Solid-state drives

aimeeandbeatles

aimeeandbeatles

watermelon
Joined
Apr 5, 2007
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I was looking up information on SSDs (link) for a teacher, they seem pretty cool. Too bad they cost so much, but hopefully they look more into them so the price drops and the space increases. Cos 25 years ago, a 10 megabyte HDD cost a fortune, so why couldn't it happen with SSDs too? (It says in 2007, most SSDs are 64 gigs. Not that good.)

The great thing about it is there's no moving parts -- I can see their uses in laptops. And they're faster too, so it could be good for gamers. And there's no click of death. Although it probably would break if you hurled it to the floor.

What are your thoughts on this?
 
Flash drives are essentially SSDs. They're coming down in price drastically. Give it a couple of years, when the storage sizes are enough to hold an OS on it at a reasonable price.
 
Yup. And you can also now fit Windows (probably bare-bones Windows) onto a USB drive.

I also have a portable hard drive that's maybe 20 gigs or so. I'm not sure if it's an SSD, it's very small and when I plugged it in (mom's computer, my USB port is broken.) I didn't hear any noises. I'm planning to use it for backup as soon as I get these ports fixed. My mom managed to break most of them in the back, too!
 
Turner said:
Flash drives are essentially SSDs. They're coming down in price drastically. Give it a couple of years, when the storage sizes are enough to hold an OS on it at a reasonable price.
Click to expand...
Other than both being based off of NAND flash memory, there's really no comparison between them. SSD's are an order of magnitude faster than most thumb drives (~200 MB/s vs ~20 MB/s).

Even as it stands now pricing on SSDs is not terrible. A 30GB drive can be had for around $100, 64GB models for $150 or less. That's cheaper than comperably size WD Rapter HDDs sold for just a few years ago.
 
I like to go by price per gig. To better compare. 'Cos you can't compare a 64-gig SSD to a 150-gig HDD. Unless you want to do the math.

$100 / 30 gigs = $3.33 per gig
$150 / 64 gigs = $2.34 per gig

I'd need similarly sized HDDs to compare before saying it it's good or bad.
 
Zelig said:
What kind of benchmarks are you looking at? I haven't seen anything that get's past ~125 MB/s.
Click to expand...
Take a look at the Intel X25 drives. They're more on the top end at the moment, but they're really the best benchmark for what SSDs should do, because most of the other SSDs on the market* have issues with their controllers which absolutely destory their performance. The Anandtech review of the X25 details some of this.

*Note that most of the SSDs on the market use the same flash and controllers, they're just rebranded for whichever company is selling them.

I like to go by price per gig. To better compare. 'Cos you can't compare a 64-gig SSD to a 150-gig HDD. Unless you want to do the math.

$100 / 30 gigs = $3.33 per gig
$150 / 64 gigs = $2.34 per gig

I'd need similarly sized HDDs to compare before saying it it's good or bad.
Click to expand...

At present SSDs really have two purposes - lower power usage on notebooks, and faster speeds. If your only criteria is storage capacity, they're not going to compare favorably to anything else no matter how you look at it.
 
Yeah. And also notebooks can get jolted around a bit, so there's less risk of physical failure, if there's no moving parts. (Less risk, because if you hurl it to the floor, it's probably gonna shatter anyways.)
 
Speedo said:
Take a look at the Intel X25 drives. They're more on the top end at the moment, but they're really the best benchmark for what SSDs should do, because most of the other SSDs on the market* have issues with their controllers which absolutely destory their performance. The Anandtech review of the X25 details some of this.
Click to expand...

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/intel-x25m-ssd_5.html

All the benchmarks of the X25 drives I've seen place them around 125 MB/s for both sequential and random reads and 65 MB/s for writes..
 
Sorry for the bump/necroing, I was doing some more research and found weaknesses in SSD:
1) Limited write cycles -- for files which write constantly to the drive, such as system logs, this may have to be modified.
b) Lack of disk cache -- from what I understand, this limits multitasking.
c) Can't defrag without wearing it out -- not really a disadvantage unless you like watching the little colored blocks.
 
Is there any need to defrag a SSD?
 
aimeeandbeatles said:
Sorry for the bump/necroing, I was doing some more research and found weaknesses in SSD:
1) Limited write cycles -- for files which write constantly to the drive, such as system logs, this may have to be modified.
b) Lack of disk cache -- from what I understand, this limits multitasking.
c) Can't defrag without wearing it out -- not really a disadvantage unless you like watching the little colored blocks.
Click to expand...
Oh thank you for enlightening us!:rolleyes: I mean it's not like we didn't already know this. Please don't bump threads to post useless info.

Is there any need to defrag a SSD?
Click to expand...
No, there is not.
 
Fetus4188 said:
Is there any need to defrag a SSD?
Click to expand...

They're so fast, I doubt you need to. Unlike you like watching the little colored blocks (on Windows 9x), and in that case you could probably write up a quick program to watch them. (I know of one person who did, unfortunatly it wasn't up for download.) In fact, the other day I fired up my Windows 98 just to watch those colored blocks. It needed to be defragged anyways, so not a problem.

The disk cache thing is a bugger, too, although I'm not exactly sure what it is. I think it's to do with buffering, or loading the data before it's actually read, e.g. on youtube videos, but I may be confusing something.

EDIT: Wiki'd it. it's an embedded memory that goes between the physical drive platter & the computer. And it picks up nearby information in case the computer wants it later.
 
You defrag traditional HDD's because the files are fragmented. The drive heads must travel all over the platters to read the data which introduces a delay. SSD's on the other hand, have no access time, so files can be scattered as much as they can and it still wouldnt matter.
 
Genocidicbunny said:
You defrag traditional HDD's because the files are fragmented. The drive heads must travel all over the platters to read the data which introduces a delay. SSD's on the other hand, have no access time, so files can be scattered as much as they can and it still wouldnt matter.
Click to expand...

it still matters, because it introduces new delay. delay is not the zero to start with. since SSD are limited size, you will not have large drives, but fragmentation will be a real problem.
 
Access time on an SSD is .1ms or less. The delay, even with fragmentation is not even close to comparable to a mechanical HDD.
 
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