SSD Won't Make Sense In Laptops For Two Years

kgagne writes "While solid state disk drives can vastly improve random read performance and are perfectly suited to most mobile devices, many operations are sequential in laptops and desktops and involve writes where SSDs most often lose to magnetic hard disk drives in performance. While introducing multi-channel flash memory controllers and interleaving the NAND flash chips increases performance, it will still be about two years before the cost versus benefit ratio will make sense to install SSD in your laptop or desktop PC, according to a Computerworld story. '"I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200, and that's going to happen around 2010. Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage," says Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner Inc.'"

Comments

120GB is too much.

[symbolset]

Try 16GB SDHC, available now for $50, delivered.

One for the OS and apps, one for the data. Need more? Put the other ones in your pocket.

Re:120GB is too much.

[karnal]

I guarantee that the SDHC card you mention will not push any really reasonable speed.

I bought this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208418

Then I went to Addonics web site and ordered a CF to IDE adapter. Well, at first I ordered one on ebay. Turned out it didn't fully support DMA...??? Like they didn't complete all the traces properly... anyways, for 70$ or so total, I have a diskless machine in my garage that boots Ubuntu and plays music; no more whiney 80gb hard drive there.

I think Linux reported hdparm stats of 25 to 30MB per second. Not too shabby; since the PC is only a 900 mhz athlon, I really can't tell if the CF is a limiting factor in speed. It feels just as snappy as when I had the original hard disk in; it probably boots a bit faster but I generally just turn it on and don't watch over it...

Re:120GB is too much.

[symbolset]

That was just the cheapest one today. There are dozens there and one will suit. I didn't have time to construct the capacity/price/performance grid and still get a first post. Sorry.

If you need more than 16GB of OS and apps, you don't need a laptop really. Or if you do you're a power user with unusual needs - you're not in the "most people" zone where the price/performance sweet spot is. About 4GB is an XP install with Office, for 8GB you can have Ubuntu and a few hundred of your favorite free apps. If your system image is >12GB, you have other issues and you should expect to pay more. 16GB for OS & apps, 16GB for data is plenty for almost anybody.

Not all SDHC->IDE or SDHC->PCMCIA or SDHC->SATA converters support booting, but most do and most SDHC adapters installed in laptops do support it. You can always try it. The ones that do are quite proud of the fact and so it won't be hard to tell which is which. The performance on these things can be quite fine. I don't know why they don't just put a socket for these things on a desktop motherboard. You have to buy the embedded motherboard for that.

Re:120GB is too much.

[Anonymous Coward]

"16GB for data is plenty for almost anybody."

Hahaha oh wow

Re:120GB is too much.

[bigstrat2003]

Ever try to torrent something that isn't popular? Yeah. That's why you keep a local copy.

Re:120GB is too much.

[suggsjc]

You are missing the point. I had a whole post (with numbers/calculations) done, but it all boils down to this. If you are using your laptop as your main storage point (probably a bad idea), then yes 16GB is probably not enough. But if you are smart about it, then you can easily make it work. Worst case scenario for your CD's (320kbps) would come out to over a week of continuous music. If you are one of those "I need all of my songs with me at all times" people, then again 16GB may not work for you. But I go through phases and want to hear different styles at different times, so I can easily swap out what I want to hear from my main storage, out of my +20GB worth of music I probably only list to maybe a GB at a time, and probably 60-70% is stuff that I will never listen to again.
You can take that rough principle above and apply it to all of your other examples as well. You can easily use more than 16GB worth of storage. But with just a tiny bit of effort you can also easily live happily with less, and probably much less. Does that mean I'm jumping on the SSD bandwagon at this point, nope...I'll wait for it to be cost effective for me and my usage habits, and I don't need a /. article to let me know when that time will be.

I completely agree

[moderatorrater]

The small increase in performance isn't worth the several hundred in cost it would add to my laptops. I bought my laptop for $650, and a better HD just isn't worth increasing that to nearly $1000. YMMV.

Re:I completely agree

[magarity]

There's a reason those new Dells which boast 19h of battery life have SSD's
 
No, the new Dells that are boasting that have a battery pack option that is the same size as the bottom of the laptop. Think of one of those laptop cooler pads except 15 pounds of battery instead of a couple of fans inside.

Re:I completely agree

[Idiomatick]

SHHH! if we cant convince rich idiots to buy these things en masse we dont have to wait as long before they are useful.

Re:I completely agree

[frosty_tsm]

Think of one of those laptop cooler pads except 15 pounds of battery instead of a couple of fans inside.

Imagine the explosion you can get out of that!

Re:I completely agree

[llZENll]

Why the hell are SSDs so slow? I've never understood this, its not like in an HD where you can't add more read heads because there isn't enough physical space to do so, or because they can't move fast enough with the additional weight. In an SSD you should be able to put as many chips in parallel to make your read and write speeds whatever the hell you want, 1TBps, no problem. You would think SSDs should be able to saturate a SATA/Fibre/PCIE bus instantly? What gives?

Re:I completely agree

[AllynM]

Many of the modern SSD's *DO* saturate the bus. The Memoright GT and other SLC flash drives easily push 120-130 meg/sec over sata 150. The key is that the 'cheaper' MLC based drives have horrible write speed, especially when writing bunches of small files. Most users think this won't bother them, until they realize outlook does exactly the same thing when accessing its PST.

The thing I don't get is why so many people think SSD's are slow. Even MLC based first generation samsung PATA SSD's obliterate even the fastest laptop hard disks in all areas except for the aforementioned small writes.

