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Solid State Drives - Fast, Rugged, and Expensive
Nick Breen writes "Are solid state drives becoming a reality? Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech has written an article concerning the current state of SSD with a comparison between a Samsung 64GB SATA and a Super Talent 32GB SATA. While they showed impressive speed rates when placed against a hard disk drive, the occasional sporadic statistic (and high cost) indicate they're not quite ready for the mainstream. Dell and Alienware have been shipping laptops with SSDs for months now, and Apple may be rolling out one of their own next year. Is the time of the solid-state drive almost at hand? Does anyone have any first-hand, practical experience with SSD?"
What exactly is a "sporadic statistic"?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Does anyone have any first-hand, practical experience with SSD?
I know Darth Vader had his own SSD, but that's probably not what you're talking about.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I've put one 32GB 1.8" IDE SuperTalent SSD in my Thinkpad X40, to replace that ever-failing 1.8" mechanical Hitachi crap, and formatted it with Reiser4 + cryptcompress. I LOVE IT. Fast, silent, more battery life, and, best of all, reliable. It was worth every buck.
Both my home server and several systems in use at work boot from compactflash drives. Our production servers run Ubuntu LTS, and are basically VMware Server boxes--the actual apps run off of guest OSs that live on the 6TB RAID-6s on each server.
All in all, I've had seven servers running off of SSDs for about eight months, and they have worked like a charm. I never have to worry about getting paged due to the inevitable mechanical failure of magnetic drives.
Also, SSDs are NOT expensive! A CF-to-IDE adapter costs $15, and a 2GB CF card costs about $30. Two gigabytes is more than enough to boot an OS and start a RAID. Don't waste your money on a 64GB CF card. The CF+RAID hybrid approach is the way to go.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I have first hand experience with SSDs as I have bought one of the Samsung 64 GB SATA SSDs. In terms of writing performance, they're approximately on par with regular hard disks, as far as I can tell. Disk reads, however, are very good. To give you a vague idea of the read speed, Windows XP on this drive boots to login screen without the black logo screen appearing at all. Additionally, for those who are interested, here's what Linux's hdparm has to say about it:
/dev/sda1 /dev/sda1:
# hdparm -tT
Timing cached reads: 7352 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3679.72 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 168 MB in 3.01 seconds = 55.86 MB/sec
Unless you know of some special reason why sustained write speed is critical, you should probably be looking more closely at access time, where SSD blows mechanical drives out of the water.
No doubt, mechanical drives still rule capacity/price, but with the growth rates of the two technologies over the past several years, SSD could take over soon.
I've been using a Sandisk 32 GB SSD on a Dell Latitude D630 running Vista for about 3 months now. This wasn't cheap, and even with an early adopter mindset, this is a big disappointment; it does indeed reads much faster (about 30 times), but writes at least 3 times slower than the same D630 running a SATA. My typical usage involved web/email, Microsoft Office, photography/photoshop, compiling large projects, etc.
Quiet is great, more battery is fine, and I hardly ever reboot using Vista almost instant-sleep feature, but installing software or writing large files is *painful*. Moreover, you should plan for a lot of physical memory: you do *not* want to see your system paging for virtual memory.
Now maybe Vista is to blame, but the whole system will hang now and then for 10 secs or more. Is it indexing something, writing whatever system logs to disk, who knows, but a a few other users have reported the same issue with this SSD on Dell forums. No driver update has been released either since the SSD option was out. This is also probably not coincidental that SSD vendors emphasize read speed but remain somehow quiet about the write speed (or lack thereof).
I, for one, am switching back to a 7200 RPM SATA. This is *not* ready for prime time, even if Samsung claims slightly better write speed on its 64 GB; *do* check the user forums (say, Dell), and you will find a lot of frustrated users. This was worth a shot, and I'll eventually consider that technology again in 10 months.
Hope this helps
Funny should be given a positive score, I personally consider a funny comment at least as valid in the conversation as an insightful or informative, and the current scoring system just leads to mislabeled posts.