SSDs vs. Hard Drives In Value Comparison 263
EconolineCrush writes "SSDs hardly offer compelling value on the cost-per-gigabyte basis. But what if one considers performance per dollar? This article takes a closer look at the value proposition offered by today's most common SSDs, mixing raw performance data with each drive's cost, both per gigabyte and as a component of a complete system. A dozen SSD configurations are compared, and results from a collection of mechanical hard drives provide additional context. The data are laid out in detailed scatter plots clearly illustrating the most favorable intersections of price and performance, and you might be surprised to see just how well the SSDs fare versus traditional hard drives. A few of the SSDs offer much better value than their solid-state competitors, too."
Typo in summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
It says: "A few of the SSDs offer much better value than their solid-state competitors, too."
Is that meant to be "SSDs"?
It's a trap! (Score:5, Funny)
Super Star Destroyers are better value?!?!
Re:Typo in summary? (Score:5, Funny)
Data corruption - it's not just for hard drives any more :-)
Maybe missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
The test is very unfair on small SSDs like the Intel X25-V because it doesn't look at overall price, only $/Gb. Hardly anybody is going to install a small SSD as the only drive in a machine. Most people would combine them with a big hard disk so the final score would be a blend of the scores for the SSD and the second hard disk.
eg. I just rebuilt my machine with an X25-V for the OS and applications. The X25-V gives the machine amazing boot up times and near-instant application load times - way faster then my old Velociraptor. As an overall performance enhancement it's a complete no-brainer for $110.
For the price of a big SSD you can probably get an X25-V (boot drive) plus a 300Gb Velociraptor (video editing and/or your hardcore games) plus a 1.5Tb HDD (for your torrentz and AVIs). Beat that for price/performance!
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The test is very unfair on small SSDs like the Intel X25-V because it doesn't look at overall price, only $/Gb. Hardly anybody is going to install a small SSD as the only drive in a machine. Most people would combine them with a big hard disk so the final score would be a blend of the scores for the SSD and the second hard disk.
Does it, really? A 'big' X25 @ 160 GB is $2.68/GB vs your 'disadvantaged' 40GB at $2.75. I wouldn't call a 3% price difference major when hard drives are hanging around a tenth of the price of SSD.
From my personal price checking, while with hard drives the highest non-cutting edge capacity tends to be the cheapest, SSD prices tend to level off very quickly with regards to price.
From newegg:
Intel X25-V 40GB 2.5": $110 $2.75
Intel X25-M 80GB 2.5": $220, $2.75/gb
Intel X25-M 160GB 2.5": $430 $2.68
Was going t
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The GP might have missed the point, but you certainly did. Let me put it more bluntly: Comparing the price of an ssd to a disk by $/GB is idiotic, and there is exactly as much point in it as comparing the price of your processor to the price of your ram by $/MB (looking at the size of the cache). His point wasn't that you get better $/GB in a smaller ssd -- it was that the very metric of $/GB is completely and utterly stupid when evaluating the usefulness of an ssd as an upgrade.
A SSD is not an upgrade that
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The GP might have missed the point, but you certainly did. Let me put it more bluntly: Comparing the price of an ssd to a disk by $/GB is idiotic.
I think they missed the point because you did not include a car analogy. Here, let me try to help:
Comparing the price of an SSD to a rotational hard drive by dollar/GB is akin to comparing a small sedan to a Ferrari based on dollar/mile for all the miles driven over the lifetime of the vehicles.
Sure, the sedan will cost WAY less and you'll probably drive it more than the Ferrari, but try putting them on the race track and see what happens.
Obviously you do not buy a Ferrari to commute in (unless you're John
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The true winner is a RAID of 2Tb WD Caviar Black & WD Raptors here. Get several of them and RAID, you get all the performance benefits of SSDs to a large degree (still failing a bit short on IOPS probably), at fraction of the cost for a large capacity. ... so gigantic), and honestly: You really want to enjoy the performance for everything you do for a that pile of cash.