From my own desktop testing, a single Memoright GT completely owns the pair of raid-0 74 gig raptors it replaced.

Re:I completely agree

[v(*_*)vvvv]

I have a GT in my vaio, and it is the best 2K I dropped since god knows when.

The first generation SSDs were crap. All the new SSDs are pretty much good to go because the issues were mostly with the software and memory utility algorithms, and not with the physical SSD memory architecture.

The thing I don't get is why so many people think SSD's are slow.

Mac Air and other vendors that had made SSDs optional unfortunately went with the crappy SSDs, and a lot of people who dropped serious cash for them were severely disappointed. And so there was a backlash.

I think it depends on what type of laptop

[petermgreen]

craptops I don't see going SSD for a long time.
ordinary decent laptops I see offering SSD as an option but I don't see it being popular in the near future.

Ultraportables on the other hand are already going ssd in many cases. Tiny hard drives tend to have terrible performance and a 2.5 inch 9.5mm high drive is pretty big for an ultraportable (though some ultraportables do use them).

I disagree

[statemachine]

Complexity, power, heat, and failure from kinetic shock. These are either reduced or zero with a flash device.

If you're looking for non-mobile, or a large storage application, then the disk makes sense.

Re:I disagree

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

It's not as cut and dried as you think; from the article you link to:

Update: We apologize for a procedural mistake in testing battery runtime for this article. As the benchmark looped, the total workload processed by the fast Flash SSDs was higher, causing other components, such as the chipset and the CPU, to be more active as well. We followed up with the article

Check out the graphs on the retest

Losing out on performance

[subStance]

The comment about sequential reads causing the SSD to lose on performance compared with magnetic drives caught my attention. Isn't this highly dependent on the filesystem you use and its strategy for block allocation ?

Wouldn't it be possible to design the block allocation algorithm to favour SSDs the same way previous generations of filesystems tried to put the next block on the disk to be the one under the head at the current moment (or whatever it was they did) ?

Re:Losing out on performance

[petermgreen]

Afaict with SSDs the performance is pretty much constant no matter what the read order. With HDDs sequential reads are much faster than random reads.

So SSDs lose in continuous throughput tests.

battery life?

[bigdavex]

I think people are willing to pay a premium for extended battery life. If I can use my device more, it has more utility.

More for less is an easy sale...

[Manip]

It will be easy to sell the concept of SSD to pretty much anyone, particularly for a laptop. Here is the short list:
- Faster Reads
- Potentially faster to wake up from sleep
- More durable
- Less chance of sudden and complete data loss (e.g. A smaller portion of the drive would fail instead of a complete drive failure as with a magnetic disk)
- Consumes less power
- Quieter
- Cooler (also a power saving feature due to less fan running time)

SSD drives are very cool pieces of technology and I for one can't wait to be able to buy a superthin laptop with no magnetic disk.

Re:Ah...No.

[ottffssent]

Sure. If speed, durability, power, and acoustics are valueless to you.

For the rest of us, SSDs are worth a premium. The amount of that premium depends on the user and workload.

However, given the success of WD's Raptor line of drives, I would suggest that there's certainly a segment of the population who needs or thinks it needs faster rather than larger disk. And further that this segment is sufficiently large to support a business.

It's not just database users who are buying fast SSDs (which can hit 200MB/sec read and >100MB/sec write these days), and prices are plunging as a result.

$200?

[davidpfarrell]

Maybe its just me, but I fully expect 128GB SSD to go for much less than $200 by the end of 2010.

How much HDD space will you be able to buy by that time for $200? I'd say easily 10-15x capacity.

I feel like TFA is trying to set you up to accept higher prices on the hardware for a longer period of time.

SSD is merging onto the superhighway that is Moore's Law for HDD and I can't see settling for lower capacity and higher prices for more than another year or so.

Advertising

[cybereal]

Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage," says Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

MAGIC

Seriously, solid state electronics, even after years and years of being around them as an early 80's baby, still just seems like magic to me. I can't wait to get rid of every little motor whine in my computing world, even if it's another 10 years, that will be a happy day to have a powerful computer without any moving parts.

Geeks Should Understand Latency

[StCredZero]

Time to burn some Karma...

On a "News for Nerds" site, moderators should understand the sources of disk latency. Rotating Hard Drives have latency from the time it takes to move the head across the platter, and for the platter to rotate under the head. SSDs do not have these sources of latency.

One of the big problems is that current flash is just slow on writes. Some of them don't do DMA properly. If there are problems with block sizes, this can be adjusted easily. But the underlying technology has to improve, or manufacturers need to build SSDs with more parallelism and better features. Perhaps very parallel SSD architectures might need filesystems optimized for large block sizes.

One of the big potential benefits of flash is reliability. Imagine highly modular flash drives for servers with hardware RAID 5? Instead of a disk failure, you get a notification that a module needs replacing. In fact, you could build versions with an extra slot for a failover spare in-place!

Also, with wear leveling, there's the potential for hard drives that can warn you several days before they fail!

SSD is here already.

[miffo.swe]

My familys three eeepc and the one i have at work would be utter pain if they had spinning disks and not SSD. Cheap laptop drives is terrible when it comes to sequential reads but even worse at access times.

Ubuntu runs faster in some areas on the eee than on my brand spanking new desktop.

What i long for is faster speeds and more write cycles. Servers is what i think would benefit the most from SSD and thats where i suspect it will take off soon.

Re:Ah...No.

[eggnoglatte]

How many write cycles are your SSDs good for?

With wear leveling? More than a hard drive. Time to put that myth to rest. And no, I am not trolling.