Why a Hard Disk Is a Better Bargain Than an SSD 403
Lucas123 writes "While solid state disks may be all the rage, what's often being overlooked in the current consumer market hype is that fact that hard disk drive prices are at an all-time low — offering users good performance and massive amounts of capacity for 10 to 30 cents a gigabyte. And in a side by side comparison of overall performance of consumer SSDs and HDDs, it's hard to justify spending 10 times as much for a little more speed."
Understatement (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong article linked (Score:5, Informative)
This article is nearly 80 computer years old (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong article link (Score:5, Informative)
That said, I don't think anyone claims SSD is better than HDD if your bottleneck is capacity or sequential read speed. However if you do lots of random reads/writes, this line from the comparison says it all:
OCZ's drive had a random access time of
That's an 84X difference.
I agree (Score:2, Informative)
I have used a 30GB OCZ for some time now, with one system partition and one for data. I recebtly moved the system part (Windows XP) back to an older 250GB Hitachi drive, with no perceptible speed loss. The data partition holds World of Warcraft and does give a moderate speed gain on startup. It also reduces delay when switching between two WoW instances significantly. But that is about it.
I think the primary strengths of SSD are still high shock tolerance and low power needs, which makes them ideal for laptops. In some (very few) specialized applications that are aware of the geometry of a SSD (i.e. its very large effective sector size), an SSD may also give a speed improvement. There are also applications, where SSDs are significantly slower. For example small write performance is really bad.
Re:Understatement (Score:5, Informative)
but burst speed measured with HDTach is the only metric that's important when you wish to make your point that traditional rotating platter based hard drives are "nearly as fast" as quality SSD drives.
seriously.....
is there anyone by now that HASN'T seen the extensive test by Anandtech that completely DESTROYS this bullshit article?
All that matters in the real world for HDD performance is Random read and write speeds. And the difference in the two is an order of magnitude or more using the very fastest consumer drives (WDVR) and a quality SSD (Intel X-25).
The best part is that this isn't even an article, just a random slashdot user musing that SSD's aren't worth it and a review of two of the newest high performance disk drives.
Or maybe there is a typo and he actually wanted to link to this [computerworld.com] story?
Re:forre.st storage calculator (Score:5, Informative)
I like this one better: http://diskcompare.com/ [diskcompare.com]
Re:forre.st storage calculator (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Understatement (Score:2, Informative)
is there anyone by now that HASN'T seen the extensive test by Anandtech that completely DESTROYS this bullshit article?
Actually, yes, I hadn't seen the bloody article, and would have greatly benefitted from a link, you know, one of those wonders of modern technology whereby you can give a clickable fragment of text that takes a reader directly to the article you are talking about, so they don't have to scratch their heads and wonder WTF you're talking about.
Having had a quick scan of Anandtech, I guess you are referring to this article [anandtech.com], but it's so long that it will be a couple of hours before I can finish reading it and decide for sure, but you probably have a point.
Re:Understatement (Score:3, Informative)
This is a very interesting article if you are considering SSDs versus HDs for your next computer.
*I copied this from a print-out. No I don't have a link. I am at work and I don't have the time to provide it.
Wrong link... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Understatement (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Understatement (Score:3, Informative)
Anandtech did all the hard work, and all ComputerWorld did was add hype and exaggeration. Read Anandtechs articles, and then you'll know what the SSD slowdown means, and whether it's a good idea for you to pick an SSD for your next drive.
Anandtech isn't perfect tech journalism, but it's head and shoulders above practically everything else written in English.
Re:Understatement (Score:3, Informative)
This fantastic and voluminous illustrates how even the slowest SSD drives run circles around the fastest HDDs. However, current SSD technology causes those drives to run much more slowly when all the sectors have been written to at some point in time, and remain slow until the drive is formatted. SSD is consistently faster than HDD out of the gate, but until SSD algorithms or mechanics/chemistry are improved they lose their edge after a few months of regular use. [anandtech.com]
Re:Understatement (Score:3, Informative)
but flash memory is guaranteed to die after a sufficient number of writes.
No, it's guaranteed to become read-only, and the "sufficient number of writes" is up into the 100k range, which would mean writing over the entire disk every day for a few hundred years.
Re:Understatement (Score:3, Informative)
However, if you only write to it once (i.e. long-term storage) flash storage will never degrade.
The technology is too new to say this for sure. I know that a shellac record lasts at least 94 years for example, because I have one such record. There is no way to know how long flash will last and the accelerated aging tests are unreliable, after all, they showed that a CD-R could hold its data for 50-100 years and we now know that is not true.
Hard drives also are not meant for long term storage. I try to store my data on removable media (like magnetic tape) so that if the reader device fails, at least my data is safe.
Every time a spinning disk is plugged in, there is a small chance it will fail just in the act of spinning up. It's tiny sure, but it's there for spinning disks and not for SSDs.
On the other hand, a malfunctioning power supply could fry the electronics. You could repair a hard drive by getting an identical drive and replacing the fried controller. With flash your data is gone.
drives write every bit on the disk before it will go back and re-write
Will the drive write only on free space (somehow knowing where the free space is) or do they rewrite any sector by moving the data to yet another sector?
If they rewrite only the free space then, if I keep my drive almost full, I could soon run out of writable sectors. If they write to any sector, wouldn't that cause problems if power fails during the write (I lose not only the file I did not finish writing, but also a part of some other file)?
Plus, when a flash drive fails, the failure does not prevent reads, only writes.
This depends on how it fails. If a faulty PSU sent +12V where it was supposed to be +5V, I don't think there would be a lot of readable data left.
Lastly, the speed boost is HUGE.
As I don't really need a fast hard drive, I did not look into this, so you may be right on this one.
Also, at least at this time, to me, flash drives seem unreliable, I'd rather have my data stored as tiny magnetic fields on a disk or tape that as tiny electric charges in some chip, though this is only my personal opinion, I may be wrong.