40Gb SSD is still too small for the OS + Apps (w7
The RealSSD C300 costs 660$ or Corsair Nova 349$. They buy ~6 or ~3, WD 2Tbs. at RAID0
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Actually, I just built a low voltage ultra-portable notebook using an X25-V (CULV CPU, no optical drive, 8+ hour battery life). I'm running Linux, so my OS load is under 3Gb right now, so a typical quarter to half terabyte drive seems like overkill for a system that only runs productivity apps. I haven't done much battery benchmarking thus far, but the reduction in disk access times has been tangible. For example, even using a low power CPU, my boot times are under 15s to the log in screen.
Your setup is a g
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Reliability? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Longevity and reliability are tough to quantify, because for the vast majority of users the median SSD or disk drive will never fail as long as they use it.
Failures of disks occur at the tail end. Perhaps 10% of disk drives and 1% of SSDs fail over two years, but how do you compare them? Do you say the disk is 9% worse, or 10x worse?
Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Do you say the disk is 9% worse, or 10x worse?"
Probably depends on which product we're advertising. No, scratch that, it depends ENTIRELY on which product we're advertising.
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because for the vast majority of users the median SSD or disk drive will never fail as long as they use it.
Bwahaha, right. Have you known many people using SSD's? I do and they have an extremely high failure rate. Currently much higher than the old spinning media. Most last less than 6 months. The oldest SSD I know of lasted 2 years. I know of no SSD that lasted longer than that.
I'll stick with hard-drives until that improves significantly.
Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Informative)
IDK, I've got three netbooks with SSDs, one of those died during/after a power-outage (I blame line transients at failure or turn-on, combined with a cheap power-supply and brittle SSD controller design, but I'll never know for sure), none of them have died from old age, and the runcore SSD I replaced that one with is still doing fine as well.
So I've only got a sample size of 4, ranges from 1 to 2.5 years old (all over your "6 month" average), and 3/4 are still good, and the one that failed was not wear-related -- not scientifically conclusive, but enough that I think you're either full of it, or are comparing semi-disposable media (SD/MMC/MS/CF) which do have alarming failure rates in heavy usage against purpose-built SSDs that seem to be built with better wear-leveling and more spare blocks...
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The fact that either drive may fail means you have to be able to recover from it perfectly.
So the only factor is cost: if 10% of disk drives fail, then you should add 10% to your budget plus whatever time you predict spending installing the new drives.
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Only someone who failed statistics would ask that question. I mean, really?
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how do you get 9% worse? 1% of 100 is, well, 1, 10% of 100 is 10, 1:10 is 10X different. 9% worse would be 1.1% return rate. you cant say 10% - 1% is 9%, thats not how it works.
Re:Reliability? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thats because the write-cycle limitation is pretty much a moot point these days. Considering the better reliability of flash memory, coupled with better wear leveling, reserved space, etc it takes a hell of a lot of writing to use up that life span. The thing is, drives that are very heavily written to tend to also need tons of storage (such as A/V editing)...much more than would be economical in SSDs. So the systems which would likely have a chance at wearing out an SSD are also usually the systems that cannot realistically use an SSD for data storage. At the moment (current cost of SSDs), the problem sort of solves itself.
Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's even better, is that the life span of an SSD is linearly related to it's capacity (because there's more cells to write to, and the write speed remains constant), so as SSDs get to the capacity needed for A/V editing, they'll also get many many many year reliability at that write speed.
At the moment, good SSDs last ~10 years writing to them at a normal rate (which is tbh, better than most HDDs anyway); many TB ones will last upwards of 40 years, great news :).
Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about databases? I have a project based around a PostgreSQL database and it's pretty intensive. The bottleneck on the database's performance remains the disk I/O. A good SSD, I estimate, would provide a very noticeable boost to this. Note the system is about equal parts writing to and reading from (well, about 30/70) which is the worst of all worlds for a database.
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While a pretty comprehensive article, nowhere do they actually talk about reliablity and longevity of these drives in their value calculations. That's a pretty important factor for me, and has been one of the reasons (besides price) that I haven't seriously considered one yet.
Honestly? No.
