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Why a Hard Disk Is a Better Bargain Than an SSD
Lucas123 writes "While solid state disks may be all the rage, what's often being overlooked in the current consumer market hype is that fact that hard disk drive prices are at an all-time low — offering users good performance and massive amounts of capacity for 10 to 30 cents a gigabyte. And in a side by side comparison of overall performance of consumer SSDs and HDDs, it's hard to justify spending 10 times as much for a little more speed."
"A little more speed" ? how a bout a lot more speed ? Putting the OS on a quality SSD gave lots of people immense performance gains.
Aren't hard disk prices always at an all time low? Have they ever gone up in price?
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
you would know why you would never ever go back for your boot drive, these things are just so night and day faster. Yes it squeezed my budget till it squeaked to get my Intel x25-m (early adopter) but I'd never have anything else now for boot, my Velociraptor went on Ebay after a week of using it. I'm considering a second for raid0 even though as it is it's fast enough (more for the extra space than speed tbh now they have come down in price). Bulk storage is fine for movies etc, but for the OS space mechanical magnetic disks are a dead dead end to me.
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
It tottaly depend if you're aiming at mass storage or at operation per second. And sometimes, that "little more speed" can be key to outperform competition.
FYI, this is a pretty nifty tool that pulls drive information from Newegg and calculates the best price/size so you can quickly find out the best deal.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
From the article: "(Random access was a jaw-dropping 7ms.)" 7ms random access time is not "jaw dropping"...in computer terms it's an aeon. This fascination with sequential read and write speeds has got to stop. A ssd with 40 mb/sec read and write but 0.1ms random access time will fell faster than a 200mb/sec hard drive for a large number of applications. In the enterprise world, random access time is even more important. Performance critical databases run on giant storgage systems with dozens of disks not for storage reasons, but because of limitations of the spinning platter. SSDs stand poised to revolutionize computing by drastically raising the slowest (and most important) component in the computer a couple of orders in magnitude of performance.
If I have an SSD in a laptop and I drop the laptop, what are the chances that even if my screen goes splat, my keyboard gets crumbled and the case splits open that my data is still safe? Pretty good. On the other hand, if the same laptop had a hard disk, you are looking at some pretty expensive data recovery plans to get data off of it. Sure, SSDs may have other issues (such as you can only write to a certain sector so many times till it becomes read-only) but with SSDs now and in the future you shouldn't have unpredictable failures like what happens to so many HDs.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I don't think anyone out there is saying that from a $/GB perspective that SSD's are a bargain.
But here are two key points:
1) Not everyone needs 1TB of storage (about $100, and practically entry level now for hard drives). Especially on laptops, a $350 32GB SSD (also entry level) can get you quite far, especially if it is reserved for the OS and applications. You can pick up a 32GB SSD for a reasonable price, and get the really good performance, and use a big, cheap HD for media files.
2) Many people view the extra performance + lower power consumption + greater reliability as worth the premium price, and that makes them a value. Just because they can't compete on a $/GB basis doesn't make them a bargain to some people.
It's also about dropability. And moving parts. And use of Coulomb. And heat.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
This story is completely asinine. Everybody knows that HDDs are cheaper than SSDs. And the "little more speed" thing is way off -- SSDs can read and write at double the speed of a HDD in many cases. You are always going to pay a premium for having the best, this is like putting out an article about how you get more for your money with a Volkswagen than you do with a Mercedes -- of course you get more car dollar for dollar with Volkswagen, but for someone in the market a Mercedes a Volkswagen just is not an option, they want top quality and are willing to pay more for it. It's called the price/performance curve and we all struggle with it.
Looks like the submitter is mixing up 2.5" HDD and 3.5" HDD.
SSD is all the rage in the 2.5" segment, not the 3.5" (yet, as they are much much faster than what's described in the article and much more expensive as well).
I can't fit these very fast 3.5" HDD in my Macbook Pro no matter hard I try.
The article in the link is from July 31, 2008 and has nothing to do with SSDs, but rather a comparison of WD HDDs. I think they meant to link to this one: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134468 from today (June 18, 2009)
... I suppose it's a matter of assessing if the speed difference and the battery power differences are worth it for you. If your time simply isn't worth the premium price (let's be honest you're not doing anything that important are you?) then I don't suppose it is *worth* the price premium to you.
[signature]
Let me be the first of many to point out this article was posted July 31, 2008, though its central point still stands. Also worth nothing, this article was written before Intel's X-25 SSDs were released which moved the performance bar so high that their insane price (~3-4$/GB) started to make sense for the some people.
Did anyone bother to take a look at the date of this article? Seems a little outdated given the continuing advancements in disk storage over the past year.
Could someone please point out the SSD they compare to in the article?
Here is the link to the real article http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134468 considering the one linked from the summary is totally different.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"A little more speed" ? how a bout a lot more speed ?
No matter what I do with my Bunsen Burner and Alchemy cookbook I can still only turn my SSD's into a molten pile of useless debris. Which smells.
Tips for speed production using only harddrive technology would be most welcome.
Higher performing parts have always carried a higher price. However, there is a need for higher performance, and clearly the market shows that the demand is there for the price, I'm looking at you servers and computer enthusiasts.
I have a 300GB velociraptor in my computer, and I have been eye'ing the SSD's for some time, but they just haven't hit the price point for me yet to justify purchasing them yet.
In fact, I feel like an oddity, I work for a small IT firm, and when I asked my boss why a customer's computer had a raid0 of 250'sGB (where we had to replace them both with a new 500GB) why did he just get a velociraptor in the first place, he simply stated that it was cheaper to get 2 250GB hard drives at $60 than it was to get 1 300GB velociraptor.
