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Notebook Storage SSDs and HDs Compared
The Raindog sends us a particularly timely showdown article comparing seven 2.5" mobile hard drives, four of them HDs and three SSDs, across a wide range of application, file-copy, power-consumption, and noise-level tests. Tom's Hardware was recently forced to issue a correction to a claim, which we discussed here, that SSDs aren't actually much more power-thrifty than HDs. The Tech Report's in-depth comparison provides some data points on the question of whether solid-state storage is ready to supplant traditional mechanical hard drives, but notes that the price disparity is still substantial.
I think someone forgot a critical link... try this for the Tech Report article:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079
I've read that the algorithms used in SSD's are usually proprietary. The problem with SSD's is that they DIDN'T fix the wear leveling problem. It exists, just a lot slower now due to the algorithms referenced above. If my drive dies, I'll have to find a service that can recover my files, but they will have to be certified in samsung, seagate, white label, etc. I really feel uncomfortable with that idea.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
You're missing SLC vs. MLC and high-performance controllers.
The thumb drive will die young if you use it as a hard drive, they're typically only designed for 10-15k write cycles (per cell). They also use MLC cells, which store two bits each - that doubles the capacity, but quadruples the error rate. Errors are usually corrected via parity/ECC, but obviously if you have more errors, you're more likely to exceed the ECC threshold.
There's also the issue with performance. A thumb drive might get 10-15mb/sec on a good day, 20 if you pay way too much money for a "dual channel" unit. Hard drives are expected to deliver 40mb/sec minimum these days, else your apps will take forever to load.
If you really want to be a wacko, you could try RAID-0 across a bunch of thumb drives. You'll get the performance back, but good god you're playing with fire.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
HDDs are really not the main thing to worry about when a laptop is dropped or damaged. Screens are much more expensive than HDs, and much harder to replace. Now, data on HDDs is another story, potentially very valuable or important and impossible to replace, but it can be backed up.
Also, for the same price as a single SSD you could buy literally dozens of HDDs with more than double the storage as the SSD, so in terms of price, even if you pretend SSDs are super reliable and don't even need backup they are still more expensive than dealing with the unreliability of HDs. Obviously, it is much more convient when your hardware doesn't fail, even if it can be replaced fairly easily and cheaply, with minimal data loss, but HDDs are only one compontent of several that can be damaged and make your computer unusable, and with their incredibly limited storage SSDs are much more inconvient. You won't lose your data even if the thing is destroyed, because it won't fit on there in the first place.
Obviously, SSDs have some places where they excel, but at current prices and storage levels they are way over-hyped and over-used. The eee is an especially glaring example of this, putting a ridiculously high end component into a low end machine, forcing a incredibly low amount of storage.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Out of curiosity, have you ever seen actual 'ruggedized' military equipment?
Take a peek at these: http://www.amrel.com/federal_military_computer/rocky_patriot_rugged_notebook.html
This isn't even going into the fire systems equipment that is ruggedized.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx