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Performance Showdown - SSDs vs. HDDs
Lucas123 writes "Computerworld compared four disks, two popular solid state drives and two Seagate mechanical drives, for read/write performance, bootup speed, CPU utilization and other metrics. The question asked by the reviewer is whether it's worth spending an additional $550 for a SSD in your PC/laptop or to plunk down the extra $1,300 for an SSD-equipped MacBook Air? The answer is a resounding No. From the story: "Neither of the SSDs fared very well when having data copied to them. Crucial (SSD) needed 243 seconds and Ridata (SSD) took 264.5 seconds. The Momentus and Barracuda hard drives shaved nearly a full minute from those times at 185 seconds. In the other direction, copying the data from the drives, Crucial sprinted ahead at 130.7 seconds, but the mechanical Momentus drive wasn't far behind at 144.7 seconds."
First post?
And this was on a standard 4400RPM drive in a ThinkPad.... not that that would affect posting to a web page...
In typical use most of the time is spent seeking, not just reading or writing sequential blocks. The Windows XP disk IO is especially brain damaged in this regard (does not even try to order or prioritize disk I/O). Copying DVD images from one drive another is not typical use case.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Unfortunately there's no comparisons of battery life and speed tests with fragmented files.
mod me funny
Dunno about the author of this article, but got an "SSD" (hello buzzword) to get rid of the noise, the heat, and the annoying spin-up delay. A compactflash card doesn't cost eleventy billion dollars either.
c++;
Could a combination of these two technologies produce a more efficient HD. Let's say you used the HDD for writing data and then during idle time have the newly written data copied over to the SSD. Then one could read from the faster SSD. That way you would get the faster reading and writing speeds of each technology. I suppose that this however would be more expensive, but if the SSD were optimized for retrieval of data instead of storing, maybe this could be optimized further.
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It's nice to know all that buzz is worth ignoring since I just bought a fancy new 750gig sata hdd. Even 16mb caches beat them solidly, I wonder how 8 and 32 would compare. It's worth noting they didn't mention seek times, although I'm not sure how that would transfer into ssd terms.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Would an SSD take the hit of a drop better than spinning media? I betcha it would. Also, these are apples to oranges comparisons here - when was the last time you saw a MacBook Air equipped with a 3.5" 7200rpm Barracuda drive?
IMO: I'm already recommending the purchase of SSDs in laptops for all of our top professionals where I work. And the reason is not performance, it is for reliability.
Computerworld compared four disks, two popular solid state drives and two Seagate mechanical drives, for read/write performance, bootup speed, CPU utilization and other metrics.
But of course not the metrics that really matter, which SSD's vastly excel at and make them worth the price for many people: MTBF, power consumption, ruggedness and noise level.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
Too bad he didn't include power consumption. If I'm going to use an SSD for anytime soon, it will be in a laptop where power is my key concern. Performance is more of a desktop/high end issue right now.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
So if I read this right, if you purchase brand new, high priced technology it may not give you the same kind of bang for the buck as tried and true established technology. I... am... shocked....
IMHO, performance is not the critical factor regarding SSD. Power usage, and mostly no-moving-part (quiet and rugged) is why you want SSD in your laptop.
But on the performance front, they compared with 7200RPM hard drives, last time I checked (admittedly a while ago) most laptop are outfitted with 5400RPM drives.
Am I the only one questioning why these devices are implemented using a mechanical drive interface? Maybe it's a negligible cost, but to me it would seem that a memory bus optimized for flash memory would be a better way to go, than trying to piggy-back a mechanical drive's bus. How much faster could these be if their existence was planned into, say Intel's chipsets?
They only tested burst speeds, there was no random access testing.
SSD works best when accessing files randomly.
You really have to look deep into the advertising sometimes. Only a trained person willing to do the math on these would be able to see the differences. Clearly, these devices have a legitimate purpose and place, but at this point in time, its not in the client computer. The speeds need to come up to be really practical.
Now a good purpose for these might be in desktop bound short-stack storage arrays instead of that large tera-byte drive array. They're just quick enough for data retention backups off of the mechanical drives in the client PC.