Now, the only thing that may change the landscape from all this is that SSDs are built on silicon, which is subject to Moore's Law, and we've witnessed how cheap thumb drives and other flash media drives are, there's definitely a real possibility that in time SSD's will be faster AND cheaper than HDDs.
Why is it pointing to the wrong article?
Should have been this article. .2 milliseconds; Seagate's 16.9 milliseconds.
That said, I don't think anyone claims SSD is better than HDD if your bottleneck is capacity or sequential read speed. However if you do lots of random reads/writes, this line from the comparison says it all:
OCZ's drive had a random access time of
That's an 84X difference.
I have used a 30GB OCZ for some time now, with one system partition and one for data. I recebtly moved the system part (Windows XP) back to an older 250GB Hitachi drive, with no perceptible speed loss. The data partition holds World of Warcraft and does give a moderate speed gain on startup. It also reduces delay when switching between two WoW instances significantly. But that is about it.
I think the primary strengths of SSD are still high shock tolerance and low power needs, which makes them ideal for laptops. In some (very few) specialized applications that are aware of the geometry of a SSD (i.e. its very large effective sector size), an SSD may also give a speed improvement. There are also applications, where SSDs are significantly slower. For example small write performance is really bad.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I just got a new IT supported laptop at work (HP EliteBook). Performance was significantly better than my previous laptop (now on dualcore, 4GB ram, etc)... I took my new machine and put in the 80GB Intel SSD... The performance is amazing. I would estimate that things I do on the system are around 3-10x faster than with the stock disk.
Now I did go from a 150GB down to an 80GB drive, but for mobile with no waiting, it's like getting a new machine again. It may cost more, but being able to load visual studio, open a solution (small project), compile and run in under 10 seconds where my last HD took over a minute is well worth the "hype".
(as a disclaimer, my IT supported laptop is loaded with a TON of crap software)
You drop them, and they don't break. That seems - for many, including myself - the killer feature. For internal laptop drives, they take less energy, so my laptop lasts longer. And on my laptop, since it's not my primary machine, I don't need an enormous drive. That said, you were right; it's hard justifying extra cost for a small speed bump, but that's a less-than-honest way to phrase this particular choice.
I'd rather have a 1TB hard drive then a 32GB SSD. I play lots of games, watch videos and listen to music. A 32GB SSD just won't fly. Let me put it this way, would you rather have 4GB of DDR2 ram or 512MB of DDR3 ram?
For this price range it seems going with some enterprise rated SAS drives @ 15k RPMS. It seems they'd be a bit better for RAID configs.
Also, the 2.5" WD drives require a 3.5" drive bay, real enterprise class drives only require a 2.5" small form factor bay..
Read distance measured in microns, magnets, heads, cylinders, normal forces, weight and my favorite, impact functions - all of these seem like great reasons to move to SSD.
1000 (or more) rewrites is a scary limit for the SSD route, but I like the idea of walking around with my laptop on and not worrying about drive failures (as much).
Take this for what it's worth, but I was at a conference a couple years ago and the VP of Intel's desktop support division said that 30% of his problems with laptops were solved by requiring folks to wait for the drive to spin down after hibernating/shutdown operations and before shouldering the laptop. Even if the number seems somewhat inflated, it seems like good advice for anyone with a "conventional" hard drive.
Why target capacity on basically a thin client when you can get something smaller with so many better attributes?
Because some clients are not so thin. Someone who shoots photos or videos on the road might use a laptop for storing and editing them. Other people might want to download files to work on locally so that they save hundreds of USD per year by not needing to buy a mobile broadband plan or a tethering clause on their cell phone plan.
I really don't think that it's important that Hard Drives are at an all time low.
Would you still buy an older iPod from back in 2005? Or would you go for the newer iPod models?
It isn't because something is at an all time low that it makes it right to keep investing in it. Keep in mind that demand drives the market and that demand drives the advancement of said markets.
Technically, based on this article, I should go out and buy myself a walk-man, some parachute pants and a Hyundai Pony.
Stop, Hammer time!
SSD are also silent, do not warm too much, are resistant to shocks, are smaller...
This is how you justify the ten-fold increase in price.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
It was a 120GB HDD or 8GB SSD for the same price. We chose the HDD's and it took about a whole 2 seconds to come to that decision. SSD's might be all the rage in the geeky circles, but 120GB vs. 8GB. The extra performance was not worth it to us over the extra storage.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Really? People don't know that hard disks offer a capacity/$ value that would shock your grandpa, and that the deal just keeps getting better? I don't believe you. Find me just one of these people. I bet you can't.
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You don't buy SSDs for a bargain..
You buy them because it is the one modification you can make in this day and age that will have a dramatic impact on the speed of your computing experience.
Adding more RAM, stepping up to a faster processor with twice as many cores - yeah, you'll notice those things a bit (especiaslly when multitasking) but if you want to do something that may cust your start up time to a third of what it was, and make it seems like you've turbochraged your machine, for most people an SSD will do that - especially on a laptop where yo're generally not going to have a 10k or 15k RPM drive or a striped array - but there is a cost, and it's significant, and there are a lot of SSD drives to choose from that use different sorts of technologies, generally speaking you get what you pay for with these.
Next I transferred a 1GB folder filled with photos and video files to the drives from a USB drive. Both the SSD and the HDD accomplished the file transfer in about 50 seconds (the Seagate was 2 seconds slower).
Hmm, interesting that they both performed exactly the same. I would have expected the HDD to be faster transfering sequential data, except they were probably both limited by the transfer rate of the older, generic USB drive you were using. Way to go, you've successfully benchmarked the transfer rate for a USB drive that you weren't even reviewing.
