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Four SSDs Compared — OCZ, Super Talent, Mtron
MojoKid writes "Solid State Drive technology is set to turn the storage industry on its ear — eventually. It's just a matter of time. When you consider the intrinsic benefits of anything built on solid-state technology versus anything mechanical, it doesn't take a degree in physics to understand the obvious advantages. However, as with any new technology, things take time to mature and the current batch of SSDs on the market do have some caveats and shortcomings, especially when it comes to write performance. This full performance review and showcase of four different Solid State Disks, two MLC-based and two SLC-based, gives a good perspective of where SSDs currently are strong and where they're not. OCZ, Mtron and Super Talent drives are tested here but Intel's much anticipated offering hasn't arrived to market just yet."
Well, let's see:
- Magnetic hard drive = solid state (ICs, buffers, etc) + magnetic platter + mechanical (rotating platter(s) + moving heads)
- SSD = solid state
As soon as the price per GB of SSDs is at parity with the magnetic drives, I'm switching. It probably puts out less heat and require less power, meaning quieter drives too.
It's a good point. SSDs are so new that we can't really say empirically that they'll last for a lot of years. If nothing else, though, they'll be relatively safe against dropping your laptop on the floor.
I got a Core 64GB. I build large java projects. This is for my workstation, not a laptop. Power and quiet were not the reasons for my experimental purchase.
I aimed to slash my build time for complex scenarios.
I thought the Compile -> Jar -> War -> Deploy -> Expand -> Launch would be greatly spead up as the files would be accessed quickly.
I hoped effectively for a much more targeted and capacious file cache/ RAM disk.
Unfortunately, the hype does not turn out to be true.
The enormous time cost of writing files smaller than 8MB (!) [see footnotes] completely counters any read speed increase. Building a proect is making thousands of 2KiB files : one of the most pathological cases for these drives.
So is it slow? No, it's just as quick as a sluggish 7K250, but then again I just coughed up £179 for the privelege of the same speed.
So I'm ebaying mine to someone who wants it for a light and quiet laptop, perfect.
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Some "Terrible small write performance" links I found during research:
* http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/ssd-iram_6.html
* http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106
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