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 can a 32gb Thumb Drive (Score:1, Interesting)
be $160 and a 32gb SSD cost 3x that....am I missing something? transfer speed?
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...
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...
Re:Practical observations (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Practical observations (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Practical observations (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.
Re:Practical observations (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe you need a modern laptop hard drive [akihabaranews.com]
I've got 2 x 320-gb WD drives in my laptop - VERY quiet, very good performance - can you even BUY 320gig SSDs?
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to be too picky on Toms hardware, but they are a well known cash for comment web site (ie. vista has 'nearly' the same performance as xp) and, that article is about as wishy washy as can be and implies a whole lot without saying anything at all.
Gees don't you know, V8s and tiny 4 cylinders use about much the same fuel 'er' when a car is rolling down a hill and your foot is off the accelerator or when in 'er' 'energy saving mode' and the engine is like switched off.
Re:How can a 32gb Thumb Drive (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.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:2, Interesting)
I wrote another comment recently [slashdot.org] about building my own flash drive with a couple of 16gb CF chips and an adapter from Addonics. I left out *why* I did this. I'm very rough with my tablet PC, and a spill earlier this year killed the mechanical drive. That was the 3rd drive to die for various reasons relating to rough use over the previous four years in this particular tablet. Six months of very rough use later, I've had absolutely no problems with the flash chips. The notebook is as fast with my homemade drive as the old 7200rpm that died, but now it runs cooler and completely silent, and gets about 25 more minutes of battery life at full load. The performance is a nice side-effect (compilers and IDEs like a fast drive), but my original intent was to have something that could survive my daily bike commute in a padded saddle bag over 20mi of bumpy roads + random dropping/banging around. Couldn't be happier so far.
Re:SSD and my EEE. (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 overall storage, having to pay the power, cooling, and space cost of _10_ drives rather than a single hard drive makes no sense.
But my goodness, that OCZ brand drive blew the others out of the water in the tests, didn't it? I'm very glad they added it to their tests so that I know about it for reference on future projects. _WOW_, that's a good drive!