparison between a Samsung 64GB SATA and a Super Talent 32GB SATA. While they showed impressive speed rates when placed against a hard disk drive, the occasional sporadic statistic (and high cost) indicate they're not quite ready for the mainstream. Dell and Alienware have been shipping laptops with SSDs for months now, and Apple may be rolling out one of their own next year. Is the time of the solid-state drive almost at hand? Does anyone have any first-hand, practical experience with SSD?"

Re:you left impractical off the list

[timmarhy]

A little of both.

SSD's have a short life span due to cell memory, and they aren't immune to shocks damaging them. laptop hd's will take all kinds of poundings, only a direct solid hit during a r/w would possibly damage them

Re:Where is this applicable?

[beavis88]

For me personally, the biggest benefit would be silence. My hard drives are easily the loudest part of my machines.

Hopefully an outlier

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a Dell D430 with the SanDisk 32GB SSD and the performance was abysmal. It was so bad that I replaced it with a standard 1.8" drive. Installing Windows itself took 3 times longer! Dell replaced the drive after I reported the problem and still no dice. There seems to be a significant problem with write performance, read performance was decent but not worth the 2-3x cost difference. I can't tell if SSD's just aren't ready yet or if Dell is just really bad at systems integration and testing before product release.

Re:Where is this applicable?

[tlhIngan]

But the re-write times are twice as slow! (ok I can live with that). But the read times are faster...as a home user, WHERE is this going to benefit me? Will I notice a diffence in 'vim file' or playing/streaming music?

Actually, if you do any sort of multitasking, you'll probably notice it's a lot "snappier" (apps load faster, switching apps doesn't seem to take so long, etc). Or if you're a typical home user with decent RAM but still have all the usual crapware loaded, WIndows won't feel so slow. Or you don't defragment your disks and let your disk get horribly fragmented...

The deal with SSDs is that they can manage their peak datarates all the time. With disks, the smaller the I/O transfer, the slower the disk becomes. If you have a disk with a 5ms seek time, you're limited to 20 I/Os per second. If you read maybe 16 sectors each (8kiB), it means your disk throughput is on the order of... 160kiB/sec. Seeks are taking a lot of time compared to the actual time it takes to read the disk.

An SSD has negligible seek time, so reading those 160kiB off an SSD won't take noticably longer than reading 160kiB in one read (the overhead of doing the transaction over the ATA bus is the biggest overhead).

You won't use an SSD if you need high throughput, where you're basically doing huge writes or huge reads (i.e., media center media disks, video capture/production, etc). But a home user that's doing a lot of little random I/O will notice that the entire system feels "snappier" as the I/O is mostly seek-bound, not throughput-bound (small I/O). This applies as time goes on as most people don't defragment their disks (you don't have to, or should, with an SSD, since wear-levelling may still not put it contiguously on the flash media), so even a heavily fragmented disk will still feel fast with an SSD.

Re:Mods, Bad Mods, and Current Moderators

[Anonymous Coward]

The trouble occurs when people decide he's not funny, and mod him down overrated; the overrated mods drop his karma, while the funny mods do nothing to help it.

Give me RAM

[evilviper]

All I have to say is screw NAND. Give me some DDR RAM-based hard drive... Ridiculously fast, very low power, no possible questions about lifetime. Perhaps even the possibility of just swapping out one failed SODIMM instead of scrapping the whole drive, is quite enticing.

I've been using Flash longer than most... From wiring minuscule capacity EEPROMs into embedded circuits, to squeezing OSes down to 8MBs for firewalls. Floppies are a no-go for important systems.

They're low power, quiet, and have high speed seeking, but I don't really care. What I want most in a drive is seriously high throughput... That probably means RAM, with a battery back-up. In the mean time, HDDs keep getting faster and quieter.

I have an EEE with a solid state disk drive

[Tracy Reed]

And I really like it. This laptop is great. I have a desktop with dual 24" displays for doing work so I don't need a laptop for that. What I do need is something ultra-portable to do email, read slashdot, occasional ssh into a remote machine while on the road, terminal into a box while at the datacenter, etc. And this thing fits the bill. The solid state disk has caused no problems so far but allows things like 10 second boot times and no noise and little heat. The prices of SSD will come down, the densities will go up, and SSD drives will proliferate.

Re:And, the MTBF is..

[BlueParrot]

While storing it as an ultra-small magnetic dipole moment in a piece of rust on a rapidly spinning platter which will be irreversibly damaged from just a speck of dust sounds like a sane idea ?

Puppy Linux

[flyingfsck]

Puppy Linux runs nicely on small USB memory sticks of 128MB and up. A 1GB memory stick make a beautiful system. You really don't need umpteen gazillion gigabytes of storage space for a PC.

Re:Where is this applicable?

[timeOday]

Once again: "seek time."