Another use is small-scale server apps that usually are bound into hardware in some form of internet controllable appliance. Speed isn't really a major factor here for this and these would potentially work well.
Just my opinion. Subject to change.
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As any sysadmin knows, on a busy server what creams the disk isn't Megabytes per second, it is IO transactions per second.
;-)
According to the article the Crucial SSD has an access time of 0.4 ms which equates to 2500 IOs/s as compared to the Barracuda HDD with 13.4 ms access time which equates to a mere 75 IOs/s.
So for servers SSDs are 33 times better!
Bring them on
Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"
Reliability - http://gizmodo.com/369294/20-percent-of-ssd-notebooks-failingNope
Speed - Nope
Tell me again what the whole point was
That's the (potentially)biggest benefit of using SSDs over HDDs. No moving parts==less power used==longer battery life.
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that bounces a lot. and includes things like salt and generally high moisture in the air. I think anyone that uses their pc - whatever form factor - anywhere that's not sitting on a desk in a climate controlled environment might do well to take these results with a grain of salt *sorry*
I've been suffering too long time from the hard drive noise. If the price is reasonable I want SSD to have quiet environment.
SSD's performance boost is in battery life due to its lower power consumption from zero moving parts. Flash-based storage has always had a problem with writing; don't forget about the fact that it can only be written to ~1000 times.
Furthermore, SSD is just temporary relief for batteries; I envision a laptop with both SSD and HDD that almost never writes to the SSD; on Windows, C:\WINDOWS and C:\Program Files would live in SSD while C:\Documents & Settings would live on HDD and C:\WINDOWS\Temp (or wherever that part lives nowadays) would be on ramdisk. On FOSS systems, /usr would be SSD while /home and /var would be HDD and /tmp and /var/tmp would be in shared memory (like /dev/shm).
The real future is in racetrack memory and the like, which drastically improves speed in both directions, removes the 1000-writes issue, AND further boosts SSD's impressive battery life. However, we've got ten years before it hits the market, so we have SSD until then.
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Two things: first, booting is ideally going to be largely sequential reads because OS X caches files used in the boot process in order to speed up the boot by removing random access. SSD's have an advantage over hard drives in random reads because there's comparatively no seek time. So I wouldn't expect to see a huge advantage. Secondly, I'm not going to be using my macbook air's tiny SSD drive for analog video capture or something anyway, so high write speed is really not that relevant to me. On the other hand the thing is supposed to be light and use little battery, so SSD seems like it wins for the reasons it was used. Also, the tests bear out a higher average read speed, which is also what I would have expected. I don't see anything surprising here.
Anyone ever hear what happened to the second generation i-Ram from gigabyte? There was mad intel on the first and then it all just went away... I want the 8Gig, SATA 2. It just never came out.
I would have thought that in a laptop, solid state drives would have a noticeable advantage in terms of power consumption leading to increased battery life.
Admittedly the article described itself as a performance showdown, but I'm disappointed that the reviewer made no attempt to compare power consumption and battery life.
If nothing else, I would have thought a solid state drive would eliminate that annoying pause when a hard drive awakes from sleep and spins up, and that this would feel like a worthwhile "performance" improvement--though whether it's worth the cost is another question.
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We installed one of these for processing millions of small, read-only database transactions. The database only gets written once a day, but is too big for efficient cacheing. Even with a U320 15k drive we were still suffering, only being able to run about 700/min. With a flash drive, we're running over 25,000/min, peaking at 50,000/min. But the weekly copy of the database takes about 20 minutes, vs the 3 or 4 minutes it used to take.
- p
I don't have a
A not-very-interesting comparison of read/write performance only. He should have run the two crucial tests that caused me to move to a solid state disk (made it myself out of an adapter and a high speed/large capacity CF card) for my traveling laptop. That would be the laptop that I throw in my carry-on and occasionally drop.
First, compare and contrast laptop battery life while continuously reading and writing disk files; second, compare and contrast hardware reliability while holding the laptop in both hands and shaking it as vigorously as possible while reading and writing disk files.
