Notebook Storage SSDs and HDs Compared 149
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.
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]
What about recovery? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obviously the goggles do work (Score:1, Informative)
Re:How about a link? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Practical observations (Score:3, Informative)
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:How can a 32gb Thumb Drive (Score:5, Informative)
You're missing SLC vs. MLC and high-performance controllers.
Re:What about recovery? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:3, Informative)
On warm sea-level areas (such as a caribbean beach), high RPM harddrives tend to fail rather quickly. SSDs would operate just fine.
Re:Practical observations (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How can a 32gb Thumb Drive (Score:3, Informative)
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 - the first showings seem to be very positive (no numbers posted yet).
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.
Re:What about recovery? (Score:2, Informative)
It is my understanding (I read it on the internet somewhere) that every flash device has some form of wear leveling built in, except for the actual raw flash chips. So if you solder flash chips onto some device, you'll need to format those flash chips with jffs2 or similar because jffs2 will perform its own wear leveling.
As for compact flash as a hard drive, I have been using an 8GB Transcend 266x CF connected to an addonics CF->Sata adapter for use as the OS drive in my gentoo based mythtv system. Man, it really kicks butt.
I've only been running it for about 10 or 11 months now, but so far I've had no problems. The mysql database mythtv uses gets updated all the time. Since it is a gentoo system and I like to keep it up to date, the CF sees a lot of compiling action.
Speaking of which, having portage run off the flash has sped up my compiles way more than distc or ccache ever did for me. Or put another way, for compiling from, the flash drive is a godsend.
Performance is good as I get a consistent 40MB a second for sequential reads, and a consistent 34MB a second for sequential writes.
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.
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.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (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.