Are SSDs Finally Worth the Money?

Lucas123 writes "The price of 2.5-in solid state drives have dropped by 3X in three years, making many of the most popular models less than $1 per gigabyte or about 74 cents per gig. Hybrid drives, which include a small amount of NAND flash cache alongside spinning disk, in contrast have reached near price parity with hard drives that hover around the .23 cents per gig. While HDDs cannot compare to SSDs in terms of IOPS generated when used in a storage array or server, it's debatable whether they offer performance increases in a laptop significant enough that justify paying three times as much compared with a high-end a hard drive or a hybrid drive. For example, an Intel 520 Series SSD has a max sequential read speed of 456MB/sec compared to a WD Black's 122MB/sec. The SSD boots up in 9 seconds compared to the HDD's 21 seconds and the hybrid drive's 12-second time. So the question becomes, should you pay three times as much for an SSD for twice the performance, or almost the same speeds when compared to a hybrid drive?"

Re:Not sure if you can post anonymously early or n

[pecosdave]

If you're pushing the cloud so much is storage much of an issue at all? Seriously I can put Chromium OS on a 4GB thumb drive and boot up a laptop and do web stuff all day long.

Sometimes people don't have access to the internet but still need a computer. Remember the old days before the cloud existed? Yeah - you can't get on the Internet everywhere. Some of these rural areas people still think dial up is not only an option but they still think it's normal.

Re:Hybrid Drives

[EvanED]

Sort of; SRT is software-controlled though (basically software-RAID-based), and is limited to Windows. (Possibly you could set something up with the LVM or similar on Linux though.) Definitely a very different beast from hybrid drives, at least if my assumptions as to how the latter work are any indication.

(You also need a newish computer and it's Intel only.)

Hybrid is nowhere near the same as SSD

[jest3r]

The post makes it sound like Hybrid is close to SSD ... it is not ...

Max. read speed (4K blocks)
SSD: 456MB/sec.
Standard: 122MB/sec.
Hybrid: 106MB/sec.

Max. write speed
SSD: 241MB/sec.
Standard: 119MB/sec.
Hybrid: 114MB/sec.

1.19GB file transfer
SSD: 15 sec.
Standard: 34 sec.
Hybrid: 29 sec.

Re:In a laptop performance isn't the only issue

[GIL_Dude]

I've gone from spinning drives to SSD in my notebooks and I won't be going back. As a person responsible for both coding and creating system images, I rebuild my machines all the time. The build time is a lot faster on an SSD. Besides just the OS, it takes about 15 minutes to install Visual Studio 2010 + SP1 on an SSD as opposed to nearly an hour for a spinning drive. (BTW, I am a real poster - not that Visual Studio troll / shill we've seen recently). I also run a single VM on my notebook. That boots up and runs almost like a real computer instead of the pokey slowness I had before with a spinning drive. Honestly all of the other things mentioned here are valid. Less heat, better shock resistance, better battery life, etc. But don't count performance out either. As with most things, it depends on the workloads you are running. For my workload, SSD makes a lot of sense.

Re:Hybrid Drives

[Baloroth]

But for the most part on the desktop Solid State doesn't make too much sense.

Are you kidding? SSDs are about 5-10 times faster than HDD. Considering that in many computers, the HDD is by far the slowest component, not a bottleneck for some applications, but usually a minor one for everything (everything comes from storage at some point). Upgraded to an SSD and saw a stunning gain in responsiveness for nearly every single usage on my desktop. It was obviously massive for boot times (probably ~3 times faster), but overall everything is vastly snappier. And I'm only running a SATA II connection from my motherboard, which means I'm only getting about 1/2 the top speed of the SSD.

Re:Hybrid Drives

[DJRumpy]

As in all things, the value is in the eye of the buyer. What matters to you may be unimportant to someone else.

SSD offers speed, lower power requirements, and low heat but can't match spindle capacities and has a higher cost.

Spindle drives have large capacity and low cost but high heat, and higher power requirements and poor performance by comparison to SSD.

Hybrids have capacity and low cost, good performance, higher power requirements, and high heat.

SSD's are an easy choice for laptops (in general) unless the laptop has a large storage capacity requirement.

If portability isn't a concern, you can easily stripe 3 standard HDD's and get near the same performance as an SSD for the same cost but with higher capacity.

There are simply too many variations and 'solutions' to use a cookie cutter approach, but if you break it down into the major categories above, and grade on which is most important (Price, Power, Speed, Capacity, Heat), it becomes easier to judge which is a better fit.

Re:Hybrid Drives

[Jedi Alec]

If you are getting a desktop, then you are either in it for raw power. In that case you get a system with a lot more memory, and faster physical drives, if you are not in it for raw power then you are in it for budget reasons. But for the most part on the desktop Solid State doesn't make too much sense.

As a primary disk an SSD is truly a joy a to work with. There's no need to use them to store tons of movies or MP3's, a simple 64 or 128 GB drive to run the operating system and most commonly used applications is more than enough to experience a truly significant increase in speed.

Yes. Next question.

[sjbe]

While HDDs cannot compare to SSDs in terms of IOPS generated when used in a storage array or server, it's debatable whether they offer performance increases in a laptop significant enough that justify paying three times as much compared with a high-end a hard drive or a hybrid drive.

It's only debatable if you are severely limited in budget or have SSDs have pretty much every advantage except price. Even if the price is 3x as high, the cost of the hard drive is only a smallish percentage of the whole cost of the device - maybe 20-30% total. While price is an important consideration, if my budget can accommodate an SSD I'll go with it every time. Sure, if/when I need a few terabytes of storage space then a spinning platter is the way to go (for now) but that's not true of most devices anymore. I have a server for mass storage needs but 128GB-256GB is usually more than enough for any day to day needs and a SSD in that range is affordable already and dropping fast. My phone and laptop and my primary desktop all have solid state drives. I have two spinning platters in my house - one in an older desktop that sees limited use and the other on my file server. The new laptops we're buying for work have are solid state as well. I don't see myself ever buying a laptop without a solid state drive ever again.

Re:Verizon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since people don't seem to get parent:

http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html [blogspot.com]

SSDs are better in almost every way

[sjbe]

Bingo - drop survivability and heat generation. These are two of the best reasons to use SSD in a laptop, and not HDD. Nothing to do with performance.

Solid state drives are pretty much better in every meaningful way except price per GB. Speed, shock resistance, noise, heat, latency, and power consumption are all better in solid state drives. If you need a lot of storage space (terabyte+) a spinning platter remains the way to go for now just due to cost but otherwise there really is no other advantage to them. Price is an important consideration sometimes but unless you are on an extremely tight budget or need huge amounts of space, I can't really see any reason to pick a spinning platter drive.