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."
If you have ever owned one (Score:5, Interesting)
forre.st storage calculator (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't die.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Define "bargain" (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think anyone out there is saying that from a $/GB perspective that SSD's are a bargain.
But here are two key points:
1) Not everyone needs 1TB of storage (about $100, and practically entry level now for hard drives). Especially on laptops, a $350 32GB SSD (also entry level) can get you quite far, especially if it is reserved for the OS and applications. You can pick up a 32GB SSD for a reasonable price, and get the really good performance, and use a big, cheap HD for media files.
2) Many people view the extra performance + lower power consumption + greater reliability as worth the premium price, and that makes them a value. Just because they can't compete on a $/GB basis doesn't make them a bargain to some people.
Stupid story (Score:1, Interesting)
This story is completely asinine. Everybody knows that HDDs are cheaper than SSDs. And the "little more speed" thing is way off -- SSDs can read and write at double the speed of a HDD in many cases. You are always going to pay a premium for having the best, this is like putting out an article about how you get more for your money with a Volkswagen than you do with a Mercedes -- of course you get more car dollar for dollar with Volkswagen, but for someone in the market a Mercedes a Volkswagen just is not an option, they want top quality and are willing to pay more for it. It's called the price/performance curve and we all struggle with it.
July 2008 (Score:2, Interesting)
Performance has always had its premium. (Score:5, Interesting)
Higher performing parts have always carried a higher price. However, there is a need for higher performance, and clearly the market shows that the demand is there for the price, I'm looking at you servers and computer enthusiasts.
I have a 300GB velociraptor in my computer, and I have been eye'ing the SSD's for some time, but they just haven't hit the price point for me yet to justify purchasing them yet.
In fact, I feel like an oddity, I work for a small IT firm, and when I asked my boss why a customer's computer had a raid0 of 250'sGB (where we had to replace them both with a new 500GB) why did he just get a velociraptor in the first place, he simply stated that it was cheaper to get 2 250GB hard drives at $60 than it was to get 1 300GB velociraptor.
Now, the only thing that may change the landscape from all this is that SSDs are built on silicon, which is subject to Moore's Law, and we've witnessed how cheap thumb drives and other flash media drives are, there's definitely a real possibility that in time SSD's will be faster AND cheaper than HDDs.
Re:"hard disk drive prices are at an all-time low" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:pointless analysis: -1! (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe they meant "jaw-dropping slow"? Even for a rotary drive, that doesn't strike me as terribly impressive.
As far as latency vs. throughput, which is more important varies by your usage.
With RAID setups, you'll want lower latency drives, as throughput can be increased with more drives.
For you OS/application disks, you'll want lower latency, since you are usually dealing with smaller data files.
For "pure data" disks, throughput may be better, unless you have a lot of simultaneous reads/writes, in which case latency can be more important (or equally important).
It really varies on the use, and there is no universal "best" between the two (although latency needs a lot more respect than it'http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/18/1333230#
Previews given).
Performance is night and day better (Score:1, Interesting)
I just got a new IT supported laptop at work (HP EliteBook). Performance was significantly better than my previous laptop (now on dualcore, 4GB ram, etc)... I took my new machine and put in the 80GB Intel SSD... The performance is amazing. I would estimate that things I do on the system are around 3-10x faster than with the stock disk.
Now I did go from a 150GB down to an 80GB drive, but for mobile with no waiting, it's like getting a new machine again. It may cost more, but being able to load visual studio, open a solution (small project), compile and run in under 10 seconds where my last HD took over a minute is well worth the "hype".
(as a disclaimer, my IT supported laptop is loaded with a TON of crap software)
Moving parts (Score:4, Interesting)
Read distance measured in microns, magnets, heads, cylinders, normal forces, weight and my favorite, impact functions - all of these seem like great reasons to move to SSD.
1000 (or more) rewrites is a scary limit for the SSD route, but I like the idea of walking around with my laptop on and not worrying about drive failures (as much).
Take this for what it's worth, but I was at a conference a couple years ago and the VP of Intel's desktop support division said that 30% of his problems with laptops were solved by requiring folks to wait for the drive to spin down after hibernating/shutdown operations and before shouldering the laptop. Even if the number seems somewhat inflated, it seems like good advice for anyone with a "conventional" hard drive.
Re:When clients aren't so thin (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Understatement (Score:3, Interesting)
Tell that to my friend who just lost an entire web design project because he was storing it on a two year old flash drive which died.
How long would an HDD last being carried around in a pocket for 2 years?
Re:Understatement (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a friend who just replaced a single 72GB Raptor (not Velociraptor, but still a 10K RPM SATA HDD with 32MB of cache) with TWO (2) OCZ Vertex 30GB SSDs in RAID0 and let me tell you, the difference in performance is nothing short of staggering (and was with a single drive before he added the second). Solid state drives are the single largest upgrade you can do to any modern PC assembled from parts manufactured in the last 3 years.
If you haven't seen the difference with the new generation of SSDs (Intel X25-E/M and anything with the Indilinx or Samsung controllers - not JMICRON drives) I seriously encourage you to do yourself a favor and just try one out. You can get a 30GB Vertex for as low as ~$130. Sure, it benchmarks with TWICE the throughput of the fastest consumer HDD on the planet (WD VelociRaptor) but that doesn't really tell you the whole story. It's not just throughput, its the random read speeds and the total silence from the drive that is just absolutely awesome.
Re:When clients aren't so thin (Score:3, Interesting)
the controller card to run this (assuming you're not going to try to get your software raid to run this) would be more than the drives..........
if you are trying to get your software raid to run this, you'd better get a really nice processor.......