I recently replaced a less than 1 year old (failing) HD with a SSD in one of my servers. I expect my HDs to fail. I expect my SSD to fail. I put the SSD in instead of just another HD because it was a (relatively) cheap way to increase the performance of the machine significantly. If it lives for 1 year before failing, its doing better than the HD it replaced -even if it doesn't, the performance boost is worth it.
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SSDs for expendable client laptops - possibly. For mission-critical servers - hell no.
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I would rather create a raid1 + hotspare for a mysql server. write performance is bad in raid5.
Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)
And as for value, a good 128GB SSD is $300. For about $200 more, you can get 3 x 150GB Raptors and a $100 Adaptec SATA RAID controller, config it in RAID 5 and get comparable performance, not to mention a little redundancy. The extra initial investement will pay for itself in uptime over the long-term.
I'm sorry, but you're completely and hopelessly wrong. Spinning rust gets around 100 IOPS, maybe 200 at 15k RPM. The Intel X25-E gets around 10,000 IOPS. Assuming linear speedup (which you won't get anything close to), you'd need 100 rotational drives to come close to the performance of a single X25-E.
The only performance metric where SSDs and spinning rust are anywhere close is on linear read/write speeds. Sadly, that's of no consequence, because that workload only exists in benchmarks.
(Also, god help you if you put a database server on RAID 5... goodbye performance! RAID 10 or bust.)
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Don't get out much do you? Ten years ago this might have been the case, but with modern storage technology you can run a lot of database loads on RAID-5 with an acceptable level of performance and as a matter of fact I've done so. Indeed the technology has improved so much that when I migrated the Oracle environment at my last job off of a SAN using RAID 1+0 volumes to a SAN using RAID-5 disk access was sti
Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Funny)
Now you have four problems. Could you Do It Wrong in any more ways?
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Now you have four problems. Could you Do It Wrong in any more ways?
Ooooohhh! Ooohhhh! Oooohh! I could. I'll run it on Vista and directly connect it to the internet. I can haz epic fail yet?
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I'm from the networking side of the fence but even I know that kinda kit is strictly Small-Medium-Business kit
Proper enterprise grade SQL you're talking SAS drives, multiple RAID setups (different for different parts of the data - e.g. logs are mostly writes, so RAID5 is out).
Of course, 'real men' use SANs and fibre channel but I'm guessing thats OTT for many
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If you're using the $100 Adaptec SATA RAID controller in your "mission-critical" server, I'm very critical of your mission.
And, comparable performance - only if your MySQL does a lot of large sequential reads / writes. If it doing mostly small random writes, you're dreaming in Technicolor (TM), if you think performance will be the same.
And, why not spend the same amount of money on both setups? The extra $200 will probably get you a 256 GB SSD and possibly faster write performance although, as you pointed o
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If you're running a critical database server you could try smaller SSDs in RAID - about the same cost per Gb as a big SSD but you get the redundancy.
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RAID-5/6 is only for when you need lots of read-mostly storage space and don't care much about write performance.
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Me, I just go for a good warranty and keep backups.
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redendent back ups, their not just for HHDs.
i don't know about the stats... (Score:5, Interesting)
Once I realized that I could fit on a 64GB SSD comfortably if I didn't keep my ENTIRE photo collection on my laptop, it was a pretty easy decision to make to try them.
And after some testing, I've decided that it's enough worth it for us that we're all using them. In most cases it isn't a bit noticeable difference. But for some things it really does make a difference, and not having to wait for them is a big gain. The things that are a lot faster are: booting (rarely, but you're entirely "down" while doing it), opening big apps like OpenOffice, re-opening firefox or thunderbird when they flake out, and doing big find/grep jobs. Searching through e-mail and the like? Great.
For a long time, CPU increases were way outpacing the disc performance gains. We how have CPUs that are faster than most of my staff can really take advantage of on our laptops. But disc performance, even at 7200 RPM, was often the bottleneck.
So, we've traded volume for performance, and been very happy with it.
