SSD Prices Down 46% Since 2011 292
crookedvulture writes "Hard drive prices have yet to return to normal after last year's Thailand flooding. There's good news on the solid-state front, though. The current generation of SSDs has steadily become much cheaper over the last year or so. SSD prices have dropped an average of 46% since early 2011. Intel has largely shied away from discounting its drives, but the aggressive competition between other players in the market seems to have forced its hand. There's no indication that competition is waning, suggesting the downward trend will continue. Right now, an impressive number of drives are available for less than a dollar per gigabyte."
hard drive prices/GB are also dropping (Score:5, Interesting)
SSD prices just fell from completely ludicrous to ridiculous as part of the normal drop in prices per GB of storage
Hard drive prices down? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Hard drive prices down? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hard drive prices down? (Score:5, Insightful)
Paranoid much? I post that link because the guys at coding horror see no problem with plopping down a grand on a drive and like /. is full of geeks that know what they are doing so you can't blame it on noob mistakes.
Yes you can. I've seen Jeff Atwood be very clueless and noobish indeed. He's a programmer, more of a web developer than anything else, not an internationally recognized authority on SSDs. He just likes them because they're fast, and he (and his buddies) had a bad string of luck with them. Every time you link to that one blogpost on codinghorror, you're linking to one guy's anecdote, nothing more. He doesn't give any technical reason to justify his opinion that SSDs are inherently failure prone. He just says he and his friend had a lot of failures, conflates that into a general problem, and uses a stupid sexist analogy to cement the idea that SSDs are fast but inherently unreliable into the skulls of idiots like you.
i would also point out that article isn't even a year and a half old so if you can provide your OWN link showing this miracle breakthrough that has eliminated SSD failures I'm sure the guys here would be happy to read it.
The 'miracle breakthrough' is neither a miracle nor a breakthrough, it's just hard work. SSD reliability depends a great deal on SSD firmware, because managing flash storage is complex. Lots of SSD firmware was written with more of an eye towards time-to-market (companies trying to carve out marketshare early) than wringing out all the bugs before they shipped.
If you want a reliable SSD, stick with the vendors who have managed to sell drives to major OEMs. For instance, if you can get a drive closely related to any of the ones Apple OEMs for MacBooks, you're probably in good shape because Apple does extremely strict qualification (acceptance) testing on all storage devices they ship.
If you go down to the comments you will see failure after failure, every major brand and model, and these guys again do NOT go cheap so you can use the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) excuse either.
Many of the failures reported in Atwood's initial blogpost (and lots of them from the comments) were brands like OCZ and other "enthusiast" overclocker kiddie brands. OCZ in particular is well known for its cavalier attitude about treating customers as SSD firmware beta testers.
We are talking top o' the line drives by reputable companies like Intel crapping all over themselves.
Just curious, did you mean the comments like this one?
"Over at blekko, we've had 3 SSD failures after 1.5 years, out of 700 drives. These are Intel X-25M 160G2 drives." - Greg Lindahl
That's an actual statistically significant sample, not just an anecdote! And it's a very low failure rate; HDD vendors would probably kill for 0.43% over 3 years.
And then there's the comment with a link to Anandtech which gives some more real data, i.e. return rates recorded by a large French etailer for several major brands:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/3
(the worst is OCZ at almost 3% -- so even keeping in mind OCZ's questionable practices, the picture is quite a bit different from what you're trying to paint, eh?)
And there's also a ton of anecdotal comments which say "I have a SSD and I never had a hint of trouble with it, shrug", which actually seem to outweigh the anecdotal problem reports by a fair amount, even in spite of the well known principle that usually complaints are overrepresented on message boards and comment threads (satisfied people don't care enough to post, pissed off people do).
So unless you can provide data of your own I'm gonna call paranoia, since that link is one of the best I've found on the subject and the guys at CH are all pros, frankly I'd be more likely to listen to them than some random "Works4Me" Internet Post.
The things
Re:hard drive prices/GB are also dropping (Score:5, Interesting)
Between my $500 video card, two 28" monitors, quad-core CPU, and 8GB of high-speed RAM, it was definitely my shiny new OCZ Agility 3 that made the biggest impression on my when I booted my computer for the first time to install the OS. Those things are so fast it truly is ridiculous.