...And the survivability of mechanical drives in the ultra-portable form factor (more likely to be droped or tossed, more concentrated heat problems, etc.)
Although some data from the Palm LifeDrive (featuring a mecanical Microdrive CF module) could answer the drop-survivability in small form factor.
So, in short, they managed to produce only 1 single data i.e. bulk speed (well, not exactly. They also mentioned random access from a synthetic test, but no actual real-world application) when users would need about a dozen of others.
Specially in the long term range (wearout of SSD vs. damage of HDD).
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A lot of people have been posting what the "correct" metrics would have been to test the SSD drives vs traditional drives, which is fair.
My question is why did the traditional drives outperform SSD drives in large data transfers? SSDs would have faster seek times as has been mentioned but I see no reason why a large file transfer would take longer on an SSD, anyone have insight?
I can't find an apples-to-apples comparison in this test.
If they wanted to compare the best laptop mechanical drive to the best laptop drive (price no object), why didn't they use an MTron or Memoright drive (> 100MB/sec sustained read AND write)?
If they wanted to compare the best laptop mechanical drive to the cheapest SSD drive, why didn't they use a Transcend drive ( $200)?
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That just seems silly. I'd like to see performance tests on a system where the disk's performance affects the end result, rather than all of the results being homogenized by the operating system's poor I/O capability. Given Vista's adoption, it's not even a test of what disk performance will be like "in the real world."
--Matthew
I dunno if anyone's paying attention but SSDs vary hugely in speed- both random access and sustained transfers. It's pretty easy to find a slow SSD- they've been around forever. The Macbook currently uses a Samsung part.
I tried to read one of the other articles on the Computerworld website and was served a compulsory registration page - with a Seagate ad banner on it! One can't help but wonder if the reviewer's position might have been skewed a bit...
When asked about ignoring the 20:1 advantage SSDs have in seek speed, responded: But keep in mind that it's only one component of the overall operation. These were all freshly formatted drives so fragmentation shouldn't be an issue and the longer the operation under that condition, the less it tends to matter.
SSDs might even slow down slightly because some are built intelligently enough to not write to the same location each time (and thus prematurely "wear out" segments of memory which are, after all, limited use within context).
Anything else to add?
Is it because a MS Vista boot and reboot doesn't involve much random R/W and therefore doesn't shows the appearrent strength of SSD's? Or is it because an extremely low random access value on SSD's are offset by the fact that sequential R/W's are rare on SSD's because of wear-level algorithms? Or is it something else? Twice the read speed and 30 times the random access time ought to give some advantage.
--
Regards
SSDs have greatly improved, and typically utilize wear leveling methods to more evenly distribute writes across memory cells.
However, in real-world situations, do SSD write limitations ever pose a problem or is it a total non-issue these days?
Ron
The SSDs are getting better/cheaper/faster/larger all the time and part of the interest is that they are much more robust/less fragile and use a lot less electricity. [bad car analogy] A Ferrari is faster but it can't do the same work nor is as tough as the F450 we got, and I bet the F450 with the diesel engine gets better mileage while doing that work [/bad analogy]
Flash media, like compact flash cards, are supposed to be very shock resistant compared to hard drives. That would give these SSD drives a big advantage in machines designed to be very rugged.
Completely missed the point. SSD's are not about extremely fast sequential access, they're designed for near-instantaneous random access. No seeking means faster random access, which also means MUCH improved performance when multiple processes are hitting the disk at once.
Just think back to when you moved to a dual-core CPU how much more responsive it was. Now take that same jump to I/O, which is always the performance bottleneck. We're leaving the age of simple increases in horsepower - Mhz, RPM, and throughput; now we're attacking the problems of resource contention. Multicore CPU's, solid state disks, more memory, better CPU-memory interconnects - all of this is making resource contention and "churn" a thing of the past.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
It is amazing to me that even other geeks have fallen for the corporate hype machine. This current gen of "SSD" has little to do with the actual promise of a solid state drive. Have you all forgotten the original point? We were getting tired of the slow incremental increase in speed that magnetic platter hard drive technology was giving us. Hard drives were and still are typically the bottleneck in many applications. They are what is holding us back from instant response times.
