Notebook Storage SSDs and HDs Compared 149
The Raindog sends us a particularly timely showdown article comparing seven 2.5" mobile hard drives, four of them HDs and three SSDs, across a wide range of application, file-copy, power-consumption, and noise-level tests. Tom's Hardware was recently forced to issue a correction to a claim, which we discussed here, that SSDs aren't actually much more power-thrifty than HDs. The Tech Report's in-depth comparison provides some data points on the question of whether solid-state storage is ready to supplant traditional mechanical hard drives, but notes that the price disparity is still substantial.
It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair enough, but is this particularly relevant to the market? Sure, it would be nice, but would you rather pay a couple of hundred quid or just look after the computer in the first place?
The way I see it is that geeks would replace their laptop early enough that the HD will probably last long enough and that casual users won't want the extra expense. I think to be honest, the performance difference is the only real advantage and as soon as the prices come down, I'm getting one!
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Depends on how it's hit. A drive mid-access is much more likely to take damage from a minor to moderate fall than a LCD.
But besides that, the value of the data of many laptops is far greater than the cost of a screen replacement and SSD's are at least on price-parity with the cost of basic data recovery fees for platter-based hard drives.
Oh, and you have the benefit of significantly faster data access in many/most cases.
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And they arent afraid of losing business due to SSDs.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Interesting)
flash based drives simplify mil spec laptops, though. imagine having to design a laptop with a conventional HDD knowing that it has to survive being thrown into the back of a jeep carelessly, or be able to still work after a soldier pile dived on top of it trying to avoid machine gun fire, or even expected to still work if it had taken a pretty big shock as a result of nearby artillery or grenade blasts.
they used to have really good shock absorbing cages to protect the drive...
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Take a peek at these: http://www.amrel.com/federal_military_computer/rocky_patriot_rugged_notebook.html [amrel.com]
This isn't even going into the fire systems equipment that is ruggedized.
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Curiously, this real world ruggedized example using HDD storage doesn't really seem relevant to the question of whether SSDs are suitable from a reliability perspective.... This example is existing equipment that meets requirements, and probably very sensitive to price (as there are undoubtedly other vendors who compete for similar business).
Adding $200 or more to the cost of the device would likely price it out of most government bids if the reliability characteristics meet requirements.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really a matter of looking after the computer in the first place. There is demand for a rugged computer that can be manhandled without it breaking apart. When I come home I want to toss my computer on my desk like I do with my keys and wallet. After I've surfed a while I want to toss my computer on the coffee table like I do with magazines. The whole "holy laptop" approach where you have to carry it around on a silk cushion and press the keys one at a time so as not to hurt its feelings is the reason I've never bothered buying one.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, there are degrees of ruggedness between carrying it on a pillow and beating the shit out of it. I've had a laptop at my side pretty much constantly for upwards of 10 years now. At no time have I ever treated it as anything other than a tool. I don't baby my tools. I don't coo to it wistfully at the end of the day. I don't 'press the keys one at a time'. I also don't fling it across the house - but I don't do that to my socket wrenches either.
In all those 10 years of laptop lugging, I have never required any repairs or replacement due to mishaps. If you truly haven't bought a laptop because you picture them as fragile, I highly recommend you pick one up and give it a try. There is something to be said for carrying around a fully functional workstation wherever you go. Just remember that there is a continuum between 'holy laptop' and 'throw it across the room' - it's not a quantum step.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never had to repair anything due to mishaps, and I treat my laptop with reasonable care. However, I have had to replace two laptop hard drives on three occasions due to drive failures in the last ten years. Actually, make that two in the past five years, and none prior to that. One was an acoustic failure (loud, whining drive, but worked perfectly for the better part of a year in that state before I bothered to get it replaced). The other one... I put the machine to sleep, woke it up a minute later, and the drive wouldn't spin up, making a click-of-death "can't find track zero" noise. My suspicion is that it was a failure of the head due to abrasion as it drags across the ramp when parking.
