The 1 Terabyte SSD Arrives 237
An anonymous reader writes "Over recent years Solid State Drives (SSDs) have moved from luxury to affordable additions to one's PC, but mechanical hard drives are still king when it comes to capacity. That was until the revamped Colossus LT series Solid State Drive came along this week. With up to 1TB, the drive offers offers massive storage capacities of the level normally not seen in SSDs. While 1TB of SSD space hits right at the heart of the traditional hard disk market, it comes at a high price — at around $4,000 for the 1TB model, these drives are in the realm of aspirational rather than practical."
I'll wait a while. (Score:4, Interesting)
Speed? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yay (Score:3, Interesting)
Can we please get an affordable, 60GB one that is actually worth buying now? Last time I checked (two months ago), most of the less expensive drives were real spotty with their reliability.
Any suggestions for a decent 60GB SSD for under $120?
Uhmm.... (Score:4, Interesting)
This has been on newegg for a very long time: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227500 [newegg.com]
I've been waiting forever for its price to drop, but nothing seems to be happening. I don't think SSDs will be of any consequence to mainstream users before memristors become all the rage.
Re:I'll wait a while. (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a handful of friends who adopted Intel's latest G2 X25-m models at their release. With new firmware, they are all still reporting notably reduced performance over time. Everyone knows what causes it, it is entirely understandable given the storage technology in question, but that doesn't make it any less of a drag. I'll wait and see how things change before doing the switch.
Everyone knows what causes it huh?
Sorry, that's a really stupid assumption, because, I don't know what causes it.
So I guess not everyone knows what causes it.
Snow Leopard (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. (Score:4, Interesting)
As a media producer who uses DAW and video editing apps, solid state storage is a dream for me. I'm using much smaller SSDs now and although the power savings don't mean much to me, they are certainly quieter and faster than magnetic or optical media.
My 15k rpm drives are too loud and too warm.
When a 1TB SSD hits $1000, I'm in for two.
Re:I'll wait a while. (Score:4, Interesting)
It is only a slight performance improvement for large files. For large amounts of small files it's a huge gain thanks to the lack of head movement.
I picked up a 32gb SSD drive to handle the OS and apps and left my 1TB drive for movies. The difference in boot times and app load times are very noticeable.
Re:Yay (Score:3, Interesting)
That would be excellent, if those damn HP people didn't disable the virtualization support of the CPU in the BIOS, with no option to turn it on!
Re:I'll wait a while. (Score:3, Interesting)
"This isn't helped by the architecture of most SSDs. Usually, data is laid down within a block of available memory, meaning that it might not take up all the available space--yet will still write to all of it"
Does the author think traditional hard drives write to byte-addressable boundaries? Hard drives write blocks and sectors too and have wasted slack space at the end of their blocks too.
Yes, but these blocks of memory might be much bigger than sectors on a hard disk.
And filesystem code in operating systems knows about the (small) sectors of disks, and might not be able to cope with the large blocks of SSDs. Meaning that the SSD must be sufficiently smart to read the entire block, change whatever range needs to be changed, and rewrites it. And this might happen lots of times, because the higher level code (filesystems) might not be aware of the issue.
There is no reason to defrag an SSD because their is no latency getting to a further sector.
There is no latency, but defragging may be useful for a different purpose: making sure that each memory block is occupied by as few different files as possible (in order to dampen the effect of the phenomenon outlined above).
Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. (Score:4, Interesting)
The other thing you need to look at is lifespan. A 15k drive should last a company at least 3 years (I know some companies replace them yearly, but a typical rotation is 3 to 5 years based on what I've seen). Can an SSD (that's under high I/O) last that long? Or are you going to be replacing them yearly because of wear leveling issues? Again, I'm not saying that they are not worth the money. All I am saying is that it's far from a simple math problem to determine if they are the right fit for an enterprise...
Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. (Score:3, Interesting)
You have a strange sense of economics. Reduced demand usually means reduced prices and vice versa. Reduced consumption means less need for more power-plants and other related expenses. On the flip side, much increased demand means that the power companies have to build new plants or upgrade old ones, or upgrade infrastructure. The fact is, using resources costs money and the more you use, the more it costs somewhere. Reducing consumption does not make costs go up unless there's a false economy created by imprudent decisions on the part of the power companies or some sort of insane government involvement that keeps fixed costs high (which I can buy).
Ahh, why bother? Let's just burn through all our natural resources like there's no tomorrow so that the status quo can be preserved at all costs. I'm sure that'll work out somehow.