These flash based drives are little more than a straw man or distraction from the true goal and promise of solid state drives. Gigabyte had the right idea with their I-Ram device but apparently they found making their own memory controller to be too difficult. That is something more appropriate for someone like Intel, they claimed. And I think this is actually a good point. So why aren't Intel and AMD pursuing such a device? I don't know the answer to that but I don't think it has anything to do with ability. Clearly Intel or AMD could make their own version of an I-Ram device that could have the potential to finally realize the dream and promise of the original solid state drive idea.
The appeal of using a flash based drive for storing my data eludes me. Limited number of writes. Check. Unproven and highly suspect reliability (I have had several flash drives for my camera fail on me at unpredictable times). Check. No great speed advantage to the horribly slow archaic magnetic platter technology. Check. Expensive. Check. Sounds great. Really.
It is the 21st century already and not only do we not have HAL 9000 computers or replicants or flying cars or lunar vacation spots or fusion, but we don't yet even have drives that are significantly faster than they were 20 years ago. I am sitting here tapping my fingers on my desk waiting for the revolution in data storage that surely must be just around the corner. I am sorry but these flash based SSDs are not it.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
In other tests I've seen, the only time the SSD drives come out on top is when configured in performance RAID style, so that writes are parallelized across two or more SSD units.
If someone could put together a convenient RAID type package, the extra cost might actually result in extra, noticable speed improvements, even for writes. And two 64GB SSD units arranged in a performance RAID package would give a more usable 128GB "hard disk" to store things on anyway.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
They didn't test performance, but speed. One of the biggest aspects of "performance" is efficiency. Despite talking about some aspects of performance in the article, "Having no moving parts is, naturally, important. ... in theory -- should use less power than equivalent mechanical hard drives."
Testing speed alone ignores the different applications for the different products!
All I care about is MTBF. I am so sick and tired of trying to get data off of crashed drives and restoring computers for family members (and myself) . Even with current backups, it's a hassle and disks fail at the most inconvenient time.
My wife wanted a laptop recently and I made her spend the extra money for an SSD.
As others have said, using these things with streaming I/O doesn't make much sense.
/etc/fstab), and it's single threaded and does no async I/O. Reiserfs check does a quick scan of the filesystem tree, which seems to take time proportional to the size of the partition, so that didn't really change very much. After that, it's a completely different story. The rest of the boot sequence now completes in maybe 10 seconds, tops (it previously took something like a minute), and login to my KDE desktop (even including Firefox) really is fast -- only a bit slower than a warm login, when everything's in memory.
I recently built myself a new system. The new processor (Xeon E3110, aka Core 2 Duo E8400) certainly did make boot time somewhat faster, but not dramatically so. Likewise for initial login -- the KDE desktop came up somewhat faster, but it wasn't overwhelming.
Then it occurred to me to move my root and home directory partitions from an older 250 GB 1.5 Gb/sec SATA drive to my newer 500 GB 3.0 Gb/sec compatible drive. There are more differences than just the interface speed; the most notable one is probably Native Command Queuing. This is similar to tagged command queuing on SCSI; it allows the host to queue multiple commands to the disk, which replies to 'em as ready.
*That* made a difference.
fsck insists on checking the partitions one at a time (it sequences the partitions on a particular disk even if you tell it otherwise in
The issue's not lack of memory -- I had 2 GB on my old system and 4 GB now, and anyway, the big change was on my new system only when I switched drives around.
Moral of the story: if you're suffering from slow boot, make sure that your motherboard supports SATA 3.0 Gb/sec, use AHCI and native IDE (not legacy IDE), and make sure that your drive supports SATA 3.0 Gb/sec and that it isn't jumpered for 1.5 Gb/sec.
1. Drop both drives from a 3 meters height. 2. Do the test again 3. Repeat until one disk has performance problems.
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I can't hear the hd on my laptop, and I rarely hear the fan. The newest 2.5" drives are super-quiet.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Write speed may be irrelevant to the applications you happen to run. But it's pretty relevant to your OS.
You better disable atime if you're using SSD drives or you'll find they don't last as long as you would expect.
