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Will 2009 Be the Turning Point For SSDs?
Iddo Genuth writes "Since first entering the consumer market about two years ago, solid state drives (SSDs) have improved significantly. While prices remain substantially higher than conventional magnetic storage, it is predicted that in 2009 SSDs will finally make an impact on both the consumer and business markets bringing blazing fast speeds at reasonable prices for the first time — will it finally happen?"
It seems likely, as Samsung began mass-producing both 128GB and 256GB SSDs this year. Intel and Micron have also posted recent breakthroughs which will help to bring the technology into the mainstream.
It's the same answer to the article title.
For laptops at least. There is no reason to not to have an SSD in your laptop.
I own an Asus Eee PC, which has a 4GB SSD. I take it with me everywhere and, being a butter-fingered oaf, I tend to drop it everywhere too. If the Eee had a conventional HDD I'm sure it would have given up the ghost long ago. But the Eee bounces along quite happily with no damage to the SSD. Solid state is great, especially for children and folk like me!
Just like the iPods suddenly being introduced as solid state units, things for SSD's will soon pass the threshold where it's suddenly viable for everyone. Only Samsung knows exactly when, but it seems clear that in the next six to eighteen months widespread SSD availability will trickle down from elite systems to mid-range.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
No no no, people have too big an investment in Windows to switch over to Linu.... what? SSD? Sorry, carry on...
The question should be "is this the year that SSDs will be price competitive with hard drives?" Until that day comes, SSDs will only sell in small quantities.
Money. HDD's will keep getting cheaper. I'm betting on 2010.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Yes, it will.
will come likely before the year of the linux desktop.
What would bother me more than the high price is the limited number of writes.
Sure, there are ways to limit writes to the disk, like disable swapping and delaying writes whenever possible, but I would still rather go with a reliable HDD over a SDD.
I never dropped one of my notebooks until today, but then again I never had one that looked like a toy...
...the year of SSD on the desktop.
http://www.fusionio.com/ - why are we not hearing so much of them any more, or is there some other reason why nobody seems to mention them?
Need an ISP in South Africa?
If by "price competitive" you mean "equal $/GB," that day is far off. But if you mean "reasonable size and comparable write speed for less than $200," then that day will come in 2009 or 2010 for a lot of people, since many of us can get by fine with only 128GB.
While I respect that some people need speed (not as many as they think) and many more need the power savings that come from SSDs, many others are more concerned with storage space.
All those TiVos and media players need a lot of storage space.
Or if you're like me, a librarian at heart, who wants to acquire data, nicely label it, and store it away for future use and preservation (really am a data pack rat).
One of the main reasons Blu-Ray isn't as widely pirated as DVD, is the massive amount of space it takes, both in storage and in transmission.
While I see SSDs being used in high end data centers (were money is little object) and laptops (where battery is key), I think that they are going to be backed up or supplemented by some type of home server.
Especially now that Hamachi allows me access to my home server where ever I go (with a connection). Although, it is slow enough that my most used files are synched as "offline files".
it's not a problem anymore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling
I'm looking for a SSD cache driver for windows. I would like to have a hd-driver for vista which uses another harddisc (SSD) as a cache for other (spinning) harddiscs. My working set (including the OS) is probably below 32GByte, so a fast 64GByte SSD driver should be enough for general use. As I still have a lot of data (around 1TBype) which is only occasioaly used, a caching driver which usses a SSD would be the ideal solution.
Does anybody know such a software(driver)? I'm willing to pay, no need for open source...
It will be phased out (by Windows 7 or something similar) before XP will be phased out, so why bother.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
When comparing two computers, consumers go for the one with best numbers most of the time. They have no clue what harddrive throughput is, and even less clue about seek time. Capitalism provides the goods that sell, not the best-engineered goods (unless they sell better.. )
I bet the worldwide consumerist harddisk space utilization is about 15%, but most people don't realize this. Unless people have magically wised up, we won't see widespread SSD in laptops until they catch up pricewise.
Stop the brainwash
I wonder what effect it would have on McDonalds to say to everyone in the US, "Is 2009 finally the year people stop stuffing themselves with fattening poison?"
I doubt it would have any effect unless you made it explicit what the fattening poison was.
How many people need (or even have) 250GB+ in their laptops?!
In capacities from 30-60gb there is overlap in price ranges between SSD and HDD. Below that you can't get an HD drive, but SSD drives are available. SSD pricing has nowhere to go but down. HDD can drop relative prices, but only by adding more and more GB relative to your dollar.