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OCZ Agility 3
Have you ever benchmarked that thing? Moves more MB/s than any other technology I've ever been lucky enough to touch... Kind of makes my head spin.
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Not to get off topic, but I've found a really high res 27" display to be better than two displays of any size. I used to have dual 24"s and I switched to a 2560x1440 (WQHD) display and I haven't looked back. It was quite difficult to make effective use of two 24"s even, as I could hardly see the one while looking at the other. Now there is no annoying bezel, and plenty of pixel density!
But I agree, SSD's rock. The only machine I have that doesn't boot the OS from an SSD is a laptop that only supports on
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No sir. That would be terrible. I write code, and I have two files open side by side next to each other. I have a second monitor, which I use to full screen things, but I prefer one large view with everything on it, side by side, so I don't have several inches of plastic in the way. Right now I have 4 things open and can see everything that is going on in all 4 places from one screen. Its great.
Your friends with widescreen monitors should just stand it up, so they have more vertical real estate. The
Half of the width of a 1080p-class monitor (Score:2)
I find that having large monitors creates problems (especially when designing web applications), because you have to be careful that you aren't making the page too wide.
How so? If your monitor is 1920 pixels wide, and you're running Windows 7 or certain Linux window managers, try dragging a web browser window to the left or right edge of the screen, and it'll snap to cover the left or right half. Or you can focus your browser, Ctrl+right-click something else in the taskbar, and choose Tile Vertically. If a web site displays well in this 960px wide window, it'll display well on a 1024px wide netbook or a 1024px wide iPad.
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Even my cheap ass Kingston SSD made a huge difference in the responsiveness of my system. Office suites such as Outlook, Word, and the like are very disk-bound in performance, so it's no surprise that an SSD would make life much easier for business users. Starting Outlook or Word used to take forever, and now it just takes an annoying amount of time. The super-fast Windows boot time now lets me do away with sleep and hibernation. I just shut my system down and start each day afresh!
Re:hard drive prices/GB are also dropping (Score:5, Informative)
Only if it's Win 7 32-bit. If he's using the 64-bit version (which is a good bet) he'll get the full 8.
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I'm sure you mean GB, and you had me confused because I thought for a moment you were speaking of SATA speed.
But you would be incorrect, Windows 7 x64 is fully capable of running 8 GB of RAM.
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I have Windows 7 x64 in a system where it recognizes 16GB of RAM.
Of course, most of that's got sucked up by Firefox...
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Where are you getting that number? Most people who have Windows 7 are on 64-bit.
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PAE is only available on Server versions on Windows, and not all of them at that.
Re:hard drive prices/GB are also dropping (Score:4, Informative)
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If you have Linux with full opensourced drivers, PAE is fairly simple.
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Operating systems will still refuse to let any individual process use more than 2 or 3 GB of RAM (depending on kernel/user split) on a 32-bit system, regardless of PAE. Your 8GB machine will do fine as a server, but any memory-intensive app is going to be just as limited as it would on a system with 4GB of RAM.
Memory-mapped I/O (Score:4, Informative)
2^32 bytes = 4 294 967 296 bytes
how you get 3.2 gigabytes out of that is beyond me.
Some devices on the bus, especially the video card, reserve some address space for memory-mapped I/O.
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The OP was referring to WinXP 32-bit, and rounded 3,145,728 bytes to 3.2GB.
"By default Windows apps get 2 GB of address space for user data and 2 GB is reserved for mapping to the kernel's memory. You can change that by putting /3GB in your boot.ini , and you must also set the LARGEADDRESSAWARE option in your linker. "
http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2009/01/01-16-09-virtual-memory.html [blogspot.com]
Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension [wikipedia.org]
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No, because there's also a 64-bit version of XP.
If you want to get technical about it, NT has never not supported some 64-bit architecture (though I'm too lazy to check the RAM limits).
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Windows 7 can easily handle 8GB of RAM, as long as you have the 64bit version installed. Did you mean to type "Windows XP"?
This computer is running 16GB of RAM just fine on Windows XP x64.
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Actually the price $/GB is now around $1.42/GB, which means that SSD's are outpacing the rate at which HDD's were growing in size 12 years ago into the multi-gigabyte range. I can go down to my local Canadacomputers and get a 120GB SSD from OCZ for $83. Or 240GB for $169. Round about 12 years ago, you were still paying $1.83/GB up here.