Or this:
A lot depends on how you expect to use your computer. If you're a college student writing papers and surfing the Internet for information, the advantages of an SSD are negligible, but if you're downloading video and using multiple applications at the same time, an SSD will give you a very noticeable performance boost, Wong said.
This is exactly backwards. The college student downloading video will need the extra hard drive space, where the college student writing papers and surfing the internet is going to have a much better experience with storage that performs better under random io workloads. But then again, what college student these days doesn't have an external usb hard drive for all their media?
They also mention that consumers will likely look for larger storage regardless of the type of underlying technology. But the consumers likely to care are the same as those likely to know the difference between HDD and SDD in the first place. The consumer that doesn't is more likely to make a purchase based on "wow 20 second bootup" and "MS Office starts in a snap, and everything goes faster" than anything else.
For interactive workloads nothing beats SSD.
I currently use 30 gigas for windows + games, 20 gigas for ubuntu, and 80 gigas for porn. 130 gigas in total.
I don't like 1080p movies. 25 gigas for the sake of watching a movie? pff.. does not pay the extra time to download/burn/cut+paste/whatever. So 80 gigas for porn is right.
In 12 months 256GB SSDs will cost 150$ or less. And then, I will clearly prefer to pay 50 extra dollars for less heat, less consumption, less noise, and more resistance.
And, if today my current disk die, I would seriously consider to purchase a 128GB SSD. In fact, YouTube satisfies 90% of my multimedia needs so I could actually use a fraction of that 80 gigas.
I try to keep my hard disk from getting SSDs ever since that movie they made us watch in highschool.
Having lost 5 hard disks due to a failing motherboard (or SATA controller) in 3 months, I must say that speed is only half of the story, reliability is foremost in my book. Especially in a notebook, I appreciate it being even just a little faster (and many SSD are much faster than HDD) but I love the fact that there is no moving part at all. I take relieability over speed anyday.
When I can stick a USB magnetic platter drive that is smaller than my thumb in my pocket and not worry about it breaking into pieces or when I can insert and remove them into my camera/phone, then you can say that traditional drives have caught up with SSD. And as the world goes netbook, netbooks have a lot to gain from compact, robust, low-power, silent storage.
I never understood the motivation in spending more for the speed of an SSD drive when a bunch of RAID drives can perform at multiples faster than a single drive. Plus you get the added disk space and redundancy built in.
have four magnetic drives running on software RAID 10 -- not the 1+0 variety. I get 3x a single drive's read (200MB/s) and about 1.5-2X write. Plus I have a full backup and 2TB of space. The sw kernel module uses less than 5-10% of one cpu on a quad system
At this time, why not buy many magnetic drives in RAID with the extra $$? Unless you would want to support a burgeoning technology.
SSD has a place where it is used best, (speed-dependent applications, such as OS booting), HDD also has a place where it shines (massive storage without breaking the bank). SSD is awesome for booting, but way faster than I need for most things. Why would I pay 10X as much to store DVD rips on a drive that can deliver them oodles faster than I need to watch them?
Having the right tools and using the tools right are very different things. I refuse to pick which type of drive is "better," because each one is great in its own way. I keep my multimedia on regular old 7200rpm drives, because it's cheap and gets the job done. I'd love to boot from SDD, but using it for large-scale storage would be stupid.
Porquoi?
The Slashdot submission is using the wrong article link. A mistake by the submitter: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134468
My experience with SSDs have them being generally faster then regular HDs, much cooler since there are no moving parts, much quieter since you have no moving parts making the peanut in a tin can noise, and much more durable since bouncing around isn't going to endanger data platters with read/write heads like regular HDs.
The other thing is since they've been much cooler there's less cost for cooling fans or HD coolers like regular drives sometimes need. That's potentially less energy used to perform the same task a regular high speed HD would do. Now think about this, if you have an AC unit and your PC is throwing hot air in to the room and your trying to cool that room at the same time, with SSDs that's less work your home AC will have to do since the PC wouldn't be throwing out as much hot air potentially.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
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The submission is linking to the wrong story. This is the right story: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134468
Storing all your data on paper is even cheaper than hard disk. Of course access speed is a bit slower ;)
I'm building a home PVR (in a distributed manner), I've got an hdhomerun box, nas with two 500gb, and I'm looking at building a myth backend machine to save streams from the hdhomerun to the nas. I was trying to decide if I should use a SSD or traditional HD. I don't think I need a whole lot of space on the machine as I want the video saved to the nas. It looks like SSD is the way to go if I can find one reasonably priced.
. . . on our main OCR / image processing server. It's a Server 2008 box with the SSDs being used for the OS and a "scratchpad" partition for writing temporary batches etc. We have an additional 5 TB of "tranditional" hard disk storage for staged and completed files. We're a high-end digitization shop that processes millions of images per month where time is literally money.
The Intel Extreme SSDs have made the single biggest difference of ANY component swap I've ever seen in all of my years around computers and software. The bottom line is that processing a typical 2 GB OCR batch now takes 30-40% of the time that it used to, which allows us to process dramatically more data in the same amount of time -- and that means, of course, we make more money in the same amount of time too. If your work is currently limited by disk throughput, and time is money, don't wait -- the Intel Extreme SSDs are the real deal and the technology will only get better.
Speaking of cache, for a desktop what might be nice is a smart 500GB/1TB HD that uses a high performance 1GB/4GB SSD as read+write cache (smaller and thus cheaper than a 32GB SSD).
;).