Mechanical failures don't just happen to people who abuse their machines. Yes, they happen much more frequently to people who treat their machines like excrement, but they also happen randomly for no apparent reason... usually due to flaws in the mechanical design. Some drives have bad ramps that put too much stress on the heads when they park. Some drives have bearings that eventually start to leak oil all over the disk surface. And so on. I'd be much happier if I never had to deal with a Winchester drive again... particularly in laptops.
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I've had a laptop fall a meter onto a hardwood floor in a foreign country, simply due to a mishap involving a large lacy doily on the top of the dresser in the room I was staying in. Humorously, the fall fixed more things than it broke. Years later, however, I had a laptop as my primary (and only) machine while living abroad, and it went everywhere with me. That was the one that had the hard drive failure, and THAT, above all else, is what makes me long for a hard drive without the moving parts.
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I also don't fling it across the house - but I don't do that to my socket wrenches either.
Yes, I don't fling my "socket wrenches" across the house either, at that point I refer to them as "what happens when dinner's not ready on time" or simply "reminders".
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You don't know what you are missing - a well flung socket wrench can inflict major damage to any household environment!
1 Fling socket wrench
2 ...
3 Profiteroles
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Who "tosses" their keys or wallet around, let alone a laptop? That's ridiculous.
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Drop, or toss?
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Funny)
I dropped my fujitsu laptop multiple times this year and it styiklkl worklsd fklaweklersdsdklerty
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was babysitting my mother's new puppy a few months back.
I was happily IRC:ing away from the couch, when I heard the puppy standing by the door.
For those of you that don't know, the thing about puppies is that they do prefer to pee outside, but their bladder system isn't really that good, so when they decide they want to go out, you only have a few seconds to avoid an accident.
So, I quickly put my laptop on the table, throw my headset away, and start to quickly move towards the door. Unfortunately, I didn't really put the computer down very good - half of it was hanging outside the table. As I tried to move past it, my knee touched it, and that was enough to throw the computer of the table, letting it fall for 4-5 decimeters before it hit the floor. It gave up a faint "peeep!" before it died.
My hard drive only kindof worked after that - booting was fine, but there were lots of broken clusters that sent the computer into a (seemingly) infinite loop, forcing the computer to use all CPU resources waiting for the hard drive, in effect freezing it. Slowly but surely, more and more clusters broke down, more and more files got damaged, until I finally bought a new drive. Trust me - at that point, I really, really wanted to buy a SSD.
Oh well, at least the puppy got out in time...
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:4, Informative)
HDDs are really not the main thing to worry about when a laptop is dropped or damaged. Screens are much more expensive than HDs, and much harder to replace. Now, data on HDDs is another story, potentially very valuable or important and impossible to replace, but it can be backed up.
Also, for the same price as a single SSD you could buy literally dozens of HDDs with more than double the storage as the SSD, so in terms of price, even if you pretend SSDs are super reliable and don't even need backup they are still more expensive than dealing with the unreliability of HDs. Obviously, it is much more convient when your hardware doesn't fail, even if it can be replaced fairly easily and cheaply, with minimal data loss, but HDDs are only one compontent of several that can be damaged and make your computer unusable, and with their incredibly limited storage SSDs are much more inconvient. You won't lose your data even if the thing is destroyed, because it won't fit on there in the first place.
Obviously, SSDs have some places where they excel, but at current prices and storage levels they are way over-hyped and over-used. The eee is an especially glaring example of this, putting a ridiculously high end component into a low end machine, forcing a incredibly low amount of storage.
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Not to be too picky o
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Many people will value their data more than the monetary value of damaged equipment. That's one of the main reason that data rescue companies continue to thrive.
Especially for people that have important data for work on their laptops can have a greater loss from a single damaged cluster than from the entire hardware.
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Again, backup. Far, far cheaper than an SSD and much, much more reliable. In fact, if your data is at all valuable you still need backup for your SSD. It only provides extra protection against drops (and maybe magnets, I am not sure how they affect SSDs if at all). It does nothing for other forms of physical damage or simple rm -rf destruction or corruption of data.
If the data is so valuable that it is worth thousands to slightly lessen the chances of loss of whatever amount of data is collected between bac
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It's not worth thousands, but hundreds and that's enough for me. And while it's probably not the best solution to carry valuable data on a laptop, I've yet to see someone come up with a different solution.
