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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."
Aren't hard disk prices always at an all time low? Have they ever gone up in price?
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
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.
but burst speed measured with HDTach is the only metric that's important when you wish to make your point that traditional rotating platter based hard drives are "nearly as fast" as quality SSD drives.
seriously.....
is there anyone by now that HASN'T seen the extensive test by Anandtech that completely DESTROYS this bullshit article?
All that matters in the real world for HDD performance is Random read and write speeds.
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).
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.
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.
This benchmark shows Intel's X25-E SSD beating a 15k Seagate Cheetah SAS drive by over 50MB/s read and 10MB/s write speeds. I'd hardly call this "a little more speed." The SSD seems even better when you figure in the noise and heat generated by the 15k RPM Cheetah.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
I'd hate to be quoted as the guy who says "256GB is all anyone ever needs," so I'm posting as AC. However,
I don't even need 256GB, so I'd prefer the 256GB SSD. Thanks.
I'll go for capacity every time
Will you? Even when your primary objective is one of the following?
If you just need storage, I would agree with you. My file server uses an array of traditional 1TB HDD like everybody else, but when you have a file server with all your data, none of the other computers in your house will need significant amounts of their own capacity. Why target capacity on basically a thin client when you can get something smaller with so many better attributes?
fast enough
Is that like having too much memory, big enough hard disk? No such thing as fast enough.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
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.
And for contrast:
/mythtv
:)
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/mythvg-mythtv 658G 645G 14G 98%
Or: Pick the right tool for your job.
Only an idiot would buy either of those products.
Or an "irrational consumer" to use the technical term.
Their price does not justify their benefit. RAID etc.
Especially in an article about "bargains".
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
While what you are saying is true, how many of the common folk are actually going to need or even be able to notice the difference in their day to day tasks? I build and repair PCs for a living, and you know what I hear time and time again from my customers on the new AMD 7550 and Pentium Duals I sell them? "OMG it is just so fast! This is incredible!". You know why? Because CPUs passed ludicrous speed awhile back. If you were to secretly swap their new bottom of the line dual for an octo-core monster I doubt very seriously they notice anything except the fans are loader.
The same thing has happened with hard drives. Those old 400Mb to 20Gb HDDS were slow as hell, but for today's tasks? The new drives with 16-32Mb and beyond RAM caches are just crazy fast for the jobs folks have for them to do. The only places I see these taking off is in the ultra mobile Netbook and Smartbook space, and of course the gamers who see no problem with shelling out insane money to get another 3-FPS in Crysis. For most folks the HDD ain't the problem, and it hasn't been for awhile. It is the OEMs cheaping out and doing stupid shit like putting a Vista image filled with bloatware on a box with a crappy 512Mb of RAM.
Of course since all my customers go bragging to all their friends and family how much better anything I build is compared to a Dell (because I refuse to sell anything with less than 2Gb, preferably 4Gb of RAM) I get plenty of business from referrals. Thanks Dell!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
There are, actually, a lot of areas where flash based storage is a bargain(though, they don't tend to be areas where SSDs are used).
If you quote the cost/gig of magnetic storage based on the price of a basic OEM drive in whatever the sweet spot happens to be at the time, it looks like an incredible deal. 10 cents/gig seems to be the going number these days. However, that is for a 1TB+ drive. What if you only need 4GB, or 1GB, or 16MB? You can get a 1TB drive for $100; but you can't get a 1GB drive for 10 cents, or even $10. Traditional hard drives have comparatively high fixed costs("fixed" in the "these costs are more or less the same between the lowest capacity and the highest capacity" not in the strict economic sense). The cheapest HDD you can get(new, quantity one, not off the back of Honest Yuri's truck) is $25-$30, no matter how small a drive you want. For roughly the same price, you can get an 8GB flash drive under the same conditions.
For any application at or under 8GB(a number that is way higher than it used to be, and will probably keep rising) flash is actually cheaper than HDD, because of HDD's high fixed costs. Not to mention all the applications where a full hard drive is undesirable for other reasons. This certainly doesn't include file servers(unless IOPs are a big consideration) and it doesn't yet cover most desktop/laptop scenarios(though it is much closer than it used to be, and it does cover a fair few netbooks); but it does include the overwhelming majority of PMP, appliance, and embedded applications.
Why do the options have to be exclusive? Stop thinking about it terms of storage and start thinking about it as layers in the tiered memory subsystem; CPU registers, L1 cache, L2 cache, RAM, SSD, conventional HDD.
If I were building myself a new system today I would opt for a smaller high performance SSD for my system partition and scratch / swap partition, and a lower performance high capacity conventional HDD for backups, music, movies, etc.
Replace "Longevity" with "Resistance to mechanical failure" and you're onto a winner.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Someone who shoots photos or videos on the road might use a laptop for storing and editing them.
Firstly, let's be a little more specific. 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. Photos aside, I'll grant your point with video which does tend to be very space intensive.
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. This model offers several advantages:
I do think we agree here - if you don't have at least 100 megabit to the fileserver, it isn't practical to pull large files from that server.
a tethering clause on their cell phone plan
Is that actually stopping you?
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.
Honestly, some people are becoming garbage collectors though. Lots of content they never watch, that just sits around on disk spinning around in circles.
Will you? Even when your primary objective is one of the following?
I won't speak for the GP, but personally, my primary objective is always storage. So yes, I really will choose storage capacity every time.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Would be nice if Slashdot's editors would actually RTFA (or even scan over it) to see if it is what the submitter says it is. It took me all of 15 seconds to say "Hey, this article doesn't mention SSD's at all."