Done intelligently it'll perform almost as well as a fast SSD for many real world tasks. Random burst writes can be fast then the drive slowly writes the stuff to the platters - it only slows down when the cache becomes full. Random reads can be fast too if they are already cached - which could be true since the cache persists even after you shut the computer down.
Shouldn't be too difficult to have special heuristics to speed boots for desktop drives (may not be so important for server drives[1]) - since the drive will know when power has just come back on.
The drive could also cache whatever that makes it seek a lot. Disks are quite fast for sequential reads/writes, it's the random access that hurts.
Wonder if it'll ever happen though - might be too expensive to build? But with this approach seagate and WD might be able to squeeze a lot more from their drives.
When you have a drive like that, there are a lot of nifty tricks you can do to speed up real world stuff.
Of course, there are also a lot of things that can go wrong - make sure your smart HDD code is bug free enough to not corrupt or lose data
[1] I guess one could allow the drive to be configured to prioritize boots (so it'll try to cache most of what is read during boot in the SSD), or not - e.g. boot up speeds might not be so important for systems where the computer is hardly ever rebooted (the drive can detect that as well, but some people might still want fast boots for such environments).
I haven't used on personal equipment, but on EMC DMX 4, we have some databases that were suffering 15-27ms response times due to read misses.
SSD drop that down to 2ms.
Another interesting idea is using them for swap/paging space. Haven't toyed with yet, but should be interesting.
Just like we have a speed/size hierarchy in processor caches (L1 smaller and faster than L2 which is smaller and faster than L3), we are about to enter a tiering model for storage.
It's silly to compare a 128GB SSD with 1.5TB spindle drive. On a personal system you're going to do different things with them. The SSD (or other systemboard flash) will be your fast OS and frequently used disk where fast reads / writes are important but files are not huge. For very large data, a secondary spindle drive with TBs connected either as second SATA drive or eSATA external (or, frankly, my preference) located on a storage server or appliance will be appropriate,
But for most laptop users, i fyou cna have only one drive, a MLC SSD drive ~160GB or larger will be plenty and WILL make a qualitative change in you life. If only in that with SSD you can hibernate (full save of RAM to disk then shutdown) in seconds instead of minutes.
Anyone who has not used an SSD just doesn't know
Guess nobody bothers to read the article anymore, but this article is old and largely irrelevant.
MacroHard - Boning you in a big way! (TM)
Maybe it's just my 'give me the cheapest componants you have' method of building computers, but I've had a slew of hard drive related mishaps lately. Most notably when my high falootin external drive fell a whole foot and a half off my tower and broke, taking all the data on it with it. Then recently I just put in a new internal hard drive, because I wasn't going to risk another slight jostle blowing away 500 gigs worth of data. Again, it could be the cheapskate factor, but this new drive is also giving me issues, preventing my computer from booting and the like. Then I had another external hard drive that stopped working after I hit it with a hammer.
I think I'm leaning towards solid state drives after my recent experience, for some reason regular hard drives seem to be really unreliable for me these days.
And that was the last Terry Fox run I ever participated in.
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"A little more speed" ? how a bout a lot more speed ? Putting the OS on a quality SSD gave lots of people immense performance gains." - by zaibazu (976612)
on Thursday June 18, @09:46AM (#28373131)
Per my subject-line? Agreed, 110% - AND, especially in "industrial environs", such as for DB work... see here:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312/7
TREMENDOUS GAINS result!
I saw & first only "theorized" this, as far back as 1996 for EEC Systems & their "SuperDisk" application!
(That was while I wrote portions of their SuperCache I/II program, increasing its effectiveness &/or performance by up to 40% more ("tesla like gains"))...
AND?
Hey, it worked SO well? It took them to a FINALIST position @ Microsoft TechEd 2 yrs. in a row, in its HARDEST category, which applies on this note, perfectly: SQLServer Performance Enhancement & also reviewed very well in Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) pril 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61!
Also, ALBEIT, on a "home user/end user" platform? It helps as well, & in ways that are NOT "immediately apparent", but exist, nonetheless!
How so? Well... The apparent one, is increased speed in seek/access, which not ALL gains from, but, consider that most of the time? The end user does MOSTLY "READS" work... & here is where you gain: In the File I/O access cycle of Open/Read-Write/Close file (&, everything, even screendevice contexts are abstracted out as a file mind you, but that does not apply here, just making a point in modern OS' is all on that note)? YOU HAVE TO FIND THE FILE, first... here is how they make gains, apparent ones.
HOWEVER, NOW? I'll note the "less apparent" ones!
I use a CENATEK "RocketDrive" TRUE SSD (not based on FLASH RAM, with its slower write cycles which I suppose, a writeback cache COULD theoretically offset some, nor, with FLASH RAM's inevitable decay in longevity & performance, wear-levelling notwithstanding)...
I use it for these purposes here (and, this is since late 2002 no less to present day 2009, no problems @ all whatsoever):
----
PARTITION #1, 1gb
1.) pagefile.sys placement - both read/write in nature
PARTITION #2, 1gb
A.) Webbrowser (Opera, FireFox, & IE) caching location - both read/write in nature
B.) %temp% & %tmp% ops placement (environment alteration) - both read/write in nature
C.) SandBoxie placement (a webbrowser sandboxing tool, goes VERY slow on std. HDD's, & much fsater on this SSD, by far) - read/write in nature
D.) Print Spooler location - read/write in nature
E.) Windows' EventLogs - read/write in nature
F.) DrWatson Logging - read/write in nature
G.) Windows' Firewall logs - read/write in nature
H.) Windows Management WMI logging - read/write in nature
I.) HOSTS file placement - MOSTLY read in nature (some write)
J.) %comspec$ placement (cmd.exe location, environment alteration) - read in nature
----
All for 2 reasons:
1.) Greater seek/access speeds
&
2.) NOT "cluttering" my main disk w/ them (which can aid fragmentation also) + NOT burdening my MAIN C: drive (OS & Programs MOSTLY here only) w/ dealing w/ those files & tasks associated w/ them...