That will keep HDDs alive for awhile in higher capacity drives, but the low low end is already ruled by SSDs (4GB, 8GB, etc as only options for netbooks). As time goes on SSD will move up from there, out-competing larger and larger capacity HDD until "boom" - they are produced more cheaply per GB regardless of total capacity.
I think that "boom" mark is sometime in 2010, but certainly the GP's point about laptops stands. Unless you are the rare person who needs a large capacity laptop drive, there is no reason not to have an SSD in your laptop now.
In the mid 1990s 'disk doubler' programs were popular, compressing data on the fly as it was saved to disk. After a few years, however, disk sizes increased sharply and the relationship between price and disk size is much steeper than linear (a 1Gibyte disk does not cost twice as much as a 500Gibyte disk). So hardly anyone bothers with dynamic compression any more. It is much easier to spend $40 more and get a drive that's twice as big.
However, with SSDs, even when the price falls, there is still an almost linear relationship between capacity and cost (since to get twice the capacity you need twice as many flash memory chips). And while the transfer speed is fast, it's still not keeping pace with the increase in CPU speeds. Compressing on-disk data with a fast compression scheme such as LZO is often faster than reading or writing to disk uncompressed. With SSDs you need much less complexity in the filesystem to get good performance, since minimizing seek time is no longer as important. Perhaps, then, adding file compression can be done more straightforwardly than the earlier compressed filesystems designed for rotating disks.
It won't do anything for your movie collection, but for virtual machine images and other bloat we put on our disks nowadays it could make quite a difference.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Last I saw a performance and power consumption test, SSDs did no better than mechanical HDs. Seek performance was much better, read performance not so much, and write performance was much worse, resulting in equivalent real-life desktop performance, at a much higher price.
A smart OS might be able to optimally split files between a SSD and a HD depending on usage patterns. I'm still waiting for a smart OS though, and somewhat object to an OS that has to span 2 partitions.
As for setting up your OS on a separate partition... about time you did it. It does not even require distinct physical HDs. I personally have been doing it since Win98 days, if not before.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I use Windows' native NTFS compression on an SSD, & it works out just fine, for how I use SSD's & what for, in both HOME usage & CORPORATE ENVIRONS...
(Especially for logging, webpage caching, + %temp% ops occurring on the SSD type I use (a good one for performance on READ & WRITE I/O, not just reads (like Flash is best @ but, poorer on WRITES)):
Via the CENATEK "RocketDrive" PCI 2.2 133mb/sec bus, 4gb of PC-133 SDRAM!
----
FOR "END-USER" TYPE USE PATTERNS ON FILES THAT ARE BOTH OF READ/WRITE NATURE & CONSTANTLY ONGOING TASKS:
1gb Partition #1 = pagefile.sys placement...
1gb Partition #2 has folders on it for:
1.) %temp% & %tmp% ops to take place on it, via the environment "in memory .ini file" every app gets
2.) Webbrowser caches
3.) Logging by the OS (event logs, easily moveable via registry edits/reg file merges) + apps' logs
----
Does it make a diff., even for "end-user use patterns" of that nature?
Sure, those things which go on, ALL THE TIME mind you, of BOTH read/write nature no less (where FLASH based SSD's take a beating is writes, wear levelling notwithstanding, that's just for longevity more than performance) get F A S T E R... access/seek is MILES above std. mechanical HDD's alone!
Yes - you notice it.
Large & noticeable improvements to overall system performance results, by your std. mechanical HDD's even, in them NOT being burdened w/ constant ongoing head movements that impede program + data loads mind you (that are incurred from paging, logging, & temporary operations by the OS & apps!)
(Also, a SMALLER, but, "long-term" performance gain results, too (not huge, but present nevertheless), of less fragmentation on your main OS & Programs bearing HDD(1000x slower than SSD) from fragmentation webpage caches, logs, & paging files cause in themselves AND other files)...
Fast on my type of system for that kind of data (most of which I could care less if I lose or not mind you, even though it has a UPS backing it), because it's smallish files I move for webpage caching & SSD's are good for this, but also pagefiles, & %temp% ops, all of which are READ/WRITE I-O... because I don't use a FLASH based SSD (weaker on writes typically/historically @ least).
Especially on a rig like mine, w/ only 512mb DDR-400 RAM, now running Windows Server 2003 SP#2 as a workstation (default install), tuned & trimmed "to-the-max" has been running setup like that since 2003, solid as a rock stable, & fast.
(Thus - I use SSD's to speed-up the SLOWEST part of any system - it's HDDs!)
Bottom-line here? Well:
WANT MORE SPEED? SPEED UP THE SLOWEST THING ANY PC CONTENDS WITH - DISKBOUND I/O.."