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There are SSD's at the $1/GB range (your typo). Though what you meant was 1.42GB to the dollar, or $.69/GB. I'm glad to see this trend, but we still have another 50% drop or so to go before they become truly widespread. It's close, but can't say it's a surprise.
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Yeah thanks for catching that man. Can't wait myself.
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> Why do you say ridiculous?
Ten times more expensive?
I suspect that the vast majority of people would call that "ridiculous".
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I'm sure as hell not gonna do a clean install and VLite to try to squeeze Win 7 onto some 60Gb.
I actually managed to get a Windows 7 Pro install on a 64GB SSD. I simply created a junction link in order to move the User folder to an actual hard drive without messing with the registry. I did the same to move my large programs (mostly games) to the hard drive. I love how fast it boots up. I do will I had at least a 120GB SSD through if not a 200+ GB one. Windows 7 takes up a vast majority of my SSD.
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Why is the OS drive taking up 96GB?
Just make symlinks or whatever windows calls them.
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It's a lot more straightforward than that: NAND chips follow Moore's law (and so does their pricing), while magnetic storage doesn't. SSDs are dropping by Moore's law, and will continue to do so as long as Moore's law holds up for flash memory. It's not that the $700 160GB Intel SSD was ludicrous or ridiculously priced, it's that flash memory really cost that much back then, and the prices we see today are just about where Moore's law would predict they'd be.
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Not sure what your beef is, I have one and I think it was worth every penny.
Re:hard drive prices/GB are also dropping (Score:4, Funny)
They've gone to plaid
They speak the truth (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to be the nature of things that prices go up and rarely come down. Interesting for manufacturers, in that they were all forced to raise prices at the same time. Now you have a situation where they can all keep prices high as long as none of the big players steps out. Almost like a natural price fixing scheme.
On the SSD front, the technology has finally matured so that reliability is good enough and cost is low enough for the mainstream. I think it is important for anyone in the market to make sure that they purchase the latest generation of drives. Speed doesn't matter that much (the rest of your computer is probably couldn't utilize it) but the newer firmwares are much less likely to corrupt your data. The parts are also more fault tolerant.
Really, the biggest issue is probably the difficulty of moving existing OS installs to a new drive. Too bad, because a completely solid state PC is so nice to use.
Re:They speak the truth (Score:5, Insightful)
SSDs also have OCZ and Crucial leveraging MLC and SandForce's controllers to deliver optimized and boosted performance and extended life for reduced cost. SandForce SF-2200 chipsets compress data as it goes out to the chips, reducing write volume and thus giving fractional write amplification. This improves performance and reduces storage wear, improving product lifetime--hence the use of MLC. Of course already compressed data doesn't have those benefits, hence why OCZ's Vertex line has better write speeds--they use synchronous chips that write as fast as they read (Agility drives use much cheaper chips that read faster than they write, so for compressible data they're FAST but for non-compressible data they're slow), and use compression just to extend drive lifetime.
With all the manufacturers making good use of SandForce's better chips, and SandForce's strategic pricing (read: they're relatively cheap because they want to be a major consumer and enterprise supplier of SSD controllers, which would make them richer than charging a fistful of cash per chip), a lot of inexpensive SSDs have shown up. Essentially Intel tried to hold prices high, and SandForce stepped up and decided to help the whole market undercut them in order to gain market dominance (Intel uses SF chips in 2 models; they previously used Intel proprietary controllers, and have also used Marvell controllers).
That's called "competition," son. It's what big businesses try to prevent with patents, lock-in, vertical integration (so you can't undercut their prices ever), supply chain control (so you can't get the raw materials to make a competing product without buying from them), etc.
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I've got a first generation OCZ Vertex, that I've been running pretty close to non-stop for 3 years with the 1.16 firmware on it. Nearly continuous reads/writes including a pagefile. I know a lot of the first generation drives had some problems they're still pretty good even first generation wise. I've also got an agility 3, really nice. Good boost over the Vertex, I'm quite happy with both. I can't wait for the traditional drives to die. Now they just need to get up into the TB range, and be cheap eno
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FTFY
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I might be suffering from some form of Stockholm Syndrome from using Windows for so long but I like reinstalling the OS, gives me an excuse to update all the drivers, not keep all the old stuff I don't use anymore.