(IT WORKS, & just on "common-sense" principals)
APK
P.S.=> However, the article IS making a point: UNTIL THE CO$T$ per mb/gb fall on SSD's, as well as storage size possible (especially on the types I use, in 32-bit, the device driver memory access limit IS only 4gb)? They DO have a point - dollar for dollar/"pound-for-pound"?? HDD's still make more "sense" for your DOLLARS & CENTS... which is why I JUST PICKED UP A WD "Velociraptor" for my next machine's main OS + Programs bearing HDD... speed! $270 when all was said & done, for 10k rpm super-fast HDD access that uses (afaik, finally) "PRT" tech as well... but, @ around $1/mb? I may have "overpaid", but - I WANT THAT SPEED! apk
Unless they bought a SSD, and the content isn't spinning in circles, it's getting dusty in a little box.
The performance increase I found on my laptop after installing a SSD was amazing. I could never ever return to a regular drive.
Back maybe 5 years ago there were articles like this talking about how CRTs still had so much to offer and how they were so cheap and how LCD displays were still new and expensive...
Somehow I expect this article to have a similarly short shelf life and will look at best amusingly quaint in about 2-3 years when SSDs start getting really price competitive with spinning platters. Probably not cheaper, but close enough that people will be willing to pay the extra for the rather substantial performance improvement.
I read the internet for the articles.
"And the difference in the two is an order of magnitude or more using the very fastest consumer drives (WDVR) and a quality SSD (Intel X-25)." - by initdeep (1073290) on Thursday June 18, @09:52AM (#28373237)
Per my subject-line? Agreed, 110% - AND, especially in "industrial environs", such as for DB work... see here:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312/7
TREMENDOUS GAINS result!
I saw & first only "theorized" this, as far back as 1996 for EEC Systems & their "SuperDisk" application!
(That was while I wrote portions of their SuperCache I/II program, increasing its effectiveness &/or performance by up to 40% more ("tesla like gains"))...
AND?
Hey, it worked SO well? It took them to a FINALIST position @ Microsoft TechEd 2 yrs. in a row, in its HARDEST category, which applies on this note, perfectly: SQLServer Performance Enhancement & also reviewed very well in Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61!
Also, ALBEIT, on a "home user/end user" platform? It helps as well, & in ways that are NOT "immediately apparent", but exist, nonetheless!
How so? Well... The apparent one, is increased speed in seek/access, which not ALL gains from, but, consider that most of the time? The end user does MOSTLY "READS" work... & here is where you gain: In the File I/O access cycle of Open/Read-Write/Close file (&, everything, even screendevice contexts are abstracted out as a file mind you, but that does not apply here, just making a point in modern OS' is all on that note)? YOU HAVE TO FIND THE FILE, first... here is how they make gains, apparent ones.
HOWEVER, NOW? I'll note the "less apparent" ones!
I use a CENATEK "RocketDrive" TRUE SSD (not based on FLASH RAM, with its slower write cycles which I suppose, a writeback cache COULD theoretically offset some, nor, with FLASH RAM's inevitable decay in longevity & performance, wear-levelling notwithstanding)...
I use it for these purposes here (and, this is since late 2002 no less to present day 2009, no problems @ all whatsoever):
----
PARTITION #1, 1gb
1.) pagefile.sys placement - both read/write in nature
PARTITION #2, 1gb
A.) Webbrowser (Opera, FireFox, & IE) caching location - both read/write in nature
B.) %temp% & %tmp% ops placement (environment alteration) - both read/write in nature
C.) SandBoxie placement (a webbrowser sandboxing tool, goes VERY slow on std. HDD's, & much fsater on this SSD, by far) - read/write in nature
D.) Print Spooler location - read/write in nature
E.) Windows' EventLogs - read/write in nature
F.) DrWatson Logging - read/write in nature
G.) Windows' Firewall logs - read/write in nature
H.) Windows Management WMI logging - read/write in nature
I.) HOSTS file placement - MOSTLY read in nature (some write)
J.) %comspec$ placement (cmd.exe location, environment alteration) - read in nature
----
All for 2 reasons:
1.) Greater seek/access speeds
&
2.) NOT "cluttering" my main disk w/ them (which can aid fragmentation also) + NOT burdening my MAIN C: drive (OS & Programs MOSTLY here only) w/ dealing w/ those files & tasks associated w/ them...
(IT WORKS, & just on "common-sense" principals...)
Sure, you CAN do the same w/ multiple HDD's & I told folks to do that, if they could afford it, decades back (distribute workloads across drives) BUT, you don't get sub-ms seeks/accesses w/ mechanical HDD's either though... SSD's? They DO yield that much!
APK
P.S.=> However, the article IS making a point: UNTIL THE CO$T$ per mb/gb fall on SSD's, as well as storage size possible (especially on the types I use, in 32-bit, the device driver memory access limit IS only 4gb)? They DO have a point - dollar for dollar/"pound-for-pound"?? HDD's still
I've been following the SSD developments since last year and I finally decided to save up enough money to get the Intel X25-M 80GB MLC SSD and I don't regret it. I've been posting and replying to a few threads on HardOCP forum regarding SSDs and there is just no comparison between an HDD, even VelociRaptor in RAID-0 striping, and a single SSD when it comes to random read and write speeds and also access time. Both of metrics determine the responsiveness of your system since they are the ones most heavily utilized by the operating system's disk access to it's own system drive. Lots of random reads with a bunch of random writes thrown in and some sequential read/writes for good measure.