----
FOR COMMERCIAL/ENTERPRISE-CLASS/MULTIUSER/TRANSACTION-BASED ENVIRONS (take your pick)??
Take a read:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312/7 [techreport.com]
PERTINENT EXCERPT:
"Wow. Seriously.
The i-RAM is in another league in IOMeter, offering transaction rates that are an order of magnitude higher than its closest competition. It doesn't take long for the i-RAM to get revved up, either. The card hits its peak transaction rate with just two simultaneous I/O requests."
APK
P.S.=> Nuff said... apk
When the helical fluorescent tubes that screw into regular lamp sockets came out, they were a flop. They cost $15 to $20. Despite being longer lasting than the equivalent dollar amount of incandescent bulbs, people didn't see them as a significant improvement. In one study group, a subject gave a remark that summed up their reticence: "This solves a problem I don't have."
So it is with SSD. It'll have to be enough cheaper than magentic storage and appear to be long lived enough so that people can overcome their unwillingness to switch from something that works just fine. Specs don't matter to the average user. Not getting stuck with an orphan matters far more. That point remains unproven. Thus SSDs do not solve a problem, but present one of their own. If and when both of these change, they'll be accepted.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
My Mac Pro cold boots in 20 sec on a 7200 RPM hard drive. So I would expect that to go down to less than 10 seconds on really fast SSD.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
"Wow. Seriously.
The i-RAM is in another league in IOMeter...
Heh. The i-RAM is a finicky chunk of trash.
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/89113.html
More likely to be the year of the 1.5TB disk. With capacities so large and prices so cheap there's no reason not to have a huge disk to replace all those 80Gb and 120Gb external drives you have - for your downloaded videos and mp3, of course.
Before 2008, SSDs were too small to use, or more expensive than the rest of your computer combined. In 2008, capacity increased and price dropped to a point where SSDs were a viable option for less than a 50% total system price premium you can now have an SSD that holds the OS, any normal (non-media intensive) apps you use, and a reasonable amount of data (excluding video or massive music/photo collections, which belong on a NAS device anyway.)
Things will only continue to get better for SSD, but flash memory has been playing hard-drive catch-up for more than a decade now, and it likely will be another decade before solid state storage is larger, faster (linear access) and cheaper than rotating media. What happened in 2008 was just SSDs overtaking the basic capacity needs of modern OSs at an affordable (to some) price.
My machines (all laptops/netbooks, I do not like desktops because they eat lots of power and are thus anti-ecological) are now equipped with SSDs for the OS (Debian GNU/Linux) and for non-OS stuff, which is actually very little, I just plug some fast SD or CF memory cards or roomy USB flash drives. I do not use any hard disks anymore, except for a few old machines that I hardly use now or for my servers. Everything works great. I feel as if I am running supercomputers - it's so fast. Just to make sure my SSDs will live for a long time, I use ext2 instead of ext3/ext4, and I configured my /tmp to live in a tmpfs filesystem. Filesystem fixing takes just a few seconds with SSDs, so the speed advantage of journaling ext3/ext4 does not hold anymore, and after all I never liked journaling filesystems at all. I see no reason why anyone would want an SSD bigger than 32GB/64GB for an OS, except for booting multiple OSes. For those running games or other programs that need fast disk access, it is always possible to plug an external SSD over eSATA (or Firewire) or put multiple SSDs into your machines if the motherboard supports that.
Of course, SSD's are too expencive if you need a data storage. But they are much more better suited for laptops (and especially netbooks). I also can imagine desktops with mixed drives -- fast SSD for OS, large conventional HDD for user data.
Read the GP and PP carefully, then read your note again.
GP said: if you have Vista, it is a good reason to buy SSD.
PP said: yes, but why bother with Vista.
You said what you said...
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
fricking slashdot tricked me :( I thought you answered me, not an outmodded note, sorry.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/
32gb 76.00
64gb 136.00
transcend and ritek are the lowest prices
Both include an HDTV tuner and Blu-Ray drive, both are fairly muscular "desktop replacements" running 64 Bit Vista.
The only distinguishing feature of significance is the 26" TouchSmart screen.
We are going to be seeing many more systems like these and at much lower price points - and the HD media they are designed for will eat up a lot of storage very quickly.
The geek may be focused on the netbook right now - but it is worth paying attention to what is happening in other markets.
Why no SSD's with an ATA-6 interface. I'd love to slap a 16 GB in my old Thinkpad (I just use it as a media center with it's S-Video out port.)
I'd love to have XP boot up in five seconds like I see some people claiming.
Alas, there are none with an ATA-6 interface. :(
When SSDs get to the mid-range price they start to look good for archival storage. The lifetime of NAND flash SSD is primarily determined by the number of writes, so they should be great for this purpose.