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SSDs absolutely blow spinning rust out of the water on a price/performance basis, even the initial models that cost a grand for <100G of storage. The only problem is that there's a lot of poor quality SSDs out there now that perform badly on random writes. If you balk at the price, you don't need the performance anyways, move along.
Re:i don't know about the stats... (Score:5, Funny)
Why is everyone in this thread suddenly referring to HDDs as "spinning rust". Was there a memo or something?
I just have this idea that somewhere there is an office where shadowy figures say things like "if you check your schedules for this month, we have 'spinning rust' for HDDs, 'skeptic' is to be replaced with 'denier', we want a active effort to make as many people as possible say 'loose' when they mean 'lose'. And I'm pleased to announce that our year long project to make everyone say 'I could care less' instead of 'couldn't' has been a great success, gentlmen."
Re:i don't know about the stats... (Score:5, Interesting)
Were doing the same thing, for a few thousand laptops. 7200 RPM drives in laptops eat batteries, generate heat, and can't keep up with all the background application needed for monitoring, compliance, AV scanning, etc.
really, at a couple hundred more each (less if you order in quantity) they pay for themselves very quickly if you have a mobile workforce. If you have a 10 minute boot up, and people on the road visiting clients, several times a day, (and standby is disabled because of security concerns with disk encryption) then a 3 minute boot can pay for itself in a few months.
I was disappointed to not see any Samsung SSD's on the list. They are in a TON of OEM laptops.
10 minute boot up? Standby is a security risk? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have a 10 minute boot up, and people on the road visiting clients, several times a day, (and standby is disabled because of security concerns with disk encryption) then a 3 minute boot can pay for itself in a few months.
If your laptops take 10 minutes to boot, you've got much bigger problems...and how is standby a concern with disk encryption? If you wake the machine, you should have to enter a password.
What are you storing that requires this level of paranoia with so many client visits? Clear
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opening big apps like OpenOffice, re-opening firefox or thunderbird when they flake out,
This seems like more of a problem with Firefox and Thunderbird than your system configuration. Seriously, why is Firefox so freaking slow and crashy? It's a lot more economical to ditch such bloated software for something that's better, than to replace your HDDs with SSDs.
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boring troll is boring. what part of "it makes everything fucking faster" do you not understand?
I understand that perfectly. But how does it make Firefox and Thunderbird "not flake out"? And if you're not using Firefox or IE, other browsers open pretty much instantly without an SSD.
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Exactly. Do people seriously need these giant amounts of local storage (1 TB, 2 TB?) on their machines?
Maybe it's just me but I've never even half filled the 150 GB drive (10000 rpm Velociraptor FWIW) in my main home computer. And that includes all my photos and music, and a couple of large games. The only things that chew up heaps of space are video files (i.e. home movies, downloaded TV shows and stuff), which sit on the uPnP-capable NAS so I can stream them to my TB (which has inside it, two 1 TB 7200rpm
Nope. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, but until I can get an SSD and not have to spend almost the same amount of money again for a drive to store media and games on, no deal. They are just way too expensive per GB, and I'd rather pay for one HDD to get a lot of space than pay for a HDD PLUS an SSD just to get a speed increase with only slightly more space.
I'm afraid that people jumping big-time on the expensive SSD bandwagon, though, will not encourage makers to decrease prices as fast as if people would have actually smartly waited unt
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You have a personal preference for single hard drives(which is wrong), and you use that to form your judgement of SSDs. It's not going to be cheaper per GB for SSDs any time soon, platter density on HDDs is still going up and it's not tremendously likely to stop any time soon.
On the other hand HDD access speeds haven't increased dramatically since 10k rpm drives were introduced to the consumer market which was about 10 years ago. They've played around with cache, and the data transfer abilities off the driv
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Umm apparently you never seen SSDs back when they were like 5k
$5k? My first SSD was $50k, had a capacity of 128MB and lost all the data when you powered it down... it sure made Windows 3.1. start up fast once you'd copied the files over though.
In fact I'd say the improvement back then compared to a hard drive was much greater than the improvement of my modern SSD relative to a modern hard drive.