It would be nice if the SSDs they tested were actual high performance models, instead of crappy cut rate ones. They should do the same test with Samsung, Sandisk, and MTron drives. As it was these crappy disks destroyed the mechanical disks in IOps.
Right now, using SSD is not about saving money or having a faster drive (unless your other choice is an 1.8" drive, like the MacBook Air).
SSD is supposed to be about power savings, which should be one of your top priorities when designing a portable device (see also Nintendo GameBoy vs Sega GameGear).
The point of SSD drives, imo, is the fact it makes a laptop more portable as in the fact it's safer to carry around without worrying about the hard drive head crashing into the disk because your bus vibrates or because you moved it.
I don't care what the write speed is if it's safer while I'm walking about with it.
It strikes me that current magnetic hard drives have rather huge memory caches for buffering data. The Baracuda drives cited in the article have 16 MBytes worth. Yet there are no cache specs listed for the solid state drives. This could mean that the solid state drives are writing directly to the media. I wonder how well the solid state drives would perform relative to magnetic hard drives that had their caching disabled (or conversely if you had a 16MByte cache for the solid state drive).
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...prefer reading stats like this in a damn bar graph or something?
For years, us pilots have been looking for a viable way of taking data to altitude. Typical hard drives fail at altitudes above ~15,000 feet. SSDs have basically eliminated that problem altogether.
Using SSDs on our portables, we can now go to extreme altitudes in unpressureized enclosures without the fear of drive failure.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
Wrong, this myth simply will not go away. All modern drives have write leveling technology built in. Also unlike a mechanical drive which generally fails on read, SSDs fail on write which allows the drive itself to trap all failures, and redirect the bytes to another unused sector. Anyone who care about performance shuts off atime as it is.
Hi twitter.
This "Mactrope" sockpuppet is now posting at -1. That makes five ruined Slashdot accounts so far.
As to the actual contents of your post, well, as usual it just boils down to "I hate Microsoft". No attempt at rational thought or discussion, intentionally misrepresenting what the article said and so on. Nothing new.
All drives that have been release in the last 2 years have built in write leveling technology which pushes the bytes to new physical locations in memory. Hence it now takes something on the order of 100 years of constant writing to "wear" out the drive.
I don't know if the test took this into account, but the summary only describes throughput performance. But most HD access is burst. And it doesn't mention whether that's faster or not.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Let's not get too excited or too under-excited about SSDs until we have done some serious comparisons.
...) port usb hub, add 4 (6, 8, ...) 8GB usb sticks and voila a 32 (48, 64, ...) GB drive although you'd have to use RAID or mount points (in Linux), or something to combine them. Now what we need is someone to build a pluggable case that has an internal card that combines the sticks installed into a single disk from the visible USB port. Then, where's your agurment SSDs aren't worth the cost? I'd like to see you hotswap an HD platter. ...
I'd like to know:
1: How fast are they at reading in a bunch of data fragmented over a good size area (not a concern for me, thank you EXT3),
2: How reliable are they at holding the data, ie what is the decay rate for the data compared to a HD,
3: how would they satnd up to repeated exposure to airport and other scanning equipemnt vs HDs,
4: How high can you drop a laptop with each type of drive, and what kind of other travel related shock,
5: How sensitive is a SSD compared to a HD in regards to say static electricity.
I'd say the article's author is only doing a very narrow comparison of pros and cons of SSDs vs HD. I'd be willing to spend some serious bucks on a hotplug SSD for backup purposes, or even for extendable space. After all, it wouldn't take much to build a nice little "disk" from sticks that would be "hot-pluggable" in any PC with a usb slot. Quick-N-Dirty disk: take one 4 (6, 8,
Damn, that's such a good Idea, I should have implemented it myself and marketed it, now someone is going to read this and "steal" my Idea and make
PROFIT!
As opposed to what? The hard disk's vacuum or gaseous storage? When did "solid state" go from a technical term with a precise meaning to "no moving parts"?
What is this HD-DVD you speak of?
My apologies for a long post. There will be some adverts embedded, but I will try to keep things informative.