Also, I imagine that Asus paid far less for the 4GB SSD on the Eeepc 701 than they would have paid for any harddisk. The claim that hdds are cheaper is presumably per GB rather than per device which is perfectly capable of standard tasks such as word processing.
I am not an expert, but my limited knowledge says that we can kiss secure erase (fill with zero or random data) goodbye on SSD disks.
It is becoming hard enough to be certain that you deleted/overwritten a file with copy-on-write (ZFS and such) but with wear leveling any secure erase attempt will probably still leave with copies of your data on disk.
Even a full wipe disk procedure will leave some remnants in remapped parts of flash storage.
I do hope that somebody is tackling this issue, but it seems to me that the solution will only be available on the disk firmware level.
They will reserve SSD's for only the most high end of PCs and laptops and then market them as 'extreme' or 'ultralight' and bump the price 2 or 3x times the bottom rung of corresponding devices. It's all about margin. And SSDs will NEVER be retail priced below regular drives until manufacturers decide to stop building regular drives.
Most budget laptops poke along just fine with 80gb and 160gb hard drives. The main thing is getting the cost down.
"Heh. The i-RAM is a finicky chunk of trash." - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Saturday December 13, @08:55AM (#26102285)
ON LINUX though? Yes, maybe it is "finicky", because that IS your example it seems from the URL you put up here...
(Maybe worse also, if the user & his anecdotal evidence, is an "idiot @ the wheel driving" (i.e.-> Running the machine itself &, they don't really know what they're doing, especially w/ the IRAM by GIGABYTE)).
However, it does a good job on Windows-based machine. I have never personally seen complaints about it... & Windows does better with SSD's apparently, than does any other OS out there, per this article!
Also, I personally have a CENATEK "RocketDrive"... &, I use it as I outline + for 7-8 yrs. now going strong & it's fine (I wonder if FLASH based SSD's will last that long, eh? Doubt it...)
----
CENATEK ROCKETDRIVE = PC-133 SDRAM memory, PCI 2.2 ISA bus 133mb/sec. transferral rate
vs.
GIGABYTE IRAM = DDR memory, SATA 1 bus 150mb/sec. transferral rate.
----
The Gigabyte IRAM, in theory, should be even F A S T E R, because it uses better faster RAM & faster bus technology.
(AND, unlike the CENATEK RocketDrive I use? You can even bootup your OS from the IRAM...)
APK
P.S.=> In computers, stability depends largely on 2 things in hardware:
A.) Drivers (not a 'strong point' of Linux by way of comparison to Windows @ least, especially w/ non-mainstream hardwares such as SSD's apparently, since you show someone having troubles with the IRAM who uses LINUX)
&
B.) The user himself + his saavy & understanding...
(Lack even 1 of those 2? You get, what you get... )
AND, besides: Windows, per this article (specifically Windows 2000) does a better job of using SSD's apparently than any other OS out there...
It makes sense that Windows gets better drivers & drivers period + faster, most likely (if not filesystem & diskdriver interaction as well as cachework apparently) & Windows has more drivers that exist for it, since that IS where the monies are made (on Windows, 95% of the worlds computers run it, & most any + all peripherals are designed right off the bat for Windows because of that)... apk
I would like to use a SSD as my OS drive for a few of it's benefits. Overall noise level and speed are the two big things. Given that the drive itself is near silent is kinda obvious when dealing with noise levels but also the heat level and power consumption are lower. As such it's less cooling to deal with which then in turn can mean with a air cooling system less fan noise.
At this point the prices are low enough such that it would not be a big deal to get one and play around with it. However it would be nice to see them a bit bigger before I took the plunge.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
All the vendors lie through their teeth posting rediculous best case numbers when they know full well random write performance is patheticly worse than even the slowest of normal hard drives.
Power consumption is in practice not much better and sometimes has even come out worse than mobile HDDs (with spinning platters).
The reliability numbers on the order of even *millions* of writes before a cell stops working frankly scares the hell out of me. With the xfer rates they claim you can certainly perform a million writes (worse case) to the same cell in minutes to hours.
Wear leveling, remap sparing..etc don't really see how they can be effective if the disks storage capacity is actually being utilitized.
Using flash memory is just a fad that will pass in short order with MRAM/loop memory et al being closer to reality and eventually much easier to mass produce.
Yes the future is extremely bright for solid state storage however the current generation of repurposed flash technology is expensive crap that will likely remain so until its wholesale replacement goes into volume production. (IE not in 2009)
The price gouging will continue and we'll have idiots in these SSD manufacturing companies wondering why people don't have $1000 laying around their house to by a SSD drive.