I recently installed to an SSD from a flash drive I prepared earlier for a friend and it didn't take more than 15 minutes (not including all the other software of course).
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Too bad, because a completely solid state PC is so nice to use.
For a desktop you shouldn't really notice if it's "all SSD" or not, as long as your hot data is on the SSD. For a laptop is cool that you don't have to hold it still while it's working (I sometimes pack my laptop with a hybrid drive while shutting down anyway; if it breaks I'll get an SSD)
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Memorialising Patrick Swayze?
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It's best to do a clean install on an SSD in order to avoid sector alignment issues. If the alignment is off your SSD will suffer performance issues.
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I just did this with my Linux installation with no sweat at all, and now the GF wants me to do it for her Windows (XP) box. It's been 10 or 12 years since I've had anything to do with Windows, so I'm a bit nervous about it. While it should be fairly trivial, you also have to worry whether the vendor of a proprietary OS sees a business interest in making it more difficult or dangerous than it needs to be.
The other reason I'm nervous is because it's my GF I'll be doing it for. If there's even the slightest hi
really simple (Score:4, Insightful)
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The rule of thumb should be always use an SSD for the system drive. If the customer also needs storage it doesn't cost much to add in a 1TB or larger HDD. It only takes a minute to configure Windows to store home directories on the HDD, and you can even make a custom image that is already configured this way. With SSD prices where they are now there really is no reason to use a HDD as the system drive anymore.
Re:really simple (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a much bleaker future for mechanical HDs.
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Here's one quick google that I found. I read some other one, but yeah..
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4229171/HP-Hynix-to-launch-memristor-memory-2013 [eetimes.com]
10/6/2011 HP, Hynix plan to launch memristor memory in 2013
A good idea to put off a laptop purchase... (Score:4, Informative)
At the rates prices are falling, 512 GB SSD drives will be common in laptops soon, which I think is a very comfortable size for a laptop drive. 256GB (common base laptop SSD now) is OK but anemic.
I'm still looking for a ... (Score:2)
... small (I don't need more than 60GB) but fast SSD (250MB/sec sustained write, 400MB/sec sustained read) that plugs directly into a PCI-Express slot (4x or larger to get some speed), and works reliably in Linux (e.g. NOT a Marvell controller). Given the larger capacities generally available today, it would seem to make more sense to achieve this smaller faster design with some redundancy.
An interesting alternative (but still needs to be NOT based on a Marvell controller) would be a PCI-Express card that
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Check out the OCZ RevoDrive OCZSSDPX-1RVD0110 and its brethren.
From Newegg:
Sandforce controller
Read: Up to 530 MB/s
Write: Up to 435 MB/s
Random Write 4KB (Aligned): 70,000 IOPS
Seek Time: 0.1 ms
8W active power use
110 GB, $140
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You will be looking for a long time, sadly, or you would have to pay a high price. The device you propose would sell in very low numbers. Plain SATA is fast enough for consumers and consumers don't bother with slots anyway. That means you are talking about an enthusiast-only product. What is wrong with SATA anyway for your use? Why do you want the drive to be attached to the PCI-E-card?
60GB SATA SSD is cheap, but it will have very few chips on it, so sustained performance will not be very impressive. The ea
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OWC sells PCIe SSD drives alongside their more traditional 2.5" ones.
Not as small as 60GB (seems 120 is the smallest), but they use Sandforce controllers:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID [macsales.com]
While it's predominantly a Mac-based site, there's nothing stopping you using the drives with other machines.
Reliability and RAID, what to do with SSD (Score:2)
RAID is pretty common for HDDs, because drives do fail and RAID gives you instant (for RAID1) and automatic recovery. Is there a point to have SSDs in RAID? For most setups the speed benefits are not important (>200 MB/s is enough to move the bottleneck to the CPU for most workloads). Combining multiple smaller devices into a large volume is useful, but that is more "volume management" than "RAID". I find that bit-rot is overhyped on HDDs, but it's also mitigated by scanning for it (i.e. reading all sect
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Yes. You RAID SSDs for exactly the same reason(s) you RAID hard disks.
