Getting Rid of the Disks

Kneht writes "Dan's Data has an interesting article on what it would cost to get rid of your HDDs and replace them with SSDs because hard drives suck. Several aspects are examined, such as required UPS, compact flash, etc. Read the article and you may get a new appreciation for your lowly 7200rpm drive." Funny, I was just thinking that I should start using 120GB disks as my removable media.

Comments

HDD as removeable media.

[roseblood]

I'm finding that the lack of a universal DVD standard has left me looking at HDDs as my removeable media of choice as well. CDRs are nice and cheap, but I have files that would span multilpe CDRs. It's a little bit of a hastle to have to WINRAR up my data into small chunks, only to have to UNRAR it back into oen big chunk. DVDs aren't readable everywhere. I'd love to see faster solid state storage available at a price competitive with today's HDDs, but alas, it's just no there. I already have a great deal of respect from my 7200RPM HDDs

good for research/SDK

[stonebeat.org]

SSDs are good for research purposes and Software Developer Kits. I think Intel's Explorer 2 SDK used to have 128 MB on board, which is useful for Assembly programming.

I remember when we used to program Motorola 6800... hehe...

RAM swapfile

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it amusing that it mentioned using a RAM based swapfile. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a swapfile???

Re:$$$ Money!

[HMC CS Major]

Right now, tape drives are the right cost/benefit compromise. Could they be better? Yes. Would it cost a lot more? Yes. Why are you using hard drives over tape, when tape holds so much more for the cost?

Speed matters. Just because one is more expensive than the other doesn't rule it out, if they're both relatively affordable for the performance.

Hang on just a second....

[grahamsz]

This guy mentions that compact flash dies after 100,000 to a million rewrites... and that you'll reach that surprisingly quickly if you put your swap file on it.

It seems highly unlikely that any sane person on any desktop system would choose to spend money on compact flash to use as swap, when they could spend less money and buy dram instead - which shuld be faster.

Anyway potentially you only need fast solid state diskspace for your operating system and main applications, since few people need that sort of speed on their 'data files'. I could build a bootable linux box that ran off a 256Mb compact flash - doesn't seem like it'd be too bad at all.

Bah.

[silverhalide]

Until SSDs get an order of mangitude cheaper, HDDs will continue to rule! For the thousands that SDDs cost, you can built a huge striped RAID of quick 120 GB drives that will perform more than fast enough for any existing applications. Paintbrush and minesweeper will run like they've never run before.

article = pointless AND redundant

[SunPin]

The author starts out trying to convince the reader that hard drives suck, makes a weak attempt at defending the alternatives, and concludes that the alternatives are not yet feasible. He compounds the problem by littering the whole piece with annoying ticks like "well", "really" and nonexistent English usage like "that're."

He obviously knows his stuff but a few more drafts and an editor would have done wonders for this article.

I'd pay more for a solid state drive...

[Andorion]

The price per meg on current harddrives is RIDICULOUSLY low, we're all spoiled.

It's basically a dollar a GIG, or less... a 200 gig HD costs 200 bucks.

I'd be willing to pay $200 for a TWENTY gig solid state drive. Ten times the cost, but worth it... too bad no such thing is available.

~Berj

Re:I'd pay more for a solid state drive...

[Glonoinha]

How about $200 for a TWO GIG solid state drive?

For SSDs that are smaller than difference between what your computer has for RAM and what it can hold (ie. if you have 512M in your system but the board can hold 4G, the difference is 3.5G) the price is roughly $100 per Gig.

Add two Gigs of RAM to your mobo and run ramdrive software (www.superspeed.com) - voila! cheap SSD running at your RAM bus speed.

Need more than that? Mobo already filled with 4G and you need another 4G? RocketDrive DL (www.cenatek.com) : a PCI card with slots for up to 4 1G SDRAMs (PC133) viewed by the system as a drive. Retail price $900 plus the $1500 or so for memory (specifies high quality RAM.) So maybe $2500 total to add 4G to the system, and you can stack them if you want more than 4G via software RAID across multiple adapters (ie. 4 cards would be 16G of SSD for $10,000.)

Ok, so $12,500 for a 20G SSD is a little out of my price range, but it also offers performance that I can't justify on a price to performance ratio.

It was worth it to add a Gig of RAM to an old machine (PII/300) and create a 768M RAMdrive though, because when I tried to burn CDs from the hard drive at 12x it always suffered buffer underrun. Most of the time at 8x also. Move the stuff I want to burn to the RAMdrive first and I get a fast clean burn every time, adding $100 worth of RAM to that system saved me from having to buy a whole new computer.

Option 3.

[Glonoinha]

Option three : buy a spare computer with a TON of hard drive space to dedicate as 'offline' storage. It isn't particularly expensive anymore (although no where near as cheap as tape) but it doesn't take a week to do a system backup either. Doesn't have to be a fast state of the art computer, just have a lot of drive space.

Do a system image once a month of your entire OS, apps, etc... stored to that machine, then just back up your data once a week. If it takes you a week to back up a system now you are only backing it up once a week anyways.

If you were creative you could probably come up with a 1TB server (IDE drives) and a GigE network card for under $1,500.

Notes on your post :
Under option 1), if you do RAID5 you always lose the capacity of one disk. If you want to minimize costs use bigger drive sets (ie. in a 6 drive set you lose 17% (one drive), but in two 3 drive sets you lose 33% (two drives.) Granted it is a little difficult to do a 6 drive set using IDE, and SCSI drives are still a little pricey when they get big ...

Under option 2), if you store the offline drives in a quiet, cool, dry, clean place (those mylar bags they came in when you bought them, for example) I don't think you are going to experience hard drives demagnetizing themselves much.