The reason that Flash SSDs act "wierd" in benchmarks is that they have asymmetric performance patterns when reading and writing. Particularly with random operations, this asymmetry is huge. Here are a couple of example "drives":
* Mtron 7000 series: >14,000 4K random reads. ~130 4K random writes.
* SanDisk 5000 series: ~7,000 4K random reads. 13 4K random writes.
* Cheap CF card or USB stick: ~2,500 4K random reads. 3.3 4K random writes.
This is a 100:1 performance deficit when doing random writes versus the random reads. This has some really weird impacts on system performance. For example, if you run Outlook and tell it to "index" your system, it will build a 1-4 GB index file in-place with 100% random writes. If you do this on a hard disk, the job takes a long time and drags down your laptop, but the operation is still pretty smooth. Do the same think on an SSD and the system slugs to molasses. One of our customers described it as "totally unusable" with 2+ minutes to bring up task manager. What happens is that the fast reads allow the application to dirty write buffer faster and this then swamps system RAM, you get a 100+ deep write queue (at 13/sec), and you want to throw the machine off of a bridge.
This fix as some have described it is not some magic new controller glue or putting the flash closer to the CPU. It is organizing the write patterns to more closely match what the Flash chips are good at. Numerous embedded file systems like JFFS do this, but they are really designed for very small devices and are more concerned with wear and lifespan issue than performance.
Now here comes the advert (flames welcome). A little over 2 years ago, I wrote a "block translation" layer for use with Flash storage devices. It is somewhat similar to a LogFS, but it is not really a file system and it does not play be all of the rules of a LogFS. It does however remap blocks and linearize writes. Thus it plays well with Flash. It also appears to be an "invention", and thus my patent lawyer is well paid.
The working name of the driver layer itself is "Fast Block Device" (fbd) and the marketing name is "Manged Flash Technology". And what this does is to transparently map one block device into another view. You can then put whatever file system you want into the mix.
In terms of performance, it is all about bandwidth. Build a little raid-5 array with 4 Mtron drives and you will get over 200 MB/sec of sustained write throughput. With MFT in place, this directly translates into 50,000 4K random writes/sec. Even better, you tend to end up with something that is much closer to symmetric in terms of random read/write performance.
MFT is production on Linux (it has actually been shipping since last summer) and is in Beta test on Windows. It works with single drives as well as small to medium sized arrays. It does work with large arrays, but the controllers don't tend to keep up with the drives, so large arrays are useful for capacity but don't really help performance a lot. Once you get to 50,000 IOPS it is hard for the controllers to go much faster.
Consumer testing with MFT tends to produce some laughable results. We ran PCMark05's disk test on it and produced numbers in the 250K range. This was with a single Mtron 3025. Our code is fast, but we fooled the benchmark in this case.
There are several white papers on MFT posted in the news link of our website:
http://managedflash.com/
My apologies for the advert, but I see a lot of talk about SSDs without actually knowing what is going on inside.
I am happy to answer any questions on-line of off.
Doug Dumitru
EasyCo LLC
610 237-2000 x43
http://easyco.com/
http://managedflash.com/
http://mtron.easyco.com/
HDD -> SDD in the background. There's data inconsistency, but it's a form of caching, so I expect there's already an efficient solution.
I've seen the MacBook Air in person and it is an amazing design. It really is incredible how light it is. That said, it's pricey (not that Apple minds that) and what I really wish they would have made would have been...
- 10 or 11" screen
- 8 or 16 GB solid-state drive--for a secondary machine which WON'T be used for lots of DV capture, storing your whole iTunes library, etc., a small drive is fine
- built-in CF reader, and you could get a big CF card to be used as a TimeMachine volume
In other news, I do have a (non-Pro, non-Air) MacBook and the drive is ridicuously easy to get in and out. (Remove the battery, loosen three captive screws, pull away the L-shaped piece of metal, slide out the drive) and I'd like to experiment with some kind of SSD, either a 'proper' drive or a CF/SD/whatever card in a SATA adapter. Any suggestions on where to start? A newegg search for 'sata ssd' shows an 8 GB unit for $210 and a 16 GB one for $340. Searching for 'sata cf adapter' shows a $40 unit--could I just get one of those and a fast CF card? This page ends with the conclusion "A serious SSD a CompactFlash card is not" but it is from 2000 (but then again, shows as being updated a just a few months ago. I've written to the author.) Any thoughts?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Well, I can supply my own experiences for you, after using a 32GB Samsung SSD for a year, and a 64GB Samsung SSD for several months...
