Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
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) ?
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
I think people are willing to pay a premium for extended battery life. If I can use my device more, it has more utility.
-Dave
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.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Cube On! (http://stores.ebay.com/PuzzleProz)
Ever try to torrent something that isn't popular? Yeah. That's why you keep a local copy.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
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!