A solution that allows an instant start when arriving at the client site, that has little to none drawbacks compared to a stationary machine and with everything under my control including admin rights and network access.
Carrying around an industrial workstation is not feasible, I don't like using a client'
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Oh well, at least the puppy got out in time...
What a relief!
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Why didn't you stand up and put it on the couch? A much safer option, as long as you aren't stupid enough to just sit on it.
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Ideally we'd stop using silly measurements like feet and miles.
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I wrote another comment recently [slashdot.org] about building my own flash drive with a couple of 16gb CF chips and an adapter from Addonics. I left out *why* I did this. I'm very rough with my tablet PC, and a spill earlier this year killed the mechanical drive. That was the 3rd drive to die for various reasons relating to rough use over the previous four years in this particular tablet. Six months of very rough use later, I've had absolutely no problems with the flash chips. The notebook is as fast with my homemade dri
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In my experience, it's not so much shock as it is heat that kills the drive. When you encase a high-performance hard drive in a cheap plastic coffin, it can't withstand much sustained usage. Now if only laptop makers would turn that drive caddy into a semi-decent heatsink, things would probably be different.
How can a 32gb Thumb Drive (Score:1, Interesting)
be $160 and a 32gb SSD cost 3x that....am I missing something? transfer speed?
Re:How can a 32gb Thumb Drive (Score:5, Informative)
You're missing SLC vs. MLC and high-performance controllers.
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And high quality tested parts. At least that was what I read in an article by someone that checked if the SSD drives were ready for deployment in his server farm. These guys like to do rigorous testing and good information, at least the professional ones.
Don't forget that these controllers are brand spanking new, and they are not in their 1000th revision like the controllers used on the hard drives. I'm really looking forward to the Intel designed drives. I presume that they will use their own controllers -
Re:How can a 32gb Thumb Drive (Score:5, Informative)
The thumb drive will die young if you use it as a hard drive, they're typically only designed for 10-15k write cycles (per cell). They also use MLC cells, which store two bits each - that doubles the capacity, but quadruples the error rate. Errors are usually corrected via parity/ECC, but obviously if you have more errors, you're more likely to exceed the ECC threshold.
There's also the issue with performance. A thumb drive might get 10-15mb/sec on a good day, 20 if you pay way too much money for a "dual channel" unit. Hard drives are expected to deliver 40mb/sec minimum these days, else your apps will take forever to load.
If you really want to be a wacko, you could try RAID-0 across a bunch of thumb drives. You'll get the performance back, but good god you're playing with fire.
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And how many users will write over 320 terrabytes to their hard drive during it's lifetime? That's 190 days of continuous writing at 20MByte/sec. I wish people would stop citing write cycle limits, I have yet to hear from anyone who's actually failed a drive this way.
It's called... wear leveling algorithms.
The future is actually probably going to be a hybrid of SLC and MLC. I read a paper recently on this. They got about the same performance as SLC only, using only a small amount of SLC.
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Of the two times I've seen a laptop dropped (to the point of something breaking), the screen broke, not the hard drive.
SSD's do nothing for this.
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Take the hard drive out of the broken screen unit and put it in a new unit.
Sixty seconds later you are back in business.
The cost of the hardware is immaterial compared to the contents on the drive.
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Good point. I hadn't thought of that.
Re:It's not the power efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
For me the selling points is noise. Most of the time whatever machines I'm near are plugged in, but having a nearly silent media pc in the living room, having a silent instant-on music player in the bedroom, and having a whir-less office would increase my happiness for many hours out of the day.
Power savings would be pretty nice, too, but much less often.
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Noise ?
A decently built PC should be practically noiseless, if you choose the right parts. An SSD does eliminate one spindle, but the HDD should already be the quietest spindle in the system - the CPU/GPU/PSU fans are the troublemakers here.
If your hard drive is noticeably chatty, either insulate it with grommets/rubber bands, or just stop buying Maxtor.