1) Mine have been formatted NTFS, running Windows XP (and additionally Apple HFS Journaled recently when experimenting with OS X). I do not defragment the SSD, there is no point. Read speeds have always been better than write speed, but I see no difference in performance over time.
2) Both of the drives I have are fully functional, even though I abused the 32GB one mercilessly. That laptop has only 1GB of RAM and I would run so many programs that things were swapping constantly for the past year.
3) The 32GB SSD has been through airport scanners approximately 50 times now, no problems. The 64GB is too new, only travelled a few times so far.
4) My laptops are always on the go, brought into many factories as a consultant. While in my bag it has taken falls down sets of stairs. The laptop itself (a Fujitsu P1610) has been dropped from a height of 3.5 to 4 feet onto a metal catwalk while running with no adverse affects (other than a few scuffs and dents on the corners).
5) Not sure how well they stand up to static, but it has stood up well to a variety of high EM fields, and high/low temperatures. No data loss. I have had regular hard disks die from working next to large transformers (and their magnetic fields) for an afternoon.
Hope that helps you. For my line of work, they have been incredible. I used to go through 3 or 4 laptop hard disks per year due to various issues. Now the only reason I bought the 64GB SSD is increased storage capacity.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Remove the default anticipatory scheduler (which is good for mechanical drives... not so much for flash) and you'd probably get much better results with SDD.
/sys/block/hda/queue
cd
echo noop > scheduler
Waht about battery time. Shouldn't a SSD save on battery usage?
A major point of contention on this matter is the type of SSD. SSD technology has a very wide gap in performance, largely based on manufacturer.
I work for an SSD distributor, and it's a known fact that Crucial an d RiData SSD's simply do not perform as well as Mtron or Memoright drives. Also, OCz drives have narrowed the gap considerably.
So before you crucify SSD's as a whole, get a larger sample size.
To argue on the other hand of this, WD HDD's such as the Raptor and the new Velociraptor have much higher speeds than the Seagate drives, so a more comprehensive comparison is needed.
I just ordered a new laptop, and it has an ExpressCard slot into which I could drop 4 or 8 GB of solid-state disk at a reasonable price. That could serve as a giant cache, one that unlike RAM could be safely used as a write cache.
It seems like there would be a clever way to treat the SSD plus the regular hard drive as one unit so that the hard drive could be spun down for hours of normal working situations, giving a giant extension of battery life.
Anybody heard of a virtual block device or special filesystem that would take advantage of this in Linux?
Good job. Now
So... if your actions have any effect at all, it will be to delay the development of software that effectively uses SSDs.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
They weren't using the fastest sata SSD's readily available, so I'm not too surprised by the results. There's an SSD on newegg from OCZ that can do 100MB/s read and 80MB/s write. Also, you can easily find MTRON 2.5" sata drives that can do 120MB/s read 90MB/s write. All similarly or better priced.
Look, we get it. You hate twitter. The rest of us don't care. Shut the fuck up.
Good questions.
1) Seek time is 0 for flash. The HDD will be faster on a fresh install than after filesystems get fragmented.
2) Retention for flash is rated as long as life for HDD. Typical disk lifetime spec is only 5 years due to mechanical parts.
3) Energy to flip a bit is much higher for HDD than flash, but both have ECC and use totally different base technology. Its a good Sophomore Physics problem.
4) Flash wins. HDD spec is 250 Gs for 2 msec.
5) Once components are soldered to a PCB they are a lot less sensitive to handling. HDD and SSD should both be handled only by the cases, and both have exposed components.
I already know of one flash SSD using "your" idea. Conventional USB flash controller chips cost $0.30 in large quantity. A SATA-to-8-port-USB chip in front makes a flash drive.