Too many folks buy into the sequential and burst speed marketing disinformation campaigns, including the writer of this article, but fail to realize the advantage of SSDs, which is the random performance and access times. Below is a link to a great part of Anand's article about random performance. I would love to link directly to the pictures here to show you the graphs that speak more than works but I can't do it on this forum!
Look at the numbers for random 4KB read speed X25-M = 54.2 MB/s and VelociRaptor 1.55 MB/s for 3,496% difference or 35-times faster. Random 4KB write speed X25-m = 23.1 MB/s and VelociRaptor 1.63 MB/s for 1,417% difference or 14-times faster. Now consider responsivness which is measured as random 4KB read latency X25-M= 0.11 ms and VelociRaptor 6.83 ms for a 6,209% difference or 62-times faster. Now you realize the huge difference in performance that matters in orders of magnitudes of difference between hard disks and solid state disks.
AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ - Random Read/Write Performance
AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ - Why You Should Want an SSD
The fun starts with HP's newer servers, which use the mini 2.5" SAS/SATA drives. Has anybody taken a DL-380 G5 and filled it with 8 SSDs in RAID 5?
Would be fun to have some research play moneys.
"Aren't hard disk prices always at an all time low? Have they ever gone up in price?" - by riflemann (190895) on Thursday June 18, @09:47AM (#28373145)
Per my subject-line? Agreed, 110% but, there are gains w/ SSD's, @ least the type I use, for LONG and SHORT-TERM gain!
(E.G./I.E.-> I have been utilizing it since late 2002, no problems, & has F A S T writes w/ out writeback caching needed, OR, wear-levelling)
Still? DO read on: Because in the end of this post? I agree with you, because of the velociraptor which I bought myself recently no less, but I have to "extoll some of the virtues of SSD's" first, & apparent PLUS less apparent ones.
SSD's ROCK - AND, especially in "industrial environs", such as for DB work... see here:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312/7
TREMENDOUS GAINS result!
I saw & first only "theorized" this, as far back as 1996 for EEC Systems & their "SuperDisk" application!
(That was while I wrote portions of their SuperCache I/II program, increasing its effectiveness &/or performance by up to 40% more ("tesla like gains"))...
AND?
Hey, it worked SO well? It took them to a FINALIST position @ Microsoft TechEd 2 yrs. in a row, in its HARDEST category, which applies on this note, perfectly: SQLServer Performance Enhancement & also reviewed very well in Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61!
Also, ALBEIT, on a "home user/end user" platform? It helps as well, & in ways that are NOT "immediately apparent", but exist, nonetheless!
How so? Well... The apparent one, is increased speed in seek/access, which not ALL gains from, but, consider that most of the time? The end user does MOSTLY "READS" work... & here is where you gain: In the File I/O access cycle of Open/Read-Write/Close file (&, everything, even screendevice contexts are abstracted out as a file mind you, but that does not apply here, just making a point in modern OS' is all on that note)? YOU HAVE TO FIND THE FILE, first... here is how they make gains, apparent ones.
HOWEVER, NOW? I'll note the "less apparent" ones!
I use a CENATEK "RocketDrive" TRUE SSD (not based on FLASH RAM, with its slower write cycles which I suppose, a writeback cache COULD theoretically offset some, nor, with FLASH RAM's inevitable decay in longevity & performance, wear-levelling notwithstanding)...
I use it for these purposes here (and, this is since late 2002 no less to present day 2009, no problems @ all whatsoever):
----
PARTITION #1, 1gb
1.) pagefile.sys placement - both read/write in nature
PARTITION #2, 1gb
A.) Webbrowser (Opera, FireFox, & IE) caching location - both read/write in nature
B.) %temp% & %tmp% ops placement (environment alteration) - both read/write in nature
C.) SandBoxie placement (a webbrowser sandboxing tool, goes VERY slow on std. HDD's, & much fsater on this SSD, by far) - read/write in nature
D.) Print Spooler location - read/write in nature
E.) Windows' EventLogs - read/write in nature
F.) DrWatson Logging - read/write in nature
G.) Windows' Firewall logs - read/write in nature
H.) Windows Management WMI logging - read/write in nature
I.) HOSTS file placement - MOSTLY read in nature (some write)
J.) %comspec$ placement (cmd.exe location, environment alteration) - read in nature
----
All for 2 reasons:
1.) Greater seek/access speeds
&
2.) NOT "cluttering" my main disk w/ them (which can aid fragmentation also) + NOT burdening my MAIN C: drive (OS & Programs MOSTLY here only) w/ dealing w/ those files & tasks associated w/ them...
(IT WORKS, & just on "common-sense" principals...)
Sure, you CAN do the same w/ multiple HDD's & I told folks to do that, if they could afford it, decades
Depends. For people who want reliability in the face of write-intensive applications SSDs aren't likely to overtake HDDs soon. No matter how long it will take for SSDs to displace HDDs in most markets, I expect HDDs to still be around in thirty years just like tape is still around today.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
"Read distance measured in microns, magnets, heads, cylinders, normal forces, weight and my favorite, impact functions - all of these seem like great reasons to move to SSD." - by krulgar (250929) on Thursday June 18, @10:16AM (#28373611) Homepage
They are: Here are more, for BOTH "industrial environs", AND "home user/end user" environs as well!
(However, in defense of your points? Well - I also disagree with "FLASH-RAM" SSD use, for the very reasons you note, but, I use a diff. kind (not based on FLASH RAM))... read on:
SSD's ROCK - AND, especially in "industrial environs", such as for DB work... see here:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312/7
TREMENDOUS GAINS result!