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GPUs almost never have fans unless you're using very recent accelerated 3d cards--way overkill even for most video playback machines. If you put together gaming machines a lot, you'll think all
GPUs have fans, but if you put together more general machines fans in the GPU are still pretty uncommon.
Likewise, most CPUs don't need fans unless you're going with very recent models.
Fanless PSUs are less common, but always fairly easily available.
I've been putting together quiet PCs for a decade now, and the HD is
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On warm sea-level areas (such as a caribbean beach), high RPM harddrives tend to fail rather quickly. SSDs would operate just fine.
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but if you drop them enough don't all the bits fall out?
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does that address the problem of bit clumping?
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I just dropped a new 160 gb laptop and I lost all the data. I-m very interested in these new SSD drives.
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How about a link? (Score:5, Informative)
I think someone forgot a critical link... try this for the Tech Report article:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079 [techreport.com]
Re:How about a link? (Score:4, Funny)
I think someone forgot a critical link...
I think someone forgot they're on /.
Re:How about a link? (Score:5, Informative)
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And I thought I couldn't find the link because I was a damn retard or something.
Obviously the goggles do work (Score:2)
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Nobody reads them anyway, so apparently the editors have decided not to bother including links anymore.
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What about recovery? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about recovery? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've read that the algorithms used in SSD's are usually proprietary. The problem with SSD's is that they DIDN'T fix the wear leveling problem. It exists, just a lot slower now due to the algorithms referenced above. If my drive dies, I'll have to find a service that can recover my files, but they will have to be certified in samsung, seagate, white label, etc. I really feel uncomfortable with that idea.
You could just backup your files...
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Backup your files? Now that's just silly.
Back it up to what? Another ssd if they become standard? Tape drive? Pshh. Not a chance. Look long term. The only other option would be to pay someone to store my crap and frankly, I value my security/privacy far to much for that.
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Then use Mozy and add an encryption key. Face it, the NSA has better things to look at then whatever is squirreled away on your hard drive. They'll use the supercomputing crackers on those things first, and your porn collection later.
For more fun, encrypt it beforehand as well, use steganography, AND
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Re:What about recovery? (Score:5, Informative)
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It is my understanding (I read it on the internet somewhere) that every flash device has some form of wear leveling built in, except for the actual raw flash chips. So if you solder flash chips onto some device, you'll need to format those flash chips with jffs2 or similar because jffs2 will perform its own wear leveling.
As for compact flash as a hard drive, I have been using an 8GB Transcend 266x CF connected to an addonics CF->Sata adapter for use as the OS drive in my gentoo based mythtv system. Man
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Hmm, lets see.
(60 / 50 * 10000) / 365 = 32.something years. 33 years if you work for marketing.
Well, I don't know, but that's *really* efficient write leveling.
What do these drives do if you always write to the oldest data still in use, e.g. when doing round robin logging over the full size of the drive? Or are there other use cases that would mean a shorter life-span?
It's a manufacturers claim. I suspect the actual lifetime for casual notebook users will be pretty high. But if you continuously watch movies
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Wear leveling will dynamically move around clusters as needed.
Look at it a different way: What emerging technology will stay standard enough for 5 years (much less 30) that it will still be in vaugely common use? C'mon. These brand new SSD's are great but in a few years they'll be the early adopter junk that no one wants. Will you really care about a 32GB SSD when your average SSD is 500GB?
I sure don't pay any mind to the pile of 40GB hard drives i have laying around my house.
Re:What about recovery? (Score:4, Insightful)
The larger the drive, the more space to spread the wear.
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Not only that, I think there are multiple ways to do wear leveling and I don't see even the highest quality thumb drives use the best ones. There is no need for that - they are not produced for this kind of scenario the GP is describing.
I'm trying a 8 GB USB drive with high data rate and low seek time as a drive for my fanless PC. Since I have 1 GB RAM and not much memory intensive applications, I do expect even that drive to last forever.
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I'd also wager two 128 GiB SSDs in a Series1 TiVo will easily last at least until February 2009, if they were to make some with PATA interfaces
Seriously though, I think it would last even longer than that. A Series2 with dual tuners and a typical load of TiVoToGo pulling and video podcast downloads should have no problems either.