I have around 100gigs of music; yes, I like to haul the whole damn lot with me when I take my laptop - thank you very much. No, I don't want to ponk it on an external hard disk either.
The day when I start seeing 250gb SSD's that perform faster than traditional hard disks for radon writes and cost around NZ$150 - then I'll consider moving. Until that day, SSD will remain that unjustified luxury which I'll never be able to afford.
I think one can say confidently that SSDs do not have the same near-term catastrophic failure issues that HDs have. A SSD will be about as reliable as, say, the motherboard in a computer. Certain parts within the SSD, such as electrolytic capacitors, have limited life spans, but no more limited then the electronics inside a hard drive. Many people in the server space talk about putting their boot partition on RAID to ensure that the machine is still able to boot with a failed hard drive. You don't need to do that if you use a SSD for your boot disk. Because the SSD is no less reliable then the motherboard it makes little sense to have additional redundancy in that context. Once you are booting from reliable media you have a lot more redundancy options for the rest of the media accessed by the machine. For example, there is no need to RAID the local disks within the local hardware, the redundancy can be networked instead.
However, the ability to recover from a flash that has been sitting on a shelf too long is a real issue compared to a HD. Both suffer thermal degradation over time but even if a HD's moving parts become unusable it is still possible to do a surface scan and recover the data after a long period of time has passed, even if it costs a few thousand dollars to do it. Once a flash cell leaks into the ether the data is virtually unrecoverable. There is nothing to scan. Theoretically one can shave the top off the chip and use a tunneling microscope to scan it (the Taiwanese did this to read out 'protected' EEROM from integrated cpu chips years ago), but the expense would be enormous, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit or more, with no re-takes if it fails (the chip would be effectively destroyed). Flash-based media is NOT archival storage.
This is even more true for flash cells nearing the ends of their lives, after they've been rewritten a lot. The first write in a freshly minted flash memory will survive on the shelf far longer then the last successful write before a cell fails. The achilles heal of flash is the wear issue, and this limits its usefulness in server environments unless you explicitly replace the unit once a year as part of your regular maintenance. The risk is you put an often-used SSD on the shelf and a few years later the entire data set is corrupted beyond recovery.
On the flip side, your average consumer does not actually generate a lot of data. One terrabyte worth of writes on a 256G medium is only about 4 rewrites assuming perfect wear leveling, well within the 100,000 rewrites available. The AMOUNT of data is irrelevant. It's the amount of REWRITING that matters. We all know that the vast majority of the data sitting on those terrabyte drives is static. The problem is much reduced as the media capacity of the SSD increases. In a sense, the SSD problem is the same as the backup problem. Since you have to backup your machines anyway, your average rewrite bandwidth is limited by virtue of your backup bandwidth being limited. This would be true for most large data stores as well.
So it comes down to the price we pay per gigabyte. SSDs are clearly still way too expensive, particularly with HD capacities likely increasing past 10 Terrabytes in the next 5 years. SSDs simply cannot grow at the same rate as HDs, they are severely limited by fabrication issues that HD manufacturers do not have. The HD manufacturer can put an immense expense into the construction of the relatively tiny disk head if need-be without increasing the cost of the overall unit very much. The same cannot be said for the fabrication of flash memory chips.
SSDs have their foot in the door, though. The price really only needs to come down another 30% or so for the use cases to explode. This is still nowhere near the equivalent cost per gigabyte of a HD, but it doesn't have to be to gain mass acceptance. At some point in the next 10 years a new technology will pop up, perhaps it will be IBM's magnetic memory! Perhaps something else, that will solve flash memory's wear issues. When that occurs the mass acceptance will turn into an explosion of use cases.
-Matt
You want trend? Here you go. SSD is going up!
No sig for now.
I'd like to know from an environmental perspective which tech will be the better. HDDs seem to have parts that are recyclable - e.g metal platters. The circuit board on the bottom is questionable.
SSDs it seems are just plastic, AFAIK. This has already 'failed' us from an environmental perspective, since in most cases people just throw out CDs. There's only so many coffee coasters one can have!
Disclaimer: I don't manufacture either HDDs or SSDs. I don't know what they made with. And would also which process to manufacture is 'friendlier'.