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Updated Price Predictions (Score:5, Interesting)
I created some back-of-the-envelope predictions in July 2009 [slashdot.org] about the cost for 10TB of storage using either type of drive technology. Unfortunately, neither technology has kept pace with my predictions, but SSDs are making much better progress.
Actual July 2009 Prices for 10TB: Platter = $750, Flash = $28,125
Actual June 2012 Prices: Platter = $567, Flash = $8200
Previous Prediction for July 2010: Platter = $528, Flash = $9,868
Previous Prediction for July 2012: Platter = $262, Flash = $1,215
Previous Prediction for July 2014: Platter= $130, Flash = $150
Previous Prediction for July 2019: Platter= $23, Flash = $0.80
It's a shame to see that after three years, the prices are closer to where I hoped to see them in a single year. I think it's time to update my predictions based on what has happened over the previous 35 months. (Yes, I know this in unscientific and silly!)
New Prediction for July 2012: Platter = $562 [google.com], Flash = $7916 [google.com]
New Prediction for July 2013: Platter = $511 [google.com], Flash = $5188 [google.com]
New Prediction for July 2014: Platter = $464 [google.com], Flash = $3400 [google.com]
New Prediction for July 2015: Platter = $422 [google.com], Flash = $2228 [google.com]
New Prediction for July 2019: Platter = $287 [google.com], Flash = $411 [google.com]
New Prediction for July 2024: Platter = $178 [google.com], Flash = $50 [google.com]
These predictions seem much more achievable than last time. In fact, I expect that platter drives will exceed this pace as the industry recovers. I can't believe that platter drives will only see around a 50% price reduction per TB over the next seven years. However, that's been the pace of improvement from July 2009 until now.
The most interesting date will be when the technologies reach price equivalence. This would be August 2020 according to my model, at the price of $260 for 10 TB. My gut feeling is that equivalence will be reached a couple of years earlier than that, but who knows? We'll just have to watch and see!
Every little bit helps (Score:3)
Got an Asus G73JH whose boot time was in the 2 minute range (from bios menu to desktop plus another
30+ seconds to be usable once on the desktop...ack) on a > 1.5 year old windows7 install.
If I were not in .edu, wipe and reload...as is, did a system image (had to fight that, too)
Pure SSD was still too pricey and storage too small, so I tried a hybrid drive (8G SSD attached).
One word: "Wow".
Fresh install of win7, 20 seconds flat and ready to go.
Restored image as mentioned above: 45 seconds +/- 10 sec and off to the races.
Now, granted I could have gotten a cheap and small SSD and put it in the second bay, but until I
can get a 750G+ SSD for less than $200 *aaaand* boot in 20 seconds, I'll likely stick with
straight mechanical but I'm really liking the hybrid route.
A hybrid with enough room for a complete OS (128G or so?) would more than give me what I seek
if done right.
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Re:SSD? (Score:5, Informative)
SSD means Solid State Disc, a faster permanent storage type than HDD, however lacking capacity-per-dollar of HDDs.
Solid State Drive *
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive [wikipedia.org]
Re:SSD? (Score:5, Interesting)
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SS +1 S? ;)
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HDD? (Score:2, Funny)
You're just inventing words as you write, aren't you?
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Based on consumer feedback, they also seem to be lacking the reliability of HDDs.
That's kind of sad when you think about it (Seagate).
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Got any more info on this? I am looking at getting one some time in the coming months. From what I can gather, some of the 'lesser' products with older tech suffer from reliability problems, but the higher end stuff does not?
As a field that I have not researched enough yet, I find that there is a terrible amount of choice as to which ones are available. Hard to know which ones you should/should not get, which ones are faster/slower etc.
And it's changing fast, so every time I *google* it, I find older compar
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I'm (just this week) building a custom and paid $180something per 256fakeGB drive on Newegg. (I'm sure someone will come along and shatter the price I'm bragging about.) A couple years ago the prices just
What are fake GB? (Score:2)
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I think that's exactly what it means, but the original commenter feels compelled to point it out for nerd cred, just to show that he's not "fooled" by the marketing.