I haven't run any numbers on a Series3 with two CableCards constantly recording 1080i HD programming, but I'd want one 1 TiB SATA SSD and one 1 TiB eSATA SSD on it for the test.
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> Try this experiment: Get a normal thumb drive (a high quality brand so you know it has good wear levelling), and put run mkswap and swapon on it, and just run your system for a few hours.
For me it would do nothing. My swap is nearly never used except for hibernation.
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Virtually all notebook users write 50GB to their drive a day? I somehow greatly doubt that.
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Nah, about ten thousand, and - as far as I know - that's the guaranteed number of write cycles. And the Samsung drive reviewed uses 64 GB of single bit memory, so it's not old. What it is is expensive. Both of these things are in the freakin' article by the way (and they seem to be correct if I must believe my internet sources).
SLC vs. MLC flash (Score:3, Informative)
I thought modern, high density flash memory had only a ~3000 cycle life. The old, single bit/gate memory was good for 100,000 write cycles, but I think those parts topped out at a few megabytes.
Single-level-cell NAND flash is still produced, for use in the faster, (slightly) more expensive drives with longer warranties. And multi-level-cell NAND flash is usually guaranteed for 10,000 writes, not 3,000. And the number quoted on the data sheet is the minimum longevity for each sector; more writes than that are possible. The CF controller doesn't retire a sector until it starts returning too many just-barely-correctable errors.
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Practical observations (Score:3, Insightful)
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Reliability = Good, Speed = Good, Space = Awful , Cost = Not this decade, Charlie Brown.
And for all those saying "no moving parts - what if I drop my laptop?" - If you drop your lappy hard enough to break a modern drive, you'll probably be shopping for a replacement. Unlike those "tests", laptops don't land flat and square.
(queue all the "but I dropped my laptop and the only thing that broke was the hard drive" posts)
Re:Practical observations (Score:5, Interesting)
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Us Army guys had one of those in Iraq too - we called it the "Whore"-Drive. I destroyed my laptop drive there, but it was mainly intentional. I was trying to connect it to the crappy wireless we had, and I got so frustrated that I punch my laptop. Repeatedly. The HD didn't like that.
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I got so frustrated that I punch my laptop
Never punch inanimate objects. You cannot win. Something will probably break, and both options are bad. I found this out when I got cross and punched a monitor. It was a while ago, so it was a CRT.
I never punched a computer again.
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And then we feed your corpse to pigs. Iraqi Pigs.
They have pigs in Iraq? Glad to see they've relaxed a bit.
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I dropped my laptop once - actually, it kind of cartwheeled up into the air as I pulled it out of my backpack, then crashed on the ground.
No my hard drive didn't break - but it landed square on the end with the wireless card sticking out of it, and crushed the card. Fortunately the rest of it was fine.
In fact, I've never had a notebook drive die in any way (though maybe by saying so I've jinxed myself). Lots of desktop drives have died on me though...and I never dropped any of those.
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Maybe you need a modern laptop hard drive [akihabaranews.com]
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Yep. That's why I said "Not this decade". Maybe sometime in the next ...
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The storage space is not "fair" at all, and in many ways the reliability isn't either.
All those design points are incongruous (Score:4, Interesting)
I would love an SSD for r/w performance that blows a mechanical drive out of the water.
I would love an SSD that doesn't use much power.
I would love an SSD that's shockproof.
I would love an SSD that runs cool.
I would love an SSD that's silent.
I would love an SSD that roughly the same price performance of a mechanical drive.
The problem is, it can't be all of those things. It can't even be most of those things. So pick the ones you need.
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I would love an SSD for r/w performance that blows a mechanical drive out of the water.
It looks like the OCZ drive does this.
I would love an SSD that doesn't use much power.
It looks like the OCZ drive does this, too.
I would love an SSD that's shockproof.
Isn't this a natural result of the "solid state" part of "solid state disk"?
I would love an SSD that runs cool.
Direct result of "doesn't use much power".
I would love an SSD that's silent.
Isn't this a natural result of the "solid state" thing, again?
I would love an SSD that roughly the same price performance of a mechanical drive.