Re:Moving parts & MORE REASONS 4 SSD use... ap (Score:1, Interesting)
"Read distance measured in microns, magnets, heads, cylinders, normal forces, weight and my favorite, impact functions - all of these seem like great reasons to move to SSD." - by krulgar (250929) on Thursday June 18, @10:16AM (#28373611) Homepage
They are: Here are more, for BOTH "industrial environs", AND "home user/end user" environs as well!
(However, in defense of your points? Well - I also disagree with "FLASH-RAM" SSD use, for the very reasons you note, but, I use a diff. kind (not based on FLASH RAM))... read on:
SSD's ROCK - AND, especially in "industrial environs", such as for DB work... see here:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312/7 [techreport.com]
TREMENDOUS GAINS result!
I saw & first only "theorized" this, as far back as 1996 for EEC Systems & their "SuperDisk" application!
(That was while I wrote portions of their SuperCache I/II program, increasing its effectiveness &/or performance by up to 40% more ("tesla like gains"))...
AND?
Hey, it worked SO well? It took them to a FINALIST position @ Microsoft TechEd 2 yrs. in a row, in its HARDEST category, which applies on this note, perfectly: SQLServer Performance Enhancement & also reviewed very well in Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61!
Also, ALBEIT, on a "home user/end user" platform? It helps as well, & in ways that are NOT "immediately apparent", but exist, nonetheless!
How so? Well... The apparent one, is increased speed in seek/access, which not ALL gains from, but, consider that most of the time? The end user does MOSTLY "READS" work... & here is where you gain: In the File I/O access cycle of Open/Read-Write/Close file (&, everything, even screendevice contexts are abstracted out as a file mind you, but that does not apply here, just making a point in modern OS' is all on that note)? YOU HAVE TO FIND THE FILE, first... here is how they make gains, apparent ones.
HOWEVER, NOW? I'll note the "less apparent" ones!
I use a CENATEK "RocketDrive" TRUE SSD (not based on FLASH RAM, with its slower write cycles which I suppose, a writeback cache COULD theoretically offset some, nor, with FLASH RAM's inevitable decay in longevity & performance, wear-levelling notwithstanding)...
I use it for these purposes here (and, this is since late 2002 no less to present day 2009, no problems @ all whatsoever):
----
PARTITION #1, 1gb
1.) pagefile.sys placement - both read/write in nature
PARTITION #2, 1gb
A.) Webbrowser (Opera, FireFox, & IE) caching location - both read/write in nature
B.) %temp% & %tmp% ops placement (environment alteration) - both read/write in nature
C.) SandBoxie placement (a webbrowser sandboxing tool, goes VERY slow on std. HDD's, & much fsater on this SSD, by far) - read/write in nature
D.) Print Spooler location - read/write in nature
E.) Windows' EventLogs - read/write in nature
F.) DrWatson Logging - read/write in nature
G.) Windows' Firewall logs - read/write in nature
H.) Windows Management WMI logging - read/write in nature
I.) HOSTS file placement - MOSTLY read in nature (some write)
J.) %comspec$ placement (cmd.exe location, environment alteration) - read in nature
----
All for 2 reasons:
1.) Greater seek/access speeds
&
2.) NOT "cluttering" my main disk w/ them (which can aid fragmentation also) + NOT burdening my MAIN C: drive (OS & Programs MOSTLY here only) w/ dealing w/ those files & tasks associated w/ them...
(IT WORKS, & just on "common-sense" principals...)
Sure, you CAN do the same w/ multiple HDD's & I told folks to do that, if they could afford it, decades back (distribute workloads across drives) BUT, you don't get sub-ms seeks/accesses w/ mechanical HDD's either though... SSD's? They DO yield that
Re:Understatement (Score:3, Interesting)
Try this [anandtech.com]. Just searching for SSD will get you lots of interesting articles there.
Re:Understatement (Score:3, Interesting)
Hibernate dumps ram to disk and shuts the machine off.
Suspend (or sleep) simply supplies minimal power to everything - the most agressive basically kills everything except a very small amount of power to keep the contents of RAM from disappearing. Less agressive sleep states can leave your NIC available and hard disk writable, but they consume a lot more power than an agressive sleep state.
From what some have said about SSDs, hibernate should come up only a few seconds slower than suspend. Pretty cool, might make me believe in hibernate after all.
Re:Understatement (Score:3, Interesting)
No, he just likes his computer to be very very fast and can afford it. I have raptors in my PCs as well and I'm not a gamer either. I have two PC's, a linux box running fedora 9 with a 36GB raptor and a windows xp machine that I built later with a 72GB raptor (which I got open box from newegg for $89 a couple years back, absolutel steal at the time). My linux box has 25GB free and my windows xp box has over 50GB free.
I don't know why you're going on and on about the average joe, this has nothing to do with the average joe (yet). This is for people who, like me, don't need much storage but want exceptionally fast workstations. I do have a second 500GB hard drive that I use for storage/archival and a 300GB HDD in an external enclosure I use for backups.
Don't think of it as replacing HDDs entirely, thing of it as a new tier of storage. It used to be:
HDD -> RAM -> CPU registers
Now its:
HDD -> SSD -> RAM -> CPU registers
Each tier from left to right getting progressively smaller and faster.
But, SSDs are no more pointless than giving sally homemaker a quad-core monster with 4GB of RAM. Once you actually use one you'll appreciate that it is the single biggest upgrade you can do to a modern PC. It's just one of those things you have to experience to appreciate.