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:Got one, love it

[calebt3]

Since these drives do not have a head moving along a platter, what would be the most efficient partition format for them? It's not like the same rules apply.

Where is this applicable?

[RiotXIX]

I was going to buy a small one (15GB?) and put my linux partition on it (PC, so mobile benefits don't matter), but figured not too because of the fact that the number of times you can re-write is less. But according to "Because of these wear-leveling techniques, and the fact that a modern NAND device can sustain up to one million write cycles, the overall lifetime of an SSD can be decades. So losing capacity due to flash write cycles is probably not an issue", the option is now still back on.

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?

I could maybe see if I were using a laptop, but I don't get how this would benefit me.

Thanks for taking the time to answer if anyone can persuade me different.
I might just get it for the cleanness of having a small segregated linux drive - really that's the best reason I can see.

I use them

[Lord Ender]

Both my home server and several systems in use at work boot from compactflash drives. Our production servers run Ubuntu LTS, and are basically VMware Server boxes--the actual apps run off of guest OSs that live on the 6TB RAID-6s on each server.

All in all, I've had seven servers running off of SSDs for about eight months, and they have worked like a charm. I never have to worry about getting paged due to the inevitable mechanical failure of magnetic drives.

Also, SSDs are NOT expensive! A CF-to-IDE adapter costs $15, and a 2GB CF card costs about $30. Two gigabytes is more than enough to boot an OS and start a RAID. Don't waste your money on a 64GB CF card. The CF+RAID hybrid approach is the way to go.

Like Digital Cameras

[JonathanR]

I think solid state drives will be like digital cameras. The price and usability (read size) will appear not to be mainstream enough, that is, until you've just made that "big" investment in the latest incarnation of the superseded technology.

It happened to me. I bought a new (not that expensive) film SLR about 18 months prior to digital cameras having sufficient resolution/cost ratio to supersede film for everyday use. Coming from a generation where cameras tend to last almost a lifetime (having been used to my father's Minolta SR-T 101, purchased about the time I was born). The concept of a camera becoming almost obsolete in that short timeframe was a bit annoying, at the time.

It just boggles my mind...

[JustNiz]

It just boggles my mind how modern solid-state electronics organized for parallel I/O can be less than a factor of 10 times faster than an inherently serial and decidedly ancient-sounding "mechanically moved heads over a magnetized spinning disk" approach.
What the heck is going on here?

Re:you left impractical off the list

[HTH NE1]

SSD's have a short life span due to cell memory

The larger the drive, the more spread out the wear, the longer it will ast. By my calculations [slashdot.org], a 1 GiB NAND Flash as a TiVo's video drive rerecording the same data every 30 minutes would last 570 years.

If I've made a mistake in those calculations, I'd appreciate a correction before I feel compelled to cite them again.

And, the MTBF is..

[eniac42]

I am not saying it is not good, its just the idea of storing data as a few electrons of static charge on the input gate of a MOSFET (or WhatEver-FET) for a few years bothers me. Call me old fashioned..

Re:you left impractical off the list

[afidel]

and they aren't immune to shocks damaging them.

Yes they are, for all intents and purposes. If you don't believe me see this story [digitaljournalist.org] about a CF card that survived the collapse of the WTC.

Data recovery from SSDs?

[rHBa]

I was wondering if anyone can answer a simple(?) question: Can data be recovered from an SSD after it has been overwritten once? i.e If I'm disposing of an SSD with sensitive data on it do I have to run secure erasing software to make multiple/random writes to every sector?

laptops, dummy

[DreadSpoon]

There's a reason that these things are commercialls available only in laptops right now. In a laptop, you boot up a lot (or resume from hibernation a lot, which is equally disk-intensive), so disk seek and read times are incredibly important. Plus, power savings are a huge benefit when you're running a system that has a limited power source. The SSDs generate less heat, which is also hugely important when all your circuitry is compacted into the smallest amount of space possibility, and it allows either for the system to be cooler (hot laptops suck, even typing on them can be uncomfortable) or allow for other components like the CPU and RAM to be sped up since they get a greater share of the system's safe heat generation capacity. The reduced noise is great - try being in a meeting with 20 laptops all with fans whirring away. Finally, the greater lifetime of an SSD (modern hard disks fails way sooner than a modern SSD will, in general) means that the machine doesn't need a new disk with a new OS install and possibly a bunch of lost data on anywhere near as frequent a basis.