Would you employ SSDs in DB intensive tasks? (Score:2, Informative)
I doubt you would. I have a 40 GB Fujitsu MPG3409AT-E hard disk from 2001 that is still running yet the so called best Seagate Pulsar - the "first enterprise-ready" SSD failed after less than a year of database usage.
Bottom line: Do not trust SSDs.
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Based on your claim, it looks to me like the bottom line is not to trust Seagate.
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I doubt you would. I have a 40 GB Fujitsu MPG3409AT-E hard disk from 2001 that is still running yet the so called best Seagate Pulsar - the "first enterprise-ready" SSD failed after less than a year of database usage.
Bottom line: Do not trust SSDs.
Intensive DB read/write is exactly the use case I decided to go with a SSD for. I replaced a Seagate HD with an Intel SSD. The HD had failed in less than 1 year of use. The SSD noticeably sped up the work of every person in the office. So far so good, but even if it dies in 6 months, it would be worthwhile for my staff.
Re:Would you employ SSDs in DB intensive tasks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Would you employ SSDs in DB intensive tasks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, the implied "don't-trust SSDs, trust rust instead" conclusion is bad.
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I don't know how many horror stories I've heard from people who thought they had backups but never tested their backup system to find out if they can read the data they're backing up. I used to joke that I wasn't a backup administrator, that I was a restore administ
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And im sure we can find dozens of ppl who had the MPG3409AT-E fail within months of buying it.
Bottom line: one example dose not make a SSD (Soild Statical Debate.)
As usual, ignores the value of data integrity... (Score:5, Insightful)
While most every hard disk supports and respects proper cache flush semantics, SSDs typically trade performance for data integrity. Although it should be a standard feature, very few SSDs include a capacitor to prevent filesystem/data corruption in the event of power loss.
Unfortunately, the vendors are very secretive about SSD internals, and the algorithms they choose to employ can also have a significant effect on data integrity. At this point in time, there is far too much blind faith required, and many vendors definitely do not deserve it.
Re:As usual, ignores the value of data integrity.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen, and have been able to reproduce reliably, hard disks losing their internal cache data, claiming to have written it to platter when in fact it was not. And I am /not/ talking about battery-backed RAID cache, OS write cache, or anything of that nature; I am speaking specifically of the internal hard disk cache.
When we figured out what was going on, needless to say we were all a bit shaken. But the lesson is learned: your storage needs to have a battery backup system.
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Hard drives tend to use the momentum stored in the spindle itself to at least park heads after a power failure (especially for laptop drives that park away from the media). This presumably works by powering the drive's rails through the motor controller's protection diodes. I'm not sure if they also use it for last-gasp writing of write-cached data, though. i guess it depends on whether the write controller can handle media that is losing speed.
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No, they don't do the last-gasp writing. It simply takes too lo
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The consumer trend seems to be clear (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the consumer trend is pretty clear with respect to SSDs (enterprise-level I think is still uncertain). Consumers like the speed and the battery savings (laptops being incredibly popular now) that SSDs provide, but of course there is no way you are going to get the sheer quantity of storage space that you can get with hard disks.
Consequently, a lot of companies are marketing "home storage servers." I've seen Lenovo, Acer, Asus, etc... all come out with small 4 or 5 bay boxes, usually running Windows Home Server, all aimed at the mid-range consumer market. It makes complete sense to put the platters in a box, where you can keep network-accessible massive storage, and to put the fast, low-power SSD into your client machine.
The problem arises when you need to access what's on that home NAS while you're out on the road. While I think many people have the upload bandwidth for streaming music, I don't think that exists for video (at least, not in the United States, or at least not where I live). So sites like hulu, etc.. will remain popular in that regard for the time being.
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How is enterprise-level "uncertain"? The performance characteristics of SSDs almost _dictate_ their adoption. A single $250-500 SSD can easily substitute for an array of 15KRPM disks in many applications.