Still, it's just ridiculous. "Will this finally blah blah", it's a terrible preface to an article, whether it turns out accurate or not.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
If everyone's hard drives (and net connections) are getting huge, there's no disincentive to increasing the size of everything. If, on the other hand, a significant percentage of your potential customer base are running netbooks (just take a look at how many Eee PCs were sold this year), then there's a significant incentive to making your stuff small enough that you don't cut them out of your potential market. So I think there will be some trend towards caring about storage efficiency, for mass-market end-user-targeted stuff at least.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
For desktops that might be acceptable, but shoving a 15,000-rpm drive in a laptop is going to kill the battery life compared to an SSD, not to mention increase the noise output and heat-dissipation issues.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I just got 3 GB HDD for $300. Oh, and also First Post!
Who seriously has more than 40G of operating system and applications?
Store your movies, music, etc on an external or network drive.
*sigh* back to work...
WITH wear leveling, any hard drive would outlast an SSD.
Ever heard about SMART ?
Most hard disk sold in the last 10 years *DO* detect and remap bad sectors.
Well at least with proper BIOS and/or OS support to turn on the feature upon starting the computer. If using them under Windows with a crappy motherbard, YMMV.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
....But please, don't call me until I can justify plugging them into my SANs. That means, versus mechanical:
1) Far better price per GB.
2) Monster MTBFs.
3) Far less power dissipation and HVAC loading.
Until these criteria are met, I'm sorry but as far as I'm concerned they're little more than CEO toys.
Regards;
As someone that has used several brands of SSDs in our embedded equipment which must meet extremely high levels of shock and temperature requirements I have had quite a bit of experience with this "bleeding edge" line of hardware.
Currently I have not seen a single SSD (True SSD, not CF cards that some people CLAIM are SSDs in their equipment) that have been reliable in the long term at all. CF card based boot drives are MUCH more reliable.
The worst of the drives (though those with the highest specs and claims) will reinitilize themselves or lose partitions one out of every 30-50 power cycles. Better ones will do it once out of every 100-500 cycles. Data loss is rampent. Conventional notebook drives in the exact same scenarios go thousands of restarts with no problem. (All failures are the result of a power cycle)
It'll be at least another 3 to 5 years before this tech has matured enough to be reliable for anything important.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
The advantages of SSD outweigh the disadvantages, especially for laptops. You have no moving parts so you'll get longer battery times (though the monitor is still the real hog there) much faster read and write times. The costs will continue to freefall while the capacities continue to shoot upwards. You only need to store your programs on the drive and anything where different run times might matter. The price per gig is still the domain of platter media but the read and write speed, size, power consumption, noise, and simplicity is already in the hands of SSD.
This would be similar to the setup many people have currently with a few raided raptors for the programs and then a bunch of massive but slow secondary drives for media. It's another step in the speed hierarchy of slower speed and larger media.
If you look at the rate of data increase thumb drives have made in the last couple years and compare that to hard drives you'll see that the rate of increase is such that SSD is going to surpass platter in short order. I'd bet my 4 gig thumb drive on it! Which is only worth about 8 bucks now (still have one new in package), and shouldn't even be worth manufacturing in a year or so.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
SSD's should be included in systems as an AUGMENT to hard drives, but never as a replacement.
Most people who use their systems for media have long writes/reads as a routine task.
spinning platters are still better performance at this than SSD's.
While the hypesters are also playing with the numbers trying to make SSD's look as dependable as hard drives, i'm just not convinced.
SSD's should be integrated into systems for storage of program files and other data which complement their strengths, but they should not supplant the already cheaper storage solutions for applications in which they are weaker.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Yes, SSDs are great. And they become faster & have more capacity by the week. But they are still way more expensive. And if history told us one thing, it's that the cheapest solution wins. Period.
For Desktops too. Not because I'm a enviro-nazi who buys into Chicken Lil' Gore's Global Warming scheme, but because you want your system to boot fast and applications to launch in no time flat. But go for Single Cell and not Multi Cell Flash architectures. The single cells are the ones that are able to hit the theoretical maximums of the bus interface and don't have the stuttering problems. I think they've worked through a lot of the problems with the read/write cycles of Flash EEPROMs that plagued the technology earlier in the century and with dropping Flash costs, computer manufacturers and not just game enthusiasts could really get serious about fast computers that booted and launched apps from SSDs, while using HDDs for massive storage.
Some manufacturers have talked about hybrid drives, but I think you'll more likely see hybrid computers which employ both drive technologies with better efficiency. And yes, they should see great success in laptops because of energy savings and reduction of moving parts. I think we'll see massive drives used for iPods as well once the prices come down. I'd like to see them in Video Cameras as well, but I hope that the manufacturers don't integrate the drives like they currently do with HDDs, but keep them removable like their smaller cousins, the removable flash "sticks".
