Top Solid State Disks and TB Drives Reviewed

Lucas123 writes "Computerworld has reviewed six of the latest hard disk drives, including 32GB and 64GB solid state disks, a low-energy consumption 'green' drive and several terabyte-size drives. With the exception of capacity, the solid state disk drives appear to beat spinning disk in every category, from CPU utilization, energy consumption and read/writes. The Samsung SSD drive was the most impressive, with a read speed of 100MB/sec and write speed of 80 MB/sec, compared to an average 59MB/sec and 60MB/sec read/write speed for a traditional hard drive."

Comments

Re:Longevity of NAND flash

[goofy183]

Will this ever die? The write cycle counts in modern flash is in the millions now. Doing the math you very easily get 20+ years before write cycle wear is a concern: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

How many heavily used spinning drives do you know that last even 10+ years?

Re:Number of writes?

[Planesdragon]

Why is the ultimate number of writes never taken into account in these comparison reviews? Why are solid state drives tested so that their weaknesses are not probed? Because it's a measure best reflected by Baysean Data, and they don't have enough time to test them.

If you want, buy an HDD and a Flash-Drive of the same cost, hook them up to a program that runs each at equal data-transfer rates, and see how much data you can read and write to each before they fail. Report back to us in the six months it'll take you.

Oh, and you need to do the trial over a wide sample, so get, oh, at least ten of each.

Re:Longevity of NAND flash

[baywulf]

Actually the endurance on NAND has been going lower over the years as they switched to smaller cell geometry, larger capacity and MLC technology. Some are as low as 5000 cycle endurance. These MLC(multi-level cell) NAND tend also to be much slower than SLC(single-level cell) NAND. Most SLC NAND have around 50K or 100K endurance.

Re:MTBF/Write Cycles

[NMerriam]

You obviously wouldn't be overwriting any data already stored on the drive

No, but the wear-leveling routines in the drive will happily move around your existing data so that rarely written sectors are available for heavy writing operations.

Seriously, this "issue" comes up in every discussion about SSDs, and it seems like people are just unwilling or unable to accept that what was once a huge problem with the technology is now not even remotely an issue. Any SSD you buy today should outlive a spinning disk, regardless of the operating conditions or use pattern. It is no longer 1989, engineers have solved these problems.