Less power and less noise are good for servers and desktops, and the faster seek times can really make a different in performance for many common workloads, but the biggest benefit of SSD is that they make laptops suck way less.

Re:you left impractical off the list

[PoliTech]

"they seriously are not that much tougher then a laptop hd."

I would like to see a citation for that claim. From my team's research, SSDs are much much tougher than any spindle HD. But toughness may not be a factor for you when evaluating SSDs, (it wasn't for us).

Our test SSD laptops have also demonstrated much improved battery life. On a D630 we are seeing four and a half hour battery life with standard stock batteries. That's a two hour increase. Use larger cell count batteries and battery life will just get better. A laptop equiped with an eight cell battery and a secondary battery licated in the Optical drive bay, we have experienced eight hour-plus battery life.

Our boot times are also improved with SSD. Since we also encrypt, (and if anyone has used encryption on a Windows domain then they have likely experienced a hit with login times) we were most impressed with the performance improvement of encrypted SSD, when compared to a traditional HD on the same equipment. Write times are not as much improved, but there is no negative impact either.

Our experiences have been good enough that we are planning to order SSD on all new laptops for next year. The improvement in Battery life alone is worth the price of admission. Toughness, and increased write speed are icing on the cake.

Re:Got one, love it

[z0M6]

No. the wear is leveled out over the whole drive so you can partition however you want to. If only to serve as some mental map like: "I want root partition to use this much space, and the swap to have this much, and then some for my document etc"

Re:It just boggles my mind...

[Firehed]

That fails to explain how a drive made of, in effect, nothing but cache is about an order of magnitude slower. Whether you can process the data quickly enough is irrelavent when you're dealing with a medium theoretically limited by nothing but c yet performs worse than a device spinning at 4200RPM.

We're not considering the full system performance here. We're trying to figure out why something that has a seek time that's effectively zero isn't even maxing out the interface. A RAMDisk (those funny boards Gigabyte makes that use actual system RAM and a backup battery) has that same zero seek time and completely saturates the interface; why the hell is non-volatile storage so much slower?

Re:Where is this applicable?

[GoofyBoy]

Database Servers.

I love my SSD!

[lumbricus]

I agree with TFA that SSD is most useful if you need the ruggedness and the read speed. I have a 16GB Samsung 1.8" SSD in my fujitsu P1510D. It's a marriage made in heaven! I am a Biologist, and use my P1510 in the field. The SSD gives piece of mind, one less thing to go wrong. In fact, almost right after I swapped in my SSD, I (yes accidentally) dropped my computer about three feet to the floor. After checking to see that screen and case wasn't cracked, I just knew it was fine, and of course it booted right up. I also work in some high altitude locations, and I find the the machine boots at higher altitudes now. (perhaps hard drives cut out at high altitude because there's not enough air to keep the head off the platter?) Finally, the P1510 uses hard to find and extremely expensive micro-DIMMs, so upgrading the memory is prohibitively expensive. That was my biggest gripe with the little machine, it was slow because I couldn't get the 1GB it really needs. This, coupled with the incredibly slow 1.8" hard drive made it kind of annoying. I still can't do much about upgrading RAM, but the read speed of the SSD allows me to just close applications, and re-open them when I need them (nearly instantaneously), so I never have more than two applications open at a time. The most telling test I've done is with Allway Sync, which I use to synchronize the files on my little laptop with my desktop. Running "Analyze" (version checking files) on my home folder used to take about about a minute, now with the SSD it's somewhere between 10-15 seconds. Sure, I wouldn't put it on a MySQL server or the like, but for my laptop, the whole experience is just so much better. I would recommend one to anyone who can use the ruggedness and read speed.

offtopic

[Corf]

It does what I want. I was looking for a highly-portable full-featured computer, and the price was right. If I really need high-res at some point it's not like it doesn't have a VGA-out. I'm not using it for anything beyond e-mail and light surfing at the moment, but then I just got it ten days ago; I'll probably do light word processing at some point. I care much less than if I'd invested tons of cash into something nicer and it takes a fall or otherwise gets rendered a paperweight. The biggest kicker was portability -- I'm a big fan of not checking bags when I travel, and this thing makes that considerably easier.

Re:Where is this applicable?

[zippthorne]

Seriously? Not your power supply fan or heat sink fan?

Re:Huh?

[JeffSchwab]

IANAS, but I'm guessing this is what the pros call an "outlier."