Actually, the price per gig is going to stop dropping. Currently, there's a worldwide glut for flash memory - so much so that creditors of one of the largest manufacturing plants forced the owners into bankruptcy because they figured they had to cut their losses - there's no quick turnaround in view. Once all the chips that are being liquidated below cost work their way through the system, prices should stabilize.
Also, I'd hope that the flash used in an SSD is better than those el-cheapo thumb drives, or you're going to find yourself waiting a long time to do anything ...
Platters also continue to get bigger in laptops. This spring, the largest drive I could get was 320 gigs (my lappy has 2 drives, so that gives me "only" 640 gigs). Now I can buy 500 gig hds for the same price I paid 6 months ago for those 320 gig drives. The "SSD uses less electricity" myth has been debunked in lots of places, ditto "It's faster". I wouldn't be surprised to see 1TB in hard drives by this time next year.
Also, cache sizes are going up.
Noise? I did a du -sh /home yesterday, which really gives the hard drive a workout. Couldn't hear a thing. Newer drives are QUIET!
I don't see SSDs taking the place of platters in regular laptops before the middle of the next decade. They have a long way to go in terms of capacity.
Pretty much every PC gamer.
More binary multiples of metric capacity.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
"Until you come forth with that, you're just another AC blowing smoke." - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Tuesday December 16, @11:09AM (#26133363)
All I had to do was backup my initial 2 statements: I.E.-> You're just another "disgruntled Linux user" who lacks a device driver for a piece of equipment that Windows has always had running & running well no less!
And, you're just another:
No degree related to computers (probably no cert. of any kind either) poster here, whereas I have dual degrees in it + certs
No hands-on experience in the trenches for decades in this field, whereas I have 17++ yrs. as a pro in it, & 25 yrs. total time
No accomplishments that were ever noted by others in this field via being put into international publication, as I was in Windows IT Pro Mag (Windows NT magazine April 1996 "Back Office Performance" issue, & many others of note + good repute in this art & science/field)
No Ms Tech-Ed 2 yrs. in a row finalist (as my concepts were, & there is no disputing that much per Tech-Ed 2000-2002 in the hardest category there, SQLServer Performance Enhancement, as well as getting a GREAT review in Windows IT Pro for it, & then I made the programs involved 40% better than THAT was reviewed as also, later on)
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You gave me a lot of sarcastic crap (like the "emo" stuff), & skimmed over my points & missed reading them, then, you accused me of apparently NOT stating them... give up!
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Yes - You're just another "registered user" here (the easiest kind to track here, no less)... lol!
The ones on this website who think they're "God's gift" on this website, but are often EASY to "pick apart" with their screwups, as I did last post regarding your sarcastic b.s. directed MY way here in this exchange.
(AND, above all else (again)? You're just another "disgruntled Linux user" who lacks a device driver for a piece of equipment that Windows has always had running & running well no less)
APK
P.S.=> Next time? Read carefully, instead of skimming (Now, IF you have "ADD" or Dyslexia, then I don't know what to tell you, other than see a specialist for help for them), because you did yourself in on nearly EVERY point you uttered, & my last reply set ALL of that straight, here:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1061185&cid=26129293
Including your skimming & attempts to put words into my mouth I never stated as well... apk
Linux Gigabyte IRAM working, Windows = Gigabyte IRAM working just fine. Figure out what the "finicky piece of trash" here, really is... & it's not Winodws, OR, the Gigabyte IRAM!
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"You haven't produced a repro recipe for a known working configuration" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Tuesday December 16, @07:50PM (#26140177)
Windows has a working configuration for the IRAM, and good reviews on it abound online, such as this one:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=224
Linux doesn't have a working SATA device layer apparently, or one that can make the Gigabyte IRAM work properly. By way of comparison? Windows does.
(That doesn't make the IRAM a piece of junk, because the IRAM works on Windows just fine. If anything is a "finicky piece of junk" here, it is Linux, plain & simple).
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"Why, exactly are you bringing this up? IIRC, Linux kernel drivers don't use a HAL..." - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Tuesday December 16, @07:50PM (#26140177)
Because you asked HOW hardware is accessed, & on Windows? That IS exactly how it works... and, it works, with the Gigabyte IRAM, unlike on Linux apparently. A clear cut case of Windows has more support for hardware in its HAL & drivers substrata than does Linux.
Your calling the IRAM a "finicky piece of trash" is only because you're just another disgruntled Linux user who can't make it work, and neither can your kernel hacker apparently. Windows has the Gigabyte IRAM working, perfectly fine, by way of comparison. I wonder what the "finicky piece of trash" here really is (Linux apparently, because the Gigabyte IRAM works fine on Windows...
APK
ion.simon.c, have you been drinking? You asked him how hardware is accessed and he gave you a valid reply on drivers and the hardware abstraction layer. Why as you asking why he brought that up? You asked for it. The other AC seems to have done a decent body of work in this science that you yourself have not and he also appears to have an education around this field, where apparently you do not. He offered his background and you attempted to put that down which is typical from those that do not have equal footing and means in a debate. Sorry that did not work on myself and most likely others here reading. You are not in the same league and you cannot remember what you wrote previously either which to myself is indicative of somekind of mental disturbance on your end. Windows drivers and HAL seem to be working with the Gigabyte Iram whereas on Linux, and its lack of a HAL plus a good SATA support that makes the Iram refuse to work is the problem here. You called the Gigabyte Iram a finicky piece of junk, but, since it works on Windows I would have to say that Linux does indeed appear to be the finicky piece of junk here, not Windows or the Gigabyte Iram. I would say the other anonymous coward ought to not waste time on you, as you obviously have some sort of mental problem or lack the ability to remember what you had asked of others yourself here and calling a piece of hardware that works on Windows and not Linux junk is so off it is not even funny. Grow up.
That linked review does not mention any specifics about the memory that was installed on the iram. Stop selling the sizzle. Start telling me what's in the steak.
Are you this evasive and abusive in person? If so, and if your resumé comes my way I'll strongly advise to not hire.
Cheers!
Ion.simian.c you are a class A idiot. I found good reviews on the Gigabyte IRAM online such as this one http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480&p=12 . The AC apk made statements to which you are left with no good reply at this point such as your asking him what makes hardware access possible and he answered it from a Windows perspective (the os that the gigabyte iram works on, where it does not in linux, and apparently because the SATA interface in Linux is weak in regards to SSD's) and yet you asked him why he brought that up? Get meds for your alzheimers. Do you know how stupid you look at this point? Yet you seem to get off on trying to harass him, and it only makes you look stupider still ion.simian.c
Answer this simple set of questions, enumerated 1-3 below, since you said the "Gigabyte IRAM is a 'finicky piece of trash'" etc. et al on your part:
After all, you said this, here, in this very discussion:
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http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1061185&cid=26102285
"Heh. The i-RAM is a finicky chunk of trash." -
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So, since you said that?
Well, back it up, vs. these 3 simple questions you now refuse to answer:
1.) Does the IRAM run on Windows reliably? ANSWER = YES...
2.) Does the IRAM run on Linux reliably?? ANSWER (per your sources no less) = NO...
3.) Since the IRAM runs on Windows well, but not Linux, well... what is the "piece of trash" here (what is it YOU called the IRAM? A "finicky piece of trash"??)??? ANSWER (obviously) = LINUX...
Ah, yes:
Nothing like trashing another "arstechnica wannabe", publicly, online... & your SILENCE vs. those questions? IS GOLDEN... lol!
APK
P.S.=> As the saying goes? "TOO easy"... apk
First of all apk conversations are not his apparently because I read the windowsitpro article and Jeremy Reimer impersonated apk and was caught for it along with email harassing apk also. Jeremy Reimer, the so called and self titled editor with no real credentials like degrees or certs in this field let alone years to decades of actual professional experience in this field. What a fake. I had read that about him online before and the places that used to publish his trash which he merely copied from others and spit it back out don't publish him anymore because of his stupidity. In fact apk asked the arstechnica gang the same question he did you and that is what set them off. Just a simple truth that apk put out when apk asked if they had done the same as he had which is just what he asked you and you tried to put down the fact apk is educated in this field classically as well as he accomplishing some nice things in it that were noticed in publications worldwide of great repute. Jeremy Reimer even literally did admit to impersonating apk on his own forum and his isp caught him email harassing apk and Reimer stopped that immediately because of it. Given that I would not doubt a sleaze like Reimer is the one who actually edited apk's posts from years ago on arstechnica. I also checked into apk's last visit there, and it was long before Reimer, Jay Little and Jarett Dangelis (reimer's friends) kept coming after him online and impersonating him on their own forums. Ha and only to their dismay with Jay Little having his website kicked from not 1 but 2 hosting providers (crystaltech.com and petitiononline.com). The arstechnica bunch are nothing but online trash.
Of course he won't answer you. You got him with his own words. Good job apk. I must admit that personally I love it when you knock the arstechnica morons around as you always do everytime. They think they're god's gift to the internet and you always get the better of them with their own words and misdeeds online and their outright know nothing bullcrap they spout. They must be gluttons for punishment because I have seen you get the better of them at least a dozen times now the past few years and they keep coming. Talk about stupid. You don't get any stupider than that. Arstechnica vs apk stupid and arstech loses everytime.