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Alienware Puts 64GB Solid-State Drives In Desktops
Lucas123 writes "In the face of Seagate's announcement this week of a new hybrid drive, Dell subsidiary Alienware just upped the ante by doubling the capacity of its desktop solid-state disk drives to 64 GB. Dell has remained silent on the solid-state disk front since announcing a 32-GB solid-state option for its Latitude D420 and D629 ATG notebook computers earlier this year. Now, Alienware seems to be telling users to bypass hybrid drives altogether. 'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana, Alienware's product marketing manager 'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'"
seek time hasn't been a issue for a LONG time now. transfer speed is what is king. my 3 year old U320 Scsi drives still kick the ever living crap out of anything IDE or SATA and I bet will kick the crap out of these oversized flash drives.
What nobody is pointing out is that a standard windows install will thrash the hell out of a Solid state drive. There is a reason you need to balance your writes and not treat a SS disk like a hard drive. I destroyed a Solid state IDE drive back 6 years ago (you have been able to buy them for over 15 years now) by installing windows on it. the swap space died within weeks. Yes I knew what I was doing, I was proving a point to a manager that refused to listen to his engineers. you need a special filesystem to even out writes to the SS disk to make sure your drive life is maximized. that means that you really should run the Filesystem in ram for apps that like to write to the disk all the time. Your favorite webbrowser in default config write a crapload of junk to disk. that all needs to be disabled.
Yes newer SS disks are better. Yes you can get SRAM based ones that have a battery backup. but the cheapest are the flash based and they have a limited lifetime of writes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Last I checked, while solid state drives had excellent random performance, their transfer rate was way below that of normal drives. Now random access is all well and good, I'm glad we are improving on it, hard disks are really weak at that, but it isn't the only concern, and maybe not even the primary concern in most setups. If you have a well maintained system with a defragmented drive, and that system is a single user desktop, it's a good bet that your disk access is often fairly sequential. You go and launch a game, the drive seeks to the game executable, loads that, then seeks to the game data (which is often in a couple large pack files) and starts loading that. There's not a whole lot of jumping around. You aren't waiting on the drive because it is having to seek, you are just waiting for it to read from the platters.
As such if solid state drives aren't faster (or at least as fast) in BOTH regards, I'm not sure I see them as a better performance choice. Sure, there may be a reason to use them in servers or other multi-user situations where the majority of the disk penalty is because of seek time, but I don't think that holds true at home.
Seems to me that until it gets faster, hybrids are the way to go. That's how MS's ReadyBoost thing works. You add a flash stick to a computer and use it for ReadyBoost. It's maximum transfer rate is much slower than the disk, but its seek rate is faster. So what Vista does is cache the first part of things you frequently access there. Then, when you run it, it starts loading from flash while the disk seeks, then switches to the disk as soon as it is ready. It only works as a supplement to a drive, it isn't a replacement, it won't fully cache programs on there because, size aside, it'd actually be slower. It's just designed to try and fill the access gap, not as a real replacement.