Newegg lists an out-of-stock OCZ drive (maybe the same one?) for $450 for 32GB. The cheapest laptop drive they have is $50 (60 GB). So the OCZ drive costs around 9x as much as a cheap HDD for performance 2-4 times better than the HDDs in the article,
The best thing since the MOUSE (Score:4, Insightful)
SSDs are the best thing to happen to PCs since the invention of the mouse.
I have had a MemoRight GT for 3 months now, and my laptop feels amazing. I am disappointed Tom didn't include one in his review.
Because the seek speed is 40x + than an HDD, data access is blazing fast on even the cheaper SSDs. The hangup is in the slow read/write speeds and problems with random access. MemoRight GT is the first SSD I saw that was faster than HDDs in all of these areas, and hence it not only outperforms I/O wise, you get the full benefit of fast access... And this will make your PC feel 4x faster.
Everything becomes faster. Web pages load faster. Email arrives faster. Windows moves faster. No more HDD cache writing lag or "what is my HDD doing" moments.
I don't care that much for battery life, though I am sure some do. As Tom concludes, that is pretty much a spec you just need to look out for, so if you want it, look for a drive that has it.
What I do love though is the silence. Anyone who has gone through an HDD failure is sensitive to HDD sounds probably more than they know, or would like.
SSDs make no sound, and there are no strange vibrations.
I spent close to 2K on the drive, but it was worth every penny. If I buy a new SSD when the 3rd generation drives arrive, my Memoright will still always have a place in one of my notebooks.
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Because the seek speed is 40x + than an HDD, data access is blazing fast on even the cheaper SSDs. The hangup is in the slow read/write speeds and problems with random access.
Does the operating system knows about this ? I mean, can the OS adjust its internal parameters to optimize the global speed. I'd guess with a slow write you'd want to avoid swapping or saving temp files as much as possible. If the read is fast, you don't need to pre-fetch files/programs in memory. Is there some kind of load balancing between memory speed/size, HDD speed/size, SSD, etc...?
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The OS can't tell the difference, but memory is still fastest, so I wouldn't say much needs to change as far as caching and swapping behavior. What is gone though are the drive caches... the caches on board the hard drives that pre-load data in an attempt to be faster. I am sure it improves performance overall, but sometimes the drives need to deal with whatever is queued in their caches before dealing with what you've told them to do, and hence a delay. Of course, the OS doesn't know about these either, so
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Since the mouse was invented in 1970, this means that the mouse was the best thing to happen to PCs ever. Since the compact, self contained disk units became available with ST506 in 1980, several years after the first personal computers, I'd have to vote for hard disks as the best thing ever.
And since you had to assemble the very first PC yourself (the Altair 8800 -- gad how I wanted one of these, even though I had access to much, mu
Some quick observations re power (Score:2)
When I add a 512MB Kingston mem stick, I can copy from the big HD fine.
When I put my newer 1GB MiniTraveller (Kingston) and try to write the HD goes offline - too much power draw from the Hub.
Had the same problem with an Exigo 4GB.
Also have a 6GB WD Pocketdrive (real hard disk, tiny). Never have any problem doing copies from the big disk to that.
So, my guess is that SSD's are fin
Reason given for Macbook Air SSD (Score:2)
I seem to recall the big selling point on the Macbook Air was instant on.... as in it didn't need to spin up to access the drive. Is this still a big feature for SSDs?
I still like the idea of not waiting for my drive to spin up when starting, waking from sleep, etc. Especially as I tend to max out my drives no matter how big they are.... so swapping happens and everything is just a little slower in general.
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Unfortunately, they're not very _big_. 32 Gig for a hard drive is fairly pitiful these days: the hard drives stacked against SSD in Tom's Hardware's article were typically 10 times the disk size. So our soldier boy in the story above, where they had 200 movies they lost in an attack on their campsite, would have had to have 10 times as many drives. The power savings and stability are great for small scenarios and high availability resources, such as laptop drives or small, encrypted filesystems. But for ov
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http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/09/samsungs-low-power-128gb-ssds-go-mass-production-on-the-cheap/ [engadget.com]