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Storage space isn't a problem when I can attach a 500 GB traditional HDD via USB. What I need it price. Right now a 320 GB 7.2K RPM 2.5" drive costs less then A$100, a 300
Value of the switch (Score:5, Interesting)
About 5 months ago I bought a $700 250G SSD for my laptop and ditched the spinning disk. The system is overall faster, and for someone who's used HDs since the 286 days and floppies before then, the performance is oddly different (almost always better). The big bonus though is that my laptop takes about 10 seconds to boot (once past the BIOS) while it used to take about a minute. This has changed the way I use my computer, and is enough to justify the swap. I do have a few other systems I occasionally use, and apart from the OLPC XO-1 (which has its own performance characteristics that are different again from anything else I've seen), it's now kind of irritating to use spinning disks and feel those delays again. As the costs go down, I imagine anyone who's tasted SSDs will spread the technology very broadly among their friends.
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I did something similar a few months back. My desktop has an Intel 80gb SSD and my laptop has the 40gb model. Spinning disks now just make me crazy. The lag, noise, poor performance, etc are just unacceptable. Once you gone SSD its tough to go back. The machine feels like an appliance and its incredible how the bottleneck in typical usage isn't RAM or CPU anymore, its the drive.
Previous to these Intels I tried to save money with the OCZ 60gb model, but it died after a couple of months. Thankfully, it wa
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Just got my first SSD, and I'll never turn back (Score:2)
I dropped my latitude d620 on the concrete floor my desk sits on, and it crashed the hard drive instantly. For the replacement drive I let a friend convince me to shell out for the SSD. It's amazing. I no longer have to worry about bad sectors, my battery lasts longer, the machine is cooler, it's quieter, and the OS loads in like 5 seconds to usable state with virus scanner etc.
I have a couple slow terabyte hard drives in my old system I use for a media system/home file server, but for systems I actually
Re:Just got my first SSD, and I'll never turn back (Score:5, Funny)
I dropped my latitude d620 on the concrete floor my desk sits on, and it crashed the hard drive instantly. For the replacement drive I let a friend convince me to shell out for the SSD. It's amazing. I no longer have to worry about bad sectors, my battery lasts longer, the machine is cooler, it's quieter, and the OS loads in like 5 seconds to usable state with virus scanner etc.
Have you tried dropping your SSD-equipped laptop onto a concrete floor for a comparison test?
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Prices on the article are bunk (Score:5, Insightful)
If your really a budget consumer, and are using the hard drive to get crap done then at the cheapest rate a laptop replacement SSD from newegg is going to cost you like 80 dollars more for a 64 gb SSD than a 500gb hard drive. If your time is worth 50 bucks an hour on the market, and your boot time is reduced by 2.5 minutes your ROI is at break even in around 3 work weeks according to my head math.
Don't chase dimes with dollars.
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Boot times? I daily use windows, mac and linux laptops and workstations and I probably only "boot" every month or so.. suspend/restore is completely rock solid on any OS (hibernate for weekends). Resume from standby on a modern machine only takes 3-5 seconds at most (less on a mac). Windows does require a few more average reboots for
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3 minutes sounds long for boot time. I've never had the need to time it, but around a minute would seem more typical to me.
Three minutes to a usable desktop where you can actually do stuff seems about right for the average prebuilt Windows system that's loaded with manufacturer's crapware. Sure, Windows may boot to the login screen in under a minute, but who gives a crap about that when it chugs for two minutes after logging in before it starts responding to anything you want to do?
I have a single-core Atom with a hard drive that boots to a usable Linux desktop in under 45 seconds, and a dual-core Atom with an SSD that boots to
It's been obvious to me for a while... (Score:2)
It's been obvious to me for a while that drive manufacturers are missing the boat with adding a flash backup area the size of their RAM cache and some caps to give it the ability to save the RAM to flash. This would allow you to return the 'written' status to the OS much faster, _and_ be safe in the event of a power failure.
For more points, add more flash and smarts and use the flash as a cache for 'hot' portions of the drive.
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Makes some older laptops better than new (Score:5, Informative)
We have started to deploy more multimedia intense apps and found most of our 3+ year old laptops where dogs at running them..