...and I'm guessing the review was written with the same FS on each drive, but we are now seeing new FS's that are better suited to SSD's than HDD's.
Then the actual article says the opposite of what the submitter is trying to get us to believe: "if you're downloading video and using multiple applications at the same time, an SSD will give you a very noticeable performance boost"
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I agree. I have friends that have just bought another 1TB drive, reason the old ones full. They have stuff that people gave to them or they downloaded 2+ years ago and haven't gotten around to watching yet. I had a friend in university that had 1k + anime films. Again he didn't watch most of them, they were there in case someone recommended one to him he'd already have it. Geesh. I get by just fine on a 100GB laptop drive. It is good enough for a few seasons of T.V. shows in normal def, I watch an episode and delete it. I think some people are just compulsive collectors or they get some kick out of being able to say "oh I have all of those do you want them" if anyone asks.
This is absolutely correct. I'd go one step further to say that as SSD and traditional hard drives continue to shrink in size, we're more likely to see two-disk set-ups as a standard, even in laptops, so the most heavily accessed (read-only) stuff goes on SSD, and other stuff--either archival or often-changed--will go on a traditional hard drive.
In fact, now that I think of it, there's no reason to think that the two couldn't be combined with some sort of smart interface to let the drive itself decide what to put where. I can't believe that nobody else has thought of this, so there must be some sort of hybrid (SSD+platter) drive out there...
The CB App. What's your 20?
The latest and greatest HDDs are indeed faster than ever before, especially with 32MB of cache, but they're still the biggest bottleneck in the equation. Sequential reads are pretty tolerable with HDD but the seek time is the killer.
Easy: an SSD will be more reliable, consume less power and have a much better acces time.
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.
It depends upon the task. If you're doing software development: Linus Torvalds has said repeatedly that he really appreciates his new development system from Intel, and it is the E-class Intel SSD that really makes a difference for his system reponsiveness and compile times.
But if you're doing large-transaction I/O (my environmental modeling does lots of transactions for a 9000-cell-by-6000-cell modeling grid, at 200MB per transaction, you also want a large striped disk array.
FWIW
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
However, if you only write to it once (i.e. long-term storage) flash storage will never degrade.
Well, we're talking long enough for the metal itself to deteriorate via weathering and such, at which point you'll be dead and gone!
Every time a spinning disk is plugged in, there is a small chance it will fail just in the act of spinning up. It's tiny sure, but it's there for spinning disks and not for SSDs.
Honestly, the flash drive is capable of so many writes (it's in the thousands, and the drives write every bit on the disk before it will go back and re-write) that they likely outlast conventional drives in all but the most write-heavy applications.
Plus, when a flash drive fails, the failure does not prevent reads, only writes. Recovery would be as simple as plugging it in and pulling your data off. With conventional disks, a physical failure -often- results in unrecoverable data. The reason data recovery services cost thousands of dollars is because it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover the data in many cases. Trust me, I know a number of people who have gotten backup religion only after spending thousands of dollars to fail to recover a critical piece of data (one was a single file needed for a massive audit - all was recovered except that file). The ability to read even after a failure makes SSDs -significantly- safer for data storage.
Lastly, the speed boost is HUGE. Go check the read/write numbers for SSDs vs the top end consumer drives. The worst SSDs on the market only do a little better than the best conventional drives, the benchmark I saw put various SSDs against a top of the line WD Raptor - 12k rpm I think. Due to a poor controler design, the lower end drives only performed a little better. The high end drives made the Raptor look like a complete joke. Even with the performance flaw another slashdot article mentioned (drives aren't as fast after they have been filled up, it is fixable on most drives) the top SSDs were still -significantly- faster than the Raptor. I think the prices were even similar for the same capacity, but I could be remembering funny on that one. You definitely don't get 12krpm out of a 1tb hard drive though, they are still in the 300gb range for the consumer market if I remember right.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Here's the truth about RAIDs: RAID has faster transfer rate, but the access time is just as slow as the slowest hard drive you have in the RAID. When you try to read a file from a specific part of the disk, the disks still have to move the heads to that location and wait for the given part of the plate to spin past the reading head. Whether you have 1 hard drive, or a RAID of 20 hard drives, the time it takes to start reading the given block is identical. However, once you start reading the block, sequential access is much faster in RAID0 or 5 and that's the advantage of RAID.
If you're copying a very large file from one place to another, RAID0 or 5 will go much faster. But: when people are talking about speed in general, they are referring to things like Windows booting up, programs starting up, your database reading a bit of data from a file, a game loading some textures from a file, browser accessing hundreds of cached files etc, those all keep accessing random blocks of data from the hard drive and the overall speed for these are almost entirely limited by the access time, at that point RAID makes very little difference.
This is where SSD comes in: transfer speed of SSD is about the same as a standard hard drive, but the access time is phenomenally faster because there's no waiting for a head to move and there's no waiting for a plate to spin past the head.
In addition, SSD makes no sound, and uses much less electricity to read/write and almost no electricity when idle, produces less heat, and: immune to mechanical shocks and vibrations. These are very desirable attributes on a laptop.
Also, SSD and RAID aren't mutually exclusive. You can have a RAID of SSDs for some mind blowing performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs
On Windows, Hibernate dumps the RAM to the disk, but it DOESN'T use swap space/virtual memory (pagefile.sys). It has its own file (hiberfil.sys).
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
That, and an external 1TB is 80 euros. Really no reasons at all not to 'collect'.