I saw & first only "theorized" this, as far back as 1996 for EEC Systems & their "SuperDisk" application!
(That was while I wrote portions of their SuperCache I/II program, increasing its effectiveness &/or performance by up to 40% more ("tesla like gains"))...
AND?
Hey, it worked SO well? It took them to a FINALIST position @ Microsoft TechEd 2 yrs. in a row, in its HARDEST category, which applies on this note, perfectly: SQLServer Performance Enhancement & also reviewed very well in Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61!
Also, ALBEIT, on a "home user/end user" platform? It helps as well, & in ways that are NOT "immediately apparent", but exist, nonetheless!
How so? Well... The apparent one, is increased speed in seek/access, which not ALL gains from, but, consider that most of the time? The end user does MOSTLY "READS" work... & here is where you gain: In the File I/O access cycle of Open/Read-Write/Close file (&, everything, even screendevice contexts are abstracted out as a file mind you, but that does not apply here, just making a point in modern OS' is all on that note)? YOU HAVE TO FIND THE FILE, first... here is how they make gains, apparent ones.
HOWEVER, NOW? I'll note the "less apparent" ones!
I use a CENATEK "RocketDrive" TRUE SSD (not based on FLASH RAM, with its slower write cycles which I suppose, a writeback cache COULD theoretically offset some, nor, with FLASH RAM's inevitable decay in longevity & performance, wear-levelling notwithstanding)...
I use it for these purposes here (and, this is since late 2002 no less to present day 2009, no problems @ all whatsoever):
----
PARTITION #1, 1gb
1.) pagefile.sys placement - both read/write in nature
PARTITION #2, 1gb
A.) Webbrowser (Opera, FireFox, & IE) caching location - both read/write in nature
B.) %temp% & %tmp% ops placement (environment alteration) - both read/write in nature
C.) SandBoxie placement (a webbrowser sandboxing tool, goes VERY slow on std. HDD's, & much fsater on this SSD, by far) - read/write in nature
D.) Print Spooler location - read/write in nature
E.) Windows' EventLogs - read/write in nature
F.) DrWatson Logging - read/write in nature
G.) Windows' Firewall logs - read/write in nature
H.) Windows Management WMI logging - read/write in nature
I.) HOSTS file placement - MOSTLY read in nature (some write)
J.) %comspec$ placement (cmd.exe location, environment alteration) - read in nature
----
All for 2 reasons:
1.) Greater seek/access speeds
&
2.) NOT "cluttering" my main disk w/ them (which can aid fragmentation also) + NOT burdening my MAIN C: drive (OS & Programs MOSTLY here only) w/ dealing w/ those files & tasks associated w/ them...
(IT WORKS, & just on "common-sense" principals...)
Sure, you CAN do the same w/ multiple HDD's & I told folks to do that, if they could afford it, decades back (distribute workloads across drives) BUT, you don't get sub-ms seeks/accesses w/ mechanical HDD's either though... SSD's? They DO yield that
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Coal, soda pop, vinyl siding, housebrand whiskey, anything from Wal-Mart.
GB / $ ... that's awesome. Remember when it used to be $ / GB?
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Hey guys, the article should not have been posted. Check the date, it's from exactly 1 year ago.
If you want to discuss this, find an up to date article comparing speeds, and then start over.
Since then, Solid Sstate drives are somewhat bigger. SSD are a lot (relatively) bigger, and cheaper than 1 year ago.
But I think the results are the same. Use what's best for your situation.
Editing video? SolidS state drives.
High Seek database with small transactions? SSD
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Shooting photos on the road is not exactly a space intensive task for most people. At 2 megabytes a jpeg for your average ultra-portable, you'd have to try pretty hard to fill up 16 gigabytes. On the other hand, if you're the guy shooting in raw making 60 megapixel landscapes, a laptop probably isn't the best tool for the job anyway.
I was thinking more along the lines of a photojournalist or other professional documentary photographer.
Secondly, somebody who needs that kind of space on the road would be well advised to keep an SSD in the laptop and buy an external USB hard drive.
And use the external USB hard drive only in the office or a hotel room where there's steady electric power, right?
a tethering clause on their cell phone plan
Is that actually stopping you?
Yes. I use my cell phone to arrange rides and a land line for most everything else. So I have a $5/month prepaid plan from Virgin Mobile, and my years-old Audiovox 8610 phone isn't even capable of tethering.
When I was in college it was $/KB.
http://www.ramsan.com/products/ramsan-5000.htm
If brute force isn't working, you are not using enough.
I quote: "(Keep in mind that most SSD vendors publish sequential read/write rates, which are much faster than random I/O. But most operations on a desktop or laptop are random. For example, file systems and e-mail applications mostly use random operations, while system boot up or copying a large file from a USB drive involves sequential operations. So, in general, don't believe the packaging hype.)"
The author apparently lacks the basic understanding that since an SSD has no moving platter, there is no difference between sequential and random read/writes. This is why it is advertised as such. So, in general, don't believe the BS this amateur is spouting out.
I just got done ordering a new machine, and after much research I decided to go with a 256GB SSD as my boot and application installation drive and 3x1TB drives RAIDed together for my data/multimedia storage and work area. The rationale is screaming fast boot and app load times and fault tolerance for the files I can't replace. Read times on SSDs tend to be off the chart fast, and writes to my boot/app drive will occur almost entirely when I'm installing software.
My current machine, much as I love it, takes 3 minutes to boot from hibernation, and at least 10 minutes to do a full startup. Yeah, it's about 5 years old, but it's got 2GB of RAM and two 2GHz AMD Athlons. The problem, ignoring OS bloat, is largely the drive speed. Plainly put, I'm doing what I can to eliminate the biggest bottleneck on my system.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
that fact that hard disk drive prices are at an all-time low
Was there ever a time that hard disk driver prices weren't at an all-time low?
I thought the biggest advantage of solid state was no moving parts to wear out. Speed is certainly a consideration to be sure, but reliability and service life seemed like it was more of the point.
However, even high-end single level cells will wear out after a few million write cycles. Even though wear leveling mitigates that, there is a limit to what it can do. On a fairly full SSD there are much fewer locations to shift writes to, resulting in the wear being distributed over relatively few cells. A fairly full disk receiving constant writes will fail relatively soon.
The questions are how soon exactly it will fail, whether there are any reliable warning signs prior to data loss and whether SSDs or HDDs will generate higher replacament expenses over time.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
As someone else pointed out, this link was to the wrong review.
And the review made the wrong analysis.
I have two machines with SSDs in them. My Eee has a cheapish SSD in it. Is it as fast as a HD? Probably not. But:
1. It's faster for random-access reads, which are 95% of my workload on the Eee.
2. It is quieter and uses less power.
The Eee ran its fan all the time when I got it. I swapped the hard drive for an SSD. Now the fan runs only very occasionally. Why should it? I just took half the heat out of the system, easily. It also gets longer battery life.
The other is a desktop machine I put together on a lark to see whether I could make a machine which ran WoW really nicely and was very quiet on a reasonable budget. ("Reasonable" is probably the wrong word to use.) I have a fanless video card, a huge heatsink, a bunch of 120mm or larger slow fans, and an SSD. The SSD is one of the nicer ones (OCZ vertex). It is at least TWICE as fast, probably moreso, than the striped array of fastish (but not super fast) platter drives it replaced. It is, of course, silent. Since the VAST bulk of everything the game does is random-access reads, the net result is a huge performance win.
Would I use these for everything? No.
If I got a big chunk of money, would I seriously think about putting a 250GB flash drive in my laptop, or ordering my next laptop with one? Yes.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
For the price difference, you could easily pick up a spare battery. And then you're doubling your power time.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Unlike laptops, desktop computers let you have multiple drives, and thus the smart use of SSDs... A smaller, cheaper SSD for the OS, and a large HD for data storage, etc.
Have you seen the math? That 'few million' cycles with perfect wear leveling is something like 70-100 years of continuous use. Intel's guarantees on their drives are on a par with hard drives right now and as far as we can see they are leaving a very large amount of headroom.
How long until they fail isn't really a serious concern at this point, the answer is 'long enough' IFF you are planning to replace them on "runs out day"+1. The real question is how they will fail when that replacement is postponed too long. There are theories, and experience with old flash drives but these are very new designs and even the physics is being pushed into new regions. So people expect the failures to be nicer than hard drives but most are not really ready to bet the farm on the drives just yet.
How about MTBF? traditional hard Drives have only so long to live before they die. SSD should - in theory - last longer.
... it depends on what you're trying to do. Just today, Sun published a Sun BluePrint Solid State Drives in HPC: Reducing the I/O Bottleneck showing that by using SSD as part of an HPC configuration, you can improve performance pretty dramatically. If buying 64GB of SSD can double performance on an I/O bound HPC program (these were finite element analysis programs) it might be a pretty good investment.
My desktop has a hard drive. I might throw in SSD to in effect, provide me a faster HD cache. If this were a server, I might be even more inclined to do so. Either way, I'd figure that the SSD is essentially an expensive special-purpose consumable rather than a cost-effective form of mass storage.
My netbook has an SSD, and that's something I chose on purpose. IMO, in a mobile environment, ruggedness is more important than millicents per megabyte. Though it helps that my real netbook mass storage is my desktop HD, I keep as little data as possible on the netbook and access the desktop via remote to get to my real personal database.
The economics will change when SSD long-term reliability improves and the cost drops, this is a question I'll revisit in a couple of years. YMMV.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Here is the actual breakdown... RANDOM WRITES people!
JMicron should hang their head in shame... 4 random writes per second... epic fail.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=8
Its like saying "Big trucks are always better than a fast car"
Don't remember anyone claiming ssd was a great value. There are advantages to ssd, but cost is not currently one of them. Someday perhaps, but not now. I have 72G of ssd hard drive in my eee pc and I love it. Would I but one for my desktop? Umm, no.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
Whoever wrote that article has probably never used an SSD in real life.
Use a regular HDD for everyday work for half a year. Install and remove apps, edit and archive photos, organize your music library. After half a year it will take forever to start recently installed or updated apps and the whole system will feel so slooooowww...
SSD speed also degrades over time (though due to other reasons), but not as heavy as regular HDDs. In real life, I didn't notice any slowdown after half a year of using my SSD now. A difference like black and white compared to regular HDDs.
I have see two Sony Vio laptops, which tend to be a bit underpowered, esp, under the weight of fat fat Vista. The minute you take it out of an overnight sleep Vista will trash the disk for 20 min. The near zero latency of the SSD means the laptop is usable from the start, the HD is like molasses.
One could argue against sw bloat, or that the SSD doesn't actually save power in some cases but from a raw performance eliminating the seek and rotational delays can be a huge boon. Most people don't need capacity, they are well under the drive storage needs.
I did find this interesting:
I didn't think that data in memory (not in a disk cache) would be preserved across boots. I think this does not make sense.
The faiulre mode of an SSD is disconcerting to me. People don't backup enough as is it.