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Frankly I think the new term should have received the new name, but I'm terrible at coming up with such names. Maybe in
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Frankly I think the new term should have received the new name, but I'm terrible at coming up with such names. Maybe
Metric GB (Score:2)
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No, it's actually a refusal by everyone else
"Everyone else" not so much. Even my 68 year old mother picked up on 1kb=1024 bytes very quickly. (I say this because people always claim "it isn't for you, it's for mom" when arguing against even the tiniest amount of complexity) It's really more those with a vested interest in reduced capacities [wikipedia.org] who were pushing it -- basically drive manufacturers for the most part.
Re:SSD? (Score:5, Informative)
Stick with Intel, and you'll be fine. Intel had some slight firmware issues a while back on one or two of their models, but otherwise every single one of their SSD offerings as been bulletproof. I've deployed hundreds now over the past 2-3 years, and I've yet to see one fail. I've seen loads of other brands (such as Kingston) have weird stuttering/hanging issues, bad write speeds, etc.
Going SSD is near life changing in terms of the apparent feel and speed gains. I've even got a number of cheapskate clients on 4-5 year old Core 2 Duo machines with SSDs that feel faster than modern 2nd gen i7 systems with traditional drives in terms of boot up time, application loading speed, etc.
Re:SSD? (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen so many problems with other brands, that I don't really trust anything but Intel SSDs anymore. Even when using the same controller, Intel manages to avoid issues, like the BSOD problems with the sandforce controllers that only Intel bothered to fix.
I don't know why TFA says Intel isn't discounting things, though. They're constantly doing mail-in-rebates for their products. I bought an Intel 160GB X25-m G1 for $700 roughly three years ago. Today, you can buy from newegg an Intel 180GB 330 for $120 after rebate, and it's enormously faster to boot.
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Samsung is actually decent, they do a huge amount of OEM work, so their validation requirements are pretty decent. Other than that, I'd stick to Intel.
OCZ is hit or miss. Their stuff is fast, but reliability isn't great compared to Intel.
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This is not my experience. If you steer clear of the fastest of the cheaper lot, OCZ you will be fine.
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I thought Maxtor and those... DeathStar, erm, DeskStar things were considered the worst. I actually never had a problem with a Seagate drive, but perhaps I've just been lucky.
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This simply isn't true. While solid state drives will ultimately fail, they are reliable enough that you will have exhausted that storage device and have upgraded to something else long before physical failure.
Depends on the drive. Mine destroyed itself in just under a year, and that was with it 50% full, with noatime, swap on an HDD and various other things to try and keep it going. It was a Kingston, mind you, but there also seem to be a lot of unhappy OCZ users and even Intel did this thing where the drive suddenly became 8MB.
The other thing is that the more modern drives are using higher density flash, and by virtue of how it works, flash is less and less stable the smaller the charge gates are.
Re:SSD? (Score:5, Funny)
Salsa Saturated Dorito
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Sounds Soggy, Dude.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Buying some SSDs for our servers has given the best ever return on investment in our IT infrastructure. The traditional hard drives were giving very poor performance because they were always seeking, so going to a drive with zero seek time made a vast difference.
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"(remember that non-residential customers often get charged more per kWh"
Um, no. Typical industrial rate (SoCal) 7 cents per kWh. Residential rate ~13 cent per kWh.
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Doesn't seem to really hold true. Here's an example from my first generation SSD which is 97% full using AS SSD. If what you said was true, that would be reflected like a traditional drive. But it's not, even with benchmarks. It's speeds are nearly in stock bench wise still, even using other tools it's the same.
http://i46.tinypic.com/1zbcg43.png [tinypic.com]
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I've had SSDs for about a year and a half now and they're still doing just fine. In fact the boot time for my mythtv frontend is so fast now I just power the thing off instead of dealing with sleep issues. It worked so well in my frontend that I put one in the backend as well (the guide on the frontends pop up instantly now, instead of 2-3 seconds later.) That's a very noticeable change.
I haven't noticed any speed degradation over that time either. It still boots in ~10 seconds, as it did when I installed i
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FUD! I have a 120GB SSD in my laptop that has been running for over a year and a half and has had a total of zero issues. According to SSD Life I have read over 7.2TB from it and written over 3.5TB of data to it. It shows that at my current usage rate I have over 8.5 years left until I run of of writes, and that is a low end estimate.
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You can get a 256GB Crucial M4 for under $200 if you look online, about $210 if you go to the store. Use one of those as your system drive and replace your laptops optical drive with the stock HDD for storage (you can get adapters for this).