We then did some side by side benchmarks between an old laptop with the HD replaced with an SSD vs a new laptop with a new normal HD. Guess what? In MOST tests the old laptop performed BETTER than the new one, despite the new laptop having a faster CPU and main board...
Guess what, although they cost WAY more than a new normal HD per GB, they are WAY cheaper than a new laptop!
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Boy, the equipment manufacturers are going to hate this. Why buy new gear if you can keep the old gear running for less? In a similar vein at my last job most of the desktop systems were 2.8Ghz to 3.2Ghz Pentiums, 32 bit, single core. The desktop guys found that if you increased the RAM to 4Gb that performance really screamed with XP and that given the choice most of our users would rather have had
I was about to ask about heat/battery life... (Score:2)
...but I think I've heard enough from the existing comments.
I'm currently working on my Dell m1530, and it feels about as hot as the pan I use to fry eggs. It also doesn't have the best battery life, especially if I'm trying to watch movies or catch up on work while traveling. It sounds like switching to an SSD will help on both of those fronts.
I just hope that the price of SSDs drops by the time I'm in the market for one. I'm not entirely sure I'd like to drop $400 or $600 in addition to the $1000 for my n
Seagate Momentus XT (Score:2, Interesting)
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Speed, Safety, Heat (Score:2)
silence is golden (Score:2, Interesting)
i dont know about you guys but i dont like the sounds that HDDs make. newer HDDs are much quieter but still audible, so i got a sweet SSD. now my PC runs nicely without moving parts with exception to my media storage HDD drive that spins up when i need it and DVDRW drive when it has media. yep, no fans or water cooling on anything, just silence.
i love my SSD.
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Here's an area where SSDs rock (Score:5, Interesting)
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you just have to worry about the lack of oxygen damaging your brain and your internal organs, but not about endangering your data or the performance of your laptop.
We need to put Slashdot on an encrypted Geeknet.
We don't want Normals seeing that is how we think.
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Value can't always be measured strictly by numbers (Score:3, Insightful)
I think personal enjoyment and your user experience trumps data of Performance per dollar from a chart. If updating your PC to use SSD storage signifigantly improves your user experince on a day to day basis, it's probably worth it.
As an example, what's the difference between a $10 bottle of wine and a $20 one? You could compare alchol levels, etc., but in the end the taste, and palate (ie. user experience) is what matters. Sometimes it's not really possible to put a value on these things using charts and graphs. Your own opinion and what the value is for that convenience/experince is the true measure.
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Not to mention its completely dependant on the person using the machine. My HP Tablet PC could have an SSD in it sure, and I am sure windows seven would be much snappier on that, but when I install steam and load the cut-down list of games that will run on the thing, I reach about 400G used, at which point a new SSD of that size would be worth nearly 50% more than what I paid for the thing in the first place, so a 7200rpm 500G drive was put in as the "next best".
Similarly putting a SSD in my main PC would b
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In a 12" laptop/tablet, yes, yes I do.
As for my desktop PC, I like to keep things simple, a single storage medium means less work when configuring backups (or rebuilding from backups) and makes the thing lighter to boot (don't go to many lan parties any more, maybe 1-2 a year, but its enough to want a light machine). I have done the whole "multi drive raid/complex mounted file-system" and frankly, its more trouble than its worth (I have used both on-board and card based "fake raid" as well as some good Arec
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No, the weight of a HDD, or multiple HDD AND an SSD is too much, assuming I am trying to use an affordable SSD with HDD mounted for the bulk storage.
The reason I don't use a SSD on my desktop machine is that a 1TB+ SSD typically isn't bootable and costs more than my PC, and complex "hybrid" setups are a pain and more trouble than they are worth.
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Oh, and a further point, for 1TB or so of storage (bootable) you would need a raid0 or JBOD of 2x 500GB [auspcmarket.com.au] or 4x 250GB [auspcmarket.com.au], both of which adding up to over $4000AU, now I agree that will be damn fast, however that much speed doesn't matter to me as much as spending all that cash on new video card/mobo/cpu/ram would.