All the brand notebooks with SSD options use first generation SSDs. These have the shattering access speeds, high durability, no noise, and power efficient benefits, but read/write performance is still mediocre.
The second generation SSDs would cost you more than a whole notebook, but have significant performance improvements:
Memoright GT vs Mtron vs Raptor vs Seagate
Memoright nails it. It is easily twice as fast as what Mac puts in their notebooks.
If you *really* want an SSD, buy one separately and install it yourself. You will not be disappointed.
BTW the file indexing that causes SSDs to slow cause HDDs to slow as well. Many people have reported unbearable slowdown, and that is with HDDs. I am sure anything slower than that would make you want to return the whole thing, but this can be fixed. Most people will tell you to just turn it off. Google has also complainted about Microsoft pre-installing an indexing system that sucks.
Looks promising ... but I would divert some money from your lawyer to your website design if I was you ;)
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
I just recently did some raw read/write speed tests with a raid0 of a bunch of USB Flash Drives. The price for performance ratio is really good compared to standard SSDs.
I've got it up on my site here.
6x USB Flash Drive Raid
Its what happens when techies run a company rather than marketeers.
Since I bough my first digital camera in 2002, I've taken more than 40000 photos and have yet to lose any photos due to a memory card failure. Of the 5 cards I own, I still use 3 frequently (the 32 MB and 128 MB ones are a tad small these days, especially when shooting RAW). Perhaps it's been dirt/wear on the card connectors rather than actual flash failure in your case?
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
Economies of scale will change the situation soon.
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
Internally, the drives should be configured as several banks of flash memory with their own read controllers. Then the drive can stripe the data across those banks (like a RAID array) for huge boost in sustained read/write speed.
The cool thing about this is you can have as many banks and controllers as you are willing to pay for, so you can scale up the throughput almost as much as you like.
From the outside, the drive would appear as a normal single drive.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
I would have loved to have seen the difference in seconds between SSD and HDD in the following:
-openoffice load time
-time to switch a tab in firefox
-time to switch or minimize a window
-boot time
-loading a large spreadsheet
Preferably, times between a fast and a slow CPU should be compared.
Those are the only areas of obvious slowness I see on a day to day basis on my 4 year old laptop, and they all strike me as bottlenecked by random access rather than CPU. I don't think any of those applications involved reading a long contiguous file like a DVD for example.
It might turn out that if you want to upgrade, you might get away with just a switch to SSD for the most noticeable speed improvement for the price; from what I have found, anything beyond the first 10 Gb is luxury in the form of music, photos or movies. So you really don't need an 80Gb drive for that application.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=141
From the above article : "Also ask if the drive is a native SATA implementation or a parallel drive with a SATA bridge chip. You want the native SATA implementation. Theyre better in all aspects."
Apple uses the bridge chip, Lenovo uses the native implementation. I'm sure this would be a factor in their results.
Disclaimer: I shelled out a fortune for a Lenovo x300 with a SSD.
I.O.U One Sig.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Habit. I used to develop for HD-DVD, and I'm still bitter enough to bring it up in every Blu-Ray discussion.
I mean "in every high-def discussion."
Fuck.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The power consumption as people already mentioned.
Also, look at the weight. This thing shaves off a pound of weight.
Suddenly, you go from 6lbs to 5lbs for a high performance laptop. Thats huge.
what is the difference between removable flash drives (CF, SD, thumbdrives) and SSD that causes the big price difference?
I'm aware of the other filesystems that do internal defragging, but since EXT3 is what I use (I used to use Reiser) that is where my example came from. I was really just trying to point out that the posting author missed a lot of the pros of SSD drives. The time to seek anywhere on a flash disk is the same, whereas on a platter it depends on where in the ring it is located. I'd say the article actually got it wrong. If I had the extra cash to spend, it'd be SSD for sure. I'm still waiting for it to come down a bit more. Although I may take the time to hack up a little project and build my own expandable one and "grow" some new drives over time with mad money. I've been looking for a good pic and usb